Last year, when the Ev and Charlie Show was going great guns and Sen. Barry Goldwater admitted that some of the finest men in Phoenix were card-carrying John Birchers, a group of Young Republicans at Harvard burned some elderly elephant ears with the publication of a new magazine, called Advance. Working out of the notorious third floor of Quincy House (Cambridge's perpetual smoke-filled room) these "progressive Republicans" took enough well-aimed pot shots at the entrenched G.O.P. leadership to win them widespread praise, especially from beleaguered liberals in their own party.

Their good work also earned them a number of handsome contributions (somehow the name Rockefeller keeps popping up when Advance's financial backers are discussed). Encouraged by their success, most of the Advance editors, who graduated last spring, deserted the warm, friendly cinder block walls of Quincy House and struck out for Washington.

Advance's first isue as a national publication (it's a quarterly "with frequent news letters") is now on the stands, and frankly it is quite disappointing. Where one hopes to find a lively gadfly tossing pointed barbs at sacred cows, one finds only a puerile magazine that, alas, will give few Republicans any disquieting moments. The issue's lone harsh words are reserved for William F. Buckley, whom Publisher Bruce K. Chapman addresses in an open letter. Chapman, however, seems to be most disgruntled at the fact that National Review spelled his name wrong in a recent attack. Perhaps Chapman and his staff have been trapped by entreaties urging party solidarity in an election year. If this is so, only the Republican Party stands to lose.

The new issue's theme is "The States Of The Nation" and features byline articles by three of our nation's most ardent defenders of the federal system--Nelson A. Rockefeller (whose insights on the problem are well known to Harvard audiences), Richard M. Nixon, and George Romney.

But if each of the articles contains a modicum of interesting data--Rockefeller on the accomplishments of his own administration, Romney on reforms in Michigan, Nixon on the plight of state governments--all read like a cross between a B- Soc Sci 2 paper and the latest agricultural statistics from the Ukraine.

Advance, it seems, has become a cheer-leader for the Republican Party rather than a force for enlightened change. Why didn't it, for instance, take out after Sen. Homer Capehart, who is up for re-election in Indiana? Why don't its writers, in short, stop sounding like they inevitably will in 30 years?