Stung by their Election Day trouncing, Republicans from Harrisburg to Lower Merion to Washington have embarked on an intense round of soul-searching.

Pennsylvania Republican State Committee chairman Robert Gleason summoned regional caucus leaders to a damage-assessment meeting here last Friday. A day earlier, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman told a gathering of Republican governors in Miami that it was time for "self-examination."

Both were trying to explain why the GOP suffered so many losses on Nov. 7 and to define a rebuilding strategy to take back lost seats and retain the White House in 2008.

Gleason said he and other state leaders examined last month's election returns and began to chart a map for victory in 2008.

"There is concern about the Southeast - it hasn't been trending Republican," Gleason said. "We are looking to do voter education for Republicans and do more voter registration."

On this most state and national party leaders agree: The GOP needs to return to its "core principles" of fiscal restraint and limited government.

But moderate voices are going a step further, blaming the party for ceding control to a minority on the far right who have allowed spending to spiral out of control, while focusing on "wedge" issues - such as stem-cell research - that are driving away centrist Republican voters.

Perhaps nowhere in Pennsylvania is this dynamic felt more intensely than in the Philadelphia suburbs, which have been noticeably shifting Democratic in recent elections.

In the former Republican stronghold of Lower Merion a local party group seeks to regain lost ground by drafting its first-ever resolution spelling out its dissatisfaction with the national Republican Party.

The resolution states that the party has "strayed away from basic principles" and "has not reached out to independent-minded voters." It also states support for "limited governmental intrusion into private lives" and accuses the party of "disproportionately focusing on peripheral issues."

"We've been losing a lot of races, and now we're losing the registration war in our township," said Tracey Specter, chairwoman of the Republican Committee of Lower Merion and Narberth. "On Election Day, we saw a lot of Republicans voting for Democrats. We want them to come back into the party."

Specter - daughter-in-law of U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.) - said GOP registration numbers had slipped in the townships as Democratic and independent registrations had grown.

In 2000, 45 percent of voters were Republican, now the figure is 37 percent, she said.

"The national party is not focusing on core values; it's focusing on wedge issues," Specter said.

Top GOP fund-raiser Bob Asher of Montgomery County called the document "right on target."

Asher, a Republican national committeeman, said he faxed the resolution to RNC headquarters last week and would push for its inclusion in discussions at the party's January meeting.

"It's something I think the Republican Party would be well-advised to consider," he said.

Pollster Chris Borick said his Election Day exit polls in the Lehigh Valley reflected Republican voter dissatisfaction with the hard-right-leaning direction of the party.

"If the party is to regain its stature, it has to change gears," said Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College. "This election exacerbated the tensions between conservatives and moderates that had been brewing for a long time."

But Gleason disagreed, attributing the Republican losses in Pennsylvania to voter disapproval of the Iraq war, dissatisfaction with bigger government and higher taxes, and - in the case of defeated U.S. Reps. Curt Weldon and Don Sherwood - ethical issues.

"The results were not a deep-seated ideological statement on the part of the American people," he said. "That the party is in choke-hold by ultraconservatives is not true."

Still, two of the Philadelphia region's most powerful Republican voices argued in recent Inquirer op-ed pieces that the party must return to the center if it is to win back seats in 2008.

Arlen Specter, the state's most senior Republican leader, said Pennsylvania Republicans must recapture the "vital center" of the electorate to succeed. He went on to say the GOP should follow the advice of 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, a conservative icon who said government should "stay off our backs, out of our pocketbooks, and out of our bedrooms."

Former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a vocal moderate who warned of a midterm Republican defeat in her 2004 book It's My Party Too, urged Bush to lead the party back to traditional roots and to build bipartisan coalitions on immigration and stem-cell research.

Whitman, who now heads the It's My Party Too political action committee, said the party platform drafted in 2004 was too single-issue-focused and alienated voters. "It's too detailed, there has to be a position on everything," she said. "They used to be general statements of principle. But instead they started weeding people out - the moderates."

Whitman said there should be a place in the party for an evangelical Christian woman she met who was opposed to abortion but who supported stem-cell research.

Gleason said he would meet with Specter and other party leaders as well as regional committee leaders to determine party priorities ahead of its semi-annual meeting in February.

Gleason said he also would embark on a "reeducation" campaign about the Reagan-era principles of fiscal and social conservatism and assure local GOP leaders that the party and its candidates would not stray from them.

"The way we differentiate as Republicans is that we are more conservative than Democrats," Gleason said. "I wouldn't say that we should moderate our principles."