Rainbow's End.

• Author: Higgins, George V.

Rainbow's End. Stephen P. Erie. University of California Press, $27.50.

The outsider supposes that the sachems of the national wing of the Democratic party, doomed as they are to at least another four years of grim exile from the White House, will seek not only sustenance from the pork of liberal programs hunted down by their skilled corps of congressional foragers and the roots and berries of state initiatives gathered by their governors, but wisdom as well from dispassionate soothsayers whose careful inspections of the past may inform their strategies for the future. After all, the presumably best braves of their tribe have been soundly clobbered three times in a row now, twice by the California medicine man and once by a fellow who acts and orates like an escapee from Watership Down. Surely it is time for them humbly to ascertain not only what they have done wrong, but, much more importantly, how to stop doing it.

The fashion in the immediate aftermath of Michael Dukakis's embarrassment last fall was to designate him as the principal if not the sole culprit in the November disaster, and thus have done with the maner. This is the Breaker Morant gambit, employed without notable success by British army commanders seeking to remove atrocious bloodstains of the Boer War from their escutcheons with the solvent of Australian blood. It is consoling-and accurate-to say that the Duke conducted his campaign with all the grace of a man falling out of a tree, but that neither explains how so uncoordinated a chap made it to his diving platform at the top of the party's tree in the first place, nor implies any reason for confidence that his successor at the pinnacle in 1992 will not prove equally inept. The issue is not whether Dukakis, or the Jimmy Carter of 1980, or the George McGovem of 1972, made the most of his opportunities, however great or small, but what fell fortune impels the dispensers of such opportunities to be so capriciously disdainful of political realities.

On the face of it, studies such as Steven Erie's contribution of Volume 15 to the California Series on Social Choice and Political Economy would seem worthy of study by the lonely and disconsolate now weary of the texts of all those Gideon Bibles they've been reading in Iowa farmhouses and New Hampshire motels since Jimmy Carter did his Cheshire cat routine in the 1980 rout. Subtitled "Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840-1985," Erie's work ought to be a...