Consider, first, the case of Bill Clinton, an obscure governor from a small state, as he set out to run in 1991. The quickest way to earn the love of dispirited Democratic constituencies that year, after three straight presidential losses, was to renew the perennial call for more liberal government.  Mr. Clinton, however, had a different strategy, which was to persuade his party’s activists that in order to win — and, not incidentally, to govern effectively — they needed to update and moderate their essential philosophy.  As part of his agenda, Mr. Clinton proposed welfare reform, middle-class tax cuts and free trade, as well as a general re-evaluation of liberal government. “In the information age,” he said in May 1991, “monopoly decisions handed down on high by government bureaucracies are not always the best way to go.”  Much of what Mr. Clinton had to say wasn’t popular with Democrats, then or later. But by and large, they grudgingly accepted the argument that the party needed to project a more mainstream image, and Mr. Clinton became the first Democrat to win the White House in 16 years (and then the first to win it twice since Franklin D. Roosevelt).  Now flash forward to 2003, when another little-known governor from a small state, Howard Dean of Vermont, joined the messy field of candidates vying to take on President George W. Bush. Mr. Dean began that campaign as a proven centrist in the Clinton mold, espousing two central planks: health care reform and a balanced budget.  By then, though, the activist base of the party had had its fill of Clintonism, and it was demanding a candidate who would make a more ideologically pure indictment of conservatism. Mr. Dean grabbed an oar and steered furiously into the current. “I represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party!” he told the California Democratic convention in March 2003, bringing the crowd to its feet.  Within months, Mr. Dean had so surpassed his rivals in money and glamour that ABC’s Ted Koppel, moderating a Democratic debate, felt moved to ask the other candidates if they thought Mr. Dean could beat Mr. Bush. He needn’t have wondered; as it turned out, Mr. Dean ended up winning only two primaries, in his home state and the District of Columbia.  The main lesson Republicans might take from this admittedly selective contrast is that chasing the applause of the faithful, even in a party that is more ideologically cohesive, generally gets you only so far. Aspirants at this week’s forum can elevate themselves by playing, both rhetorically and substantively, to a base that’s virulently anti-Washington and anti-Obama. But the wider primary electorate may judge such stridently partisan candidates to be unelectable.  What Mr. Clinton proved, however, is that laying out a more affirmative vision of what the party should stand for, and trying to persuade activists of its merits, makes for a more enduring campaign, both in the primaries and in November. This would suggest that if you’re Mr. Thune or Mr. Daniels, you don’t necessarily have to win the approval of everyone in the room at CPAC; you just have to convince them, over time, that yours is the vision that will ultimately attract enough independent voters to return the party to power.  Which path the Republican hopefuls will take depends, perhaps, not only on whether they have an actual governing vision to offer, but also on whether they think the party needs to work to reclaim independent voters at all. Some Republican activists would argue that their huge gains in 2010 prove that, unlike the beleaguered Democrats whom Mr. Clinton rose to lead, they are already philosophically in sync with the broader American electorate.  The reality, though, is that Republicans remain discredited on the presidential level by the failures of the Bush years, and winning back the White House will most likely require more recasting of the party’s traditional message than winning back the House did. “The hardest truth,” says Scott Reed, a Republican strategist, “is that we won in 2010 because independents behaved like Republicans. And we need to do that again in 2012.”  In other words, you can stir the crowd at CPAC with searing talk about where the country is now. But to stir enough voters to win the primaries and then the presidency, you probably need an idea of where we go next.  A version of this article appears in print on February 11, 2011, on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: A Fork in Road to the White House. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Republican presidential hopefuls can play to the conservative base for quick rewards, or consider the larger prize and reach out to independents and moderates.