Moderate blues.

An afternoon session of the second annual Conference for a Republican Majority focused on "political strategy." Moderating the discussion: Ellen Harley, fresh from a congressional primary loss in Pennsylvania. Another panelist: Dolly Madison McKenna, who has lost both a congressional primary and the race for chairman of the Texas GOP. Sitting on the panel too were Bill Green, who lost his New York congressional seat in 1992, and Julie Finley, a failed GOP candidate for the Washington, D.C., City Council.

If there were any need to confirm that Republican moderates are the most languid faction in American politics (even the Libertarians have Howard Stern), this Washington pow-wow met it.

There were seldom more than seventy participants in the room, some of whom had been told to forget about the $125 registration fee and to please try to bring friends (joked conference chairman Bill Frenzel, a former congressman, on Saturday morning: "While the chairs aren't all filled, what we have is choice"). The atmosphere was straight from the Monty Python skit where the Grim Reaper shows up at a dinner party, pronounces all the diners dead, and leaves them to bicker about how they got that way.

"I don't really see why they keep having these conferences and nobody does anything," says Julie Finley, who as chairman of the D.C. Republicans sits on the Republican National Committee. "They should be back in the vineyards. Don't come whining to Washington."

Not too long ago moderates didn't have to complain to themselves in rump groups: they ruled the Republican Party. But since 1964 the GOP's base has moved steadily West and South, and its politics right. The Rockefeller wing was left holding an establishment tradition with neither the ideas nor the energy to fend off an insurgent conservatism.

And the mismatch has only worsened. While a Christian Right with bands of well-organized, dedicated activists sweeps through state party organizations, GOP moderates have been left, as one conference speaker put it, to get "kicked in the teeth."

"We're not organized, we can't raise money, and we're not out in the media making our points," complained Michele Dyson, an unsuccessful congressional candidate in Maryland two years ago, now about to try again.

Efforts are under way to change that. Senator Arlen Specter (R., Pa.) is toying with the idea of running for President under an anti-Christian Right banner, and has formed the "Big Tent PAC" to support "inclusive" GOP candidates and a more mainstream" GOP platform (i.e., one without an abortion plank). Specter seems willing to pitch considerable energy into the effort - he just completed a weekend swing through California.

"As Senator Specter continues to go around the country, he will gather up troops, to use the Christian Coalition's words," says Susan Cullman, a Republican Coalition for Choice board member. "I think he's looking to take on a leadership role in removing the abortion plank and in defending the separation of church and state."

A longer-standing project is Jim Leach's Republican Mainstream Committee, founded in 1984. The group's tiny Washington staff is working to found state-level organizations to battle with the Religious Right. There are about a dozen of the groups so far, almost all of them in the Northeast.

In Pennsylvania, moderates have actually had some success. Multimillionaire Elsie Hillman poured more than $300,000 into the moderate Republican Future Fund's effort to beat Christian Coalition candidates for the 230-member state committee. Fund-backed candidates generally prospered, although moderates fell well short of a knockout. Pennsylvania Christian Coalition President Rick Schenker, for instance, won his state-committee race despite the roughly $30,000 that he says the opposition spent in his county.

Pennsylvania is the exception, however. Moderates elsewhere just can't get out the troops. Bobbie Kilberg, who lost the nomination for Virginia lieutenant governor to home-schooling advocate Mike Farris last year, estimates she had about 1,300 convention no-shows to Farris's 300. "One guy called to tell me he just couldn't come because his mother-in-law was coming into town," she says. "I just had to laugh because normally when your mother-in-law comes to town you want to get out of town."

The political weakness of the moderates' vision is that they would be bound to alienate evangelical Protestants, who make up a quarter of the Republican coalition. But they're full of ideas on how to replace them. "How many people here have ever gone to an NAACP meeting?" asked pro-choice activist Ann Stone.

"Talk to your education associations," suggested Dolly Madison McKenna. "The Texas Education Association has put out a good book on the extreme Right." She also urged: "Talk to the ADL and various Jewish groups. Talk to librarians. They're hit with censorship issues." This makes more sense in reverse as a strategy for Democrats - build from blacks and the NEA to the Ann Stones.

In California, Republican moderates have even taken the next step, and are attempting to enlist Democratic help in intra-party battles. Ron Smith, campaign manager for Tom Campbell in his losing senatorial primary fight with Bruce Herschensohn two years ago, has filed signatures to put an initiative on the spring 1996 ballot for open primaries. "It will get Democrats to vote for Republicans," says Herschensohn. "And they'll only vote for the Republicans who act like Democrats, so I understand any very liberal Republican wanting it."

Such resuscitation attempts aside, Republican moderates essentially don't exist as a movement. They live on as a grab-bag of personalities - Northeastern liberals like William Weld, George Bush true believers like Pete Wilson. Moderate hopes for influencing the national party rest with one of these figures somehow squeaking through the primaries in 1996.

"You don't win the soul of the Republican Party with platform fights," Bill Green told the conference. "You win [it] by nominating a presidential candidate who shares your views." How? Green suggests a mini-convention of moderates next year to endorse a candidate. But such an endorsement could be a liability rather than an asset. (Jack Kemp canceled a luncheon appearance at the conference.)

Out at the Iowa straw poll, meanwhile, aggressive moderate candidates Specter and former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean won 6 and 2 votes respectively out of 1,349 cast. The moderates with the brightest prospects are those who, rather than antagonizing the party's true base, reach out to it - like Senator Paul Coverdell in Georgia and Michael Huffington in California.

Moderates have to accept that while they have something to contribute to the GOP - many of the candidates in the Republicans' string of post-Clinton successes come from their wing - their vision can never define it: the party can't be ideologically denuded, or its coalition will consist of the Conference for a Republican Majority and whomever they manage to pull in off the street on a given day.

In his speech at the Iowa straw poll, Arlen Specter characterized the Texas GOP convention as "wrong philosophically because it defies the basic American principle of separation between church and state." Democrat Vic Fazio said much the same thing: "[The religious Right's] intolerance essentially is a desire to forget there's a separation between church and state." When Specter was read parts of Fazio's remarks (which he had denounced as bigoted) and asked how they differed from his own, he responded: "Well, the reports I read on Fazio were a lot more extreme than that."

No more extreme than what Specter and allies call moderation.