Tips from the Top

What makes for a successful political fund-raising dinner? According to Sidney Captain, Republican finance chairman in Baltimore County, Md., and one of the G.O.P.'s most experienced banqueteers, the answer is beef, booze and "hostesses--make them slender and pretty." How to make a form letter appear to be personally signed? Well, there is an offset process that produces smudgeable signatures that look exactly as if they had been written in blue ink.

These and other tips from the top were given at a Washington seminar last week for some 500 Young Republicans. Opening the four-day "leadership training" conference was outgoing Republican National Chairman Dean Burch, who advised the heavily pro-Goldwater audience: "Let's not be so enthralled with further fratricide that we can't elect men in 1966. And let's stop castigating and start cultivating the press. We Republicans are not sick, we're not dead, we're not dying, and we're not ready for the ashcan of history. We're not so down and out that the only remedy that will put us back on our feet is a large dose of Dr. Johnson's snake oil."

Call for Cultivation. Last year, said Burch, "may be remembered as the year in which the Republican Party invaded the South and stayed there." But he also had a warning about the so-called "Southern strategy" that characterized the Goldwater campaign. In the future, he said, "our national strategy is not going to be based on a racist appeal, overt or covert, but on the economic conservatism of the Southern voter." And the G.O.P. must cultivate the Negro vote in the South. "You don't have to go down there and wave the Confederate flag," he said. "But we do have to take steps to see that Martin Luther King's followers don't just automatically register as Democrats."

Even blunter was defeated Illinois Gubernatorial Candidate Charles Percy, who called for "a progressive party in the tradition of Lincoln" and said: "We have got to get this party away from being an Anglo-Saxon Protestant white party." Echoed House Minority Leader Gerald Ford of Michigan: "Unfortunately, we have not been able to sell the people on the fact that our solutions are better for the people as a whole and in conformity with the framework of America's basic principles."

From Schism to Schism. Near conference's end, Barry Goldwater showed up looking tanned and fit, surrounded by autograph seekers and well-wishers. In his speech, Goldwater declared: "Enough time has gone by to know that it was image that decided the election. Your candidate, and that was me in case you forgot it, was saddled with two images: that I would risk war too easily and that I would destroy the social security system. They were in fact the biggest political lies ever told in this country." He urged that the "stupidity" of the party's 1964 schism not be repeated, then proceeded to lay the groundwork for another schism by saying: "I say to my liberal friends, 'If you want to take over the party, try your darndest.' I say to my conservative friends, 'If you want to retain control of the party, work.' "

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