ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 provides an in-depth look at how Bliss sought to bring the service party model to the national party following Goldwater’s 1964 loss. As RNC Chair, Bliss focused much of his effort, as he had in Ohio, on developing a fulltime, professionally-managed service organization, and largely ignored policy issues and questions of party reform. Such an organizational focus did help unify the party after the 1964 election, by not only shifting attention from the bitter partisan infighting that had consumed the party after the election, but also by helping to rapidly rebuild and expand the party’s organizational capabilities at the national level. In the process, however, service-minded party leaders implicitly sanctioned, by exempting policy issues from the focus of their party-building efforts, the conservative Right’s then-dominant influence over the ideological contours of party policy. The Right had led the party to defeat in 1964, but in the rebuilt Republican service party that emerged after the election, as highlighted by the conservative tone of the 1966 election, Conservatives retained their role as the leading voice shaping Republican policy in the country.
