AFTER THE WAR, WHITHER THE NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY?

The Six-Week War in the Persian Gulf continues to produce political fallout, some of it astonishing. The effects could be farreaching, indeed. Let's take a morsel or two and chew on them this morning.

There's the Current Wisdom of Illinois Senator Paul Simon, safely reelected last year to a second six-year term, and fresh from his vote against the President and against using force at this defining hour in world history.

Were our soldiers heroic, and our commanders excellent? Did they perform magnificently, at extraordinary sacrifice, in whipping the fourth largest army on the planet? Did the pinpoint performance of our high-tech weapons systems justify long years of backing a strong defense, in good years and bad, whether popular or not? Did marvelous-but-expensive advances in weaponry mean that damage to strategic targets was greater than ever, while civilian casualties were minimized? Is the wisdom, fortitude, diplomatic skill and moral courage of President Bush vindicated, and worthy of the highest praise? Have we, as so many believe, restored American prestige, banished negative perceptions about the uses of American power, and finally exorcised the demons of Vietnam?

Well, Saint Paul of Simon sees the matter quite differently. Listen to the Sage of Makanda's Current Wisdom:

"We were just incredibly lucky. We fought a fool who made all kinds of military errors."

Yeah, right, Senator. Thank you for that update on the aging and drearily familiar Blame-America-First Syndrome of your party's national "leaders."

Meanwhile, a most revealing anecdote comes from The Big Enchilada on the left coast. I speak, of course, of the nation-state of California, home to 30 million people, a whopping 54 electoral votes and, were it a separate country, the sixth largest economy in the world. With a Los Angeles Times poll showing that 75 percent of California Democrats backing President Bush's handling of the Six-Week War, the state Democratic Party recently held their convention.

We must grasp one essential fact about the Democratic party's most fervent activists, in California as in many other states. This fact is that the center of gravity among these activists is so far to the left of ordinary party members, much less ordinary Americans, that nearly every U.S. Senate hopeful who trooped before their party's state convention roundly condemned the U.S. military action in the Gulf, to the cheers of the assembled multitudes. All but one, that is.

The interesting Democratic dissenter is none other than former San Francisco mayor Diane Feinstein. She ran a strong race last year as her party's standard bearer, narrowly missing out on moving into the governor's mansion in Sacramento. She has offended against liberal orthodoxy before, most notably with support for the death penalty during the 1990 gubernatorial campaign, which allowed her to surge from behind and easily dispatch a primary opponent once she began emphasizing it. This is a measure as overwhelmingly supported by the populace at large as it is opposed by the sort of liberal cranks whose idea of a day well spent is to pack into a hall to cheer on speakers denouncing President Bush's war leadership.

Feinstein aspires to the United States Senate next year. She wisely seeks to differentiate her candidacy from the Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee sameness of her party's militant liberal candidates, each trying to outdo the other in denouncing, slandering or otherwise minimizing America's recent performance. Feinstein took the podium and went out of her way to laud President Bush's policies in the Gulf.

The response from the assembled delegates? They loudly hissed Feinstein, their most recent statewide standard bearer. This is garden-variety stuff, a staple of Democratic gatherings ever since 1972, when George McGovern and his bunch of kooks and left-wing movie stars seized the Democratic Party, rendering it irrelevant in national presidential politics.

What is interesting is Feinstein's expected strategy, and the tactic she'll use to communicate it. The Feinstein campaign videotaped the whole proceedings. The tactic? Use the footage in TV commercials next year to accentuate her distance from the out-of-touch peaceniks who dominate so much of the Democratic Party and its leadership councils.

Smart lady, Diane Feinstein. As with her campaign last year, look for hers to be a potent candidacy in 1992.