LEADING ARTICLE : The Republicans vote to implode

The Republican primary campaign has come to resemble a bout of crazy tag wrestling in which contenders bounce in and out of the ring of media plausibility: comatose at one moment, cock-a-hoop the next. The result of Tuesday's Arizona primary had the whiff of real excitement. For in the United States, the country which invented opinion polls, the art of polling has become so sophisticated that genuine political upsets are now depressingly rare.

The millionaire anti-politician Steve Forbes's win in the deserts of the south- west vanquished the pundits who wrote him off after his fourth place in snowy New Hampshire. The crafty populist Pat Buchanan's third- place hobbles had begun to look like a credible run by an incredible candidate. The perpetual contender Bob Dole's second place (and his two wins in the Dakotas) suggest that there is life in the old man yet. What is one to make of it all?

First, the Republican Party in the1990s is increasingly like the Democrats of the 1970s and 1980s: a rag-bag of scarcely connected single-interest groups, incapable of making a coherent appeal to the broad plains of middle America where presidential elections are decided. Its candidates have become electoral entrepreneurs developing products designed to capture specific segments of the political market. In New Hampshire, Buchanan's anti-free-trade, anti-immigrant, pro-white, pro-little-guy message carved off a large and jagged chunk of an anxious blue-collar electorate. In Arizona, home of rednecks in battered pick-up trucks but also to tens of thousands of elderly wealthy refugees from California, Buchanan's appeal failed. Instead, Forbes's single low-tax mantra attracted the vote from the golf clubs and walled estates.

All this is oddly reminiscent of the single-issue coalitions put together in elections past by Democrats such as George McGovern and Walter Mondale. They succeeded in the activist- dominated primaries but were easily picked off in the subsequent general election as being "out of the mainstream" (the most devastating insult in American politics).

Only two years ago Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America" - part low- tax and small government, part family values - seemed to have identified a powerful centre-right message for the 1990s. Now Gingrich's contract has been torn into pieces by Forbes, Dole and Lamar Alexander and defaced by Buchanan's ugly opportunism.

The presidential monopoly assembled by Republicans has fallen apart. Worse, various parts of this coalition have begun to eat each other. (There are some echoes here of the collapse of the coalition within Conservatism in Britain.) And who will now be the Republican standard-bearer in the autumn? It is, quite honestly, anyone's guess. But, if you insist, our guess is that it will be a battered, bleeding and all-too-beatable Bob Dole.