Having been a life member of the Republican Party (yes, a real dues-paying member) I will explain: Ordinary Republicans, like me and the ones you see on the street every day, are actually fairly intelligent and level-headed. Also, we're a lot more "liberal" than you might think, i.e., we don't have a monolithically right-wing opinion on every subject. We see ourselves as differing from Democrats mainly in the conservative-liberal thing; we believe that we believe in traditional, tested American values and principles, while we see the liberal agenda as tending toward a "benevolent totalitarianism" that is not American. Still, we tend to believe that our differences can be worked out with a little common sense and logic, if no one blows off into rhetoric.

The reason we look so dumb is that our Republican leaders lately have been so dumb. We've been electing them, under some protest, because that's who the party has been putting up there, and they're at least better, to our mind, than the opposition, i.e., they generally support our beliefs. It's frustrating that they don't get our message across, and that a few of these dim bulbs have let us get stereotyped as a bunch of right-wing Christian killjoy fanatics who are obsessed with the president's sex habits.

Thank God we win in the character department. Maybe Ronnie Regan used to forget his keys a lot, but his personal principles and his belief in the American system were unimpeachable. The same can be said, pretty much, for Bob Dole and all the Bushes, and even jerks like Henry Hyde.

With luck, the Democrats will keep putting up people like Gore and the Clintons long enough for us to get our act together again.