The Republicans

Party platforms, cooked in the high temperature of factional passions, quickly , grow cold as the real campaign begins. Voters would rather listen to live candidates than read moribund cliches. But last week, as Republicans finished drafting their 1988 document in New Orleans, G.O.P. leaders thought they had forged a workable weapon to use against the Democrats: the Heft Issue.

Democratic National Chairman Paul Kirk had created the opening. Kirk decided that a crafty way to debunk the charge that Democrats promise everything to everyone was to shrink the normally gargantuan party platform to a brief statement of principles. That seemed logical enough, but the ploy reinforced the claim by George Bush that Michael Dukakis is a "Stealth candidate" who ducks specific positions. So when Republican drafters went to work, they produced a 30,000-word monster, nearly ten times the size of its Democratic counterpart.

The platform bulges with specific assertions and pledges, most of them quite familiar. The G.O.P. is against: any species of tax increase, abortion, furloughs for convicted murderers. It is for: the Strategic Defense Initiative, a reduction in the capital-gains tax, the death penalty.

The urge to inject details led to some surprising provisions. In their final deliberations, the drafters added an item calling for a constitutional amendment to limit the number of consecutive terms served by members of Congress. Other passages hardly qualify as presidential: the Republicans would evict drug dealers from public-housing projects and encourage recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in all schools.

With his representatives fending off pet proposals by both ultra- conservative s and the tiny progressive remnant, Bush got a platform very much in his own image. Thus armed, he plans to continue to use the stealth gambit against Dukakis. But in politics, as in war, every strategy evokes a response. In being so specific, the G.O.P. has promised potentially expensive goodies to various groups, such as tax breaks for certain oil producers and families that send their children to private school. Any moment now, the Democrats will tag the Republicans as the party of special interests.