CONSERVATIVES BASH CONSERVATIVES

WASHINGTON -- The conversations on Rush Limbaugh's show are fascinating these days and suggestive of the dismay which has suddenly infected conservative ranks. After months of pronouncing dicta of damnation on President Clinton and the Democrats in Congress, Limbaugh and his listeners are finding themselves wracked by tortuous questions about their own heroes and heroines.

The day I was listening to Limbaugh last week, while driving from Boston to Holyoke for the second Massachusetts Senate debate, the main topics were New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's (R) endorsement of New York Gov. Mario Cuomo (D) and the apostasy of two conservative stars, Jack Kemp and William Bennett, in condemning Proposition 187, the California initiative that would cut off health and education benefits to illegal aliens and their children.

There was more to come in the next few days. Nancy Reagan criticized Oliver North, the Republican Senate candidate in Virginia, for having "lied to my husband and lied about my husband." Teresa Heinz, the widow of Sen. John Heinz (R-Pa.), castigated the conservative Republican, Rep. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who is running for that Senate seat. Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan (R) endorsed Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) over her challenger, Rep. Michael Huffington (R-Calif).

I didn't get to hear Limbaugh after last Thursday, so I don't know how he and the Dittoheads dealt with all that bad news. But you had to feel sympathy for their efforts to wrestle with Kemp and Bennett's passionate denunciation, in The Wall Street Journal, of Proposition 187. The former Cabinet officers said that initiative, the main plank of both the Huffington campaign and Gov. Pete Wilson's (R) bid for a second-term victory over California Treasurer Kathleen Brown (D), was "fundamentally flawed and constitutionally questionable. It was, they said, a manifestation of "an ugly antipathy toward all immigrants."

I wasn't taking notes along the Massachusetts Turnpike, but there was real pain in the voices of the callers and a rare tone of doubt in Limbaugh's responses. Some callers wanted to know if the liberals had slipped a potion into Kemp's and Bennett's orange juice, or whether they weren't really the conservatives they were cracked up to be. Others denounced them for sabotaging the conservative cause in hopes of winning praise from the liberal press. Still others questioned whether the Republican Party was not demonstrating its ideological rigidity by criticizing Kemp and Bennett for what those callers described as "an act of conscience."

Limbaugh was not the beacon of certitude he normally is; the man sounded, well, ambivalent. At times, he was as wishy-washy as a Democrat confronting, say, a disagreement between single-payer and managed-competition health reform plans. "Jack and Bill," he said, "are my friends and I'm not going to condemn them." In the next breath, he was lamenting the "timing" of their manifesto. No, he told another caller, he wasn't arguing that party loyalty should supersede individual conscience. But, there's a time and a place. ...

All this -- delivered in tentative tones and with long pauses between phrases -- connoted a sensitivity to the nuances of politics and philosophy that has not been the hallmark of Limbaugh's epithet-laden assaults on the liberals.

Welcome to the real world, Rush, where your friends don't always agree with each other and where doctrinal questions are not easily disposed of with a clever catch phrase.

William Kristol, the conservative strategist who once worked for Bennett and for Dan Quayle, put it in context. The disagreements, he said on NBC's "Meet the Press," are signs that managing the Republican coalition will become more difficult as the GOP expands its base and approaches majority-party status.

He is right. If you elect Republican mayors in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, you have to expect them to calculate their debts to Democratic state officials who have been of real help to those cities. When you decide to play populist protest politics by nominating a controversial character like Ollie North for a winnable Senate seat, you have to expect that establishment Republicans like Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) are going to find others to support. In Maine, conservative Republicans are sabotaging moderate Susan Collins' bid for the governorship. In Minnesota, moderate Republicans are trying to do the same thing to the conservative Senate challenger, Rep. Rod Grams (R).

Republicans had it easy -- and not just on the talk shows -- when all they had to do was kick Bill Clinton around. Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) got a unanimous Republican vote against the Clinton budget. But he was never able to forge agreement among Republicans on an alternative health plan. And next year, if Republicans have the Senate majority, Dole's task in finding consensus on his side of the aisle will be even more difficult.

To govern is to choose. The past week's political developments have demonstrated that Republicans are no more in agreement on their choices than are the Democrats.

David Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group.