Cui bono? That is the question to ask now that the fur and feathers have settled from the celebrated January match between gamecock Vice President Bush and wildcat Dan Rather. Clearly the answer is George Bush. Before the encounter Bush had two serious liabilities: a general impression of wimpishness and a lingering taint (at least among grass roots conservatives) of Liberal Republicanism.

All that, it would appear, was turned completely around in less than 10 minutes. The Vice President is now the hero of 10,000 American barrooms, where people are slapping each other on the back and saying: “How about ole Bush? The first guy to tell off Rather since George Wallace!” And the conservatives, always ready to grasp at a straw, are telling themselves that if CBS wanted to get the Vice President that bad, he must be better than they feared.

Paranoids on the old right suspect that the whole thing was an orchestrated affair. Imagine what’s going on in the minds of the CBS brass: The American rubes are no longer buying the Democrats. Since even a replay of Watergate didn’t work, the next President will be a Republican. Which one of those guys can we live with? Obviously Bush. If we put Rather on his tail, we can kill two birds with one stone: wipe out the wimp image and get rid of Rather, whose behavior is increasingly bizarre.

Stranger things have happened. The TV bosses have always, in fact, tried to orchestrate the Republican Party. In 1964, during their stop- Goldwater phase, they promoted the ineffably forgettable Governor Scranton into a national folk hero in a matter of a few days. They kept alive the hopeless presidential candidacy of the late Governor Rockefeller for 20 years. (If I recall rightly, some of them were still touting his inevitable victory right down to the second day of the Republican National Convention in 1968.)

With Bush, they have something to work with. It has always, actually, been unkind and unfair to consider the Vice President a wimp. He has more courage and integrity than most politicians. His real weakness is not in his character, it is in his intellect. George Bush has never had an idea that was a genuine solid conviction learned in the school of real life. That is, he has never taken a public stand that had behind it anything more than pleasant plausibility and vague good intentions. Duking it out with Dan Rather over whether or not he was asleep at what meeting does not change this a bit.

In this, he is simply nothing more and nothing less than the legatee of Liberal Republicanism. Viewed over the long haul of its history, the Republican Party (like the Democratic) is a strange, strange entity. Now, nearing the end of the Reagan revolution, the Republican Party finds itself with no capacity to move constructively into the future, or to do anything but fade reflexively back into its past. Its leading candidate is a throwback to Rockefeller and Scranton, and its second chance. Senator Dole, is a throwback to Nixon and Ford. Some revolution. (Of course, I am forgetting Representative Kemp, who is a throwback to Horace Greeley. The most positive force in the party, Mr. Robertson, brings back happy memories of William Jennings Bryan, who was, alas, a Democrat.)

If Bush could somehow dedicate himself to continuing the Reagan program, there might be some hope. We knew, in 1980, or thought we knew, what the Reagan program was. The trouble is, now, nobody has the slightest idea what the “Reagan program” means. There are many, many reasons why this is so, but one of them is that what Mr. Reagan stood for has been hopelessly blurred and diffused by the former Bush supporters with whom the President has stocked his administration.

Reaganism is over, whoever is nominated. I am betting that within hours after President and Mrs. Reagan take off for the ranch next January, no one will even remember it, not even professional Republicans and commentators with a slow news day.