I picked up Victor Gold’s current book, Invasion of the Party Snatchers, with high hopes of a good political read.

The opening lines, recounting the author’s emotions on election night 2006, seemed to justify my hopes: “You know something has gone wrong in your political universe,” he writes, “when the party you’ve worked and voted with for over forty years is getting blown out in a national election and you feel good about it.”

Mr. Gold was deputy press secretary to Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign, and went on to become press secretary to Vice President Spiro Agnew and speechwriter and senior advisor to the elder President Bush.

I wasn’t of age when Barry Goldwater ran for President, although he was one of my political heroes in my adolescent years. But I am old enough to remember when the Republican Party stood for ideals like limited government, individual rights and fiscal sanity –- not federal meddling, foreign adventures and profligate spending. Like Mr. Gold, I felt good to see what he terms the party of the “Holy Rollers and the Neo-Cons” trounced by the Democrats last November.

But my enthusiasm for the book was short-lived. Sadly, has it little real substance and seems to have been written as much to pay off some old political scores as for any other reason.

Gold’s crotchets create some strange inconsistencies. On the one hand, he attacks what he calls “piranha ideologues” operating under conservative Republican colors, and laments the loss of civility in American political discourse.

Yet when was American political discourse ever civil? Consider this extract from a political pamphlet published during the early years of the Republic: “and as to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship, and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide, whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any?”

So wrote Tom Paine about George Washington. The agitated italics were Paine's own.

It cannot even be said that Republicans invented the slash-and-burn political tactics we know today. Credit for that development surely belongs to Clark Kent liberals like Bill Moyers and Daniel Schorr. Gold can’t resist reminding his readers that it was Moyers who authorized the infamous 1964 political commercial that showed a golden-haired little girl picking petals off a daisy, counting “ten… nine…eight...seven…” When she gets to “one” the screen explodes and the child disappears in a mushroom cloud. An announcer then intones: “Vote for President Johnson on November third. The stakes are too high for you to stay at home.”

There was worse. That same campaign year, CBS newsman Daniel Schorr claimed to have been “reliably” informed that Goldwater planned to travel to Bavaria after the GOP convention in San Francisco to address a neo-Nazi group.

So American politics was always rough and tumble. Even Mr. Gold is not above a little mud-wrestling himself. Consider his assessment of our current President: “For all the Rove-built façade of his being a ‘strong‘ chief executive, George W. Bush has been, by comparison to even the hapless Jimmy Carter, the weakest, most out-of-touch American president in modern times. Think Dan Quayle in cowboy boots.”

All that may be true, but it’s scarcely civil to say so.

Still, Gold asks the right questions: “Is the Republican Party we once knew salvageable and, given the damage done by the Bush-Cheney White House and DeLay-Hastart Congress in the past half-decade, is there anything left of it worth saving?”

And I think he offers the right answers. “Yes” in both cases, he says, “but with a cynic’s caveat. The salvage can come only if the patient here dies and is reborn; which is to say, the transmogrified political entity now passing itself off as the party of Lincoln will have to pay the price for its masquerade, as occurred in November 2006 – and, given the in-denial response to that election by the party’s leaders, will likely recur in 2008.”

We’re still more than a year away from the 2008 elections, but I think Mr. Gold is right in predicting another disaster for the Republicans. If it comes to that, the question is whether a phoenix will arise from the ashes -- or a political dodo.