No moderate Republicans need apply
The experience of Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter ought to be a cautionary tale for all of us. Specter has become something of a minority of late- a reasonable, moderate sort in a Republican Party that has come increasingly under the influence of unbending, slash-and-burn, killthem-all-let-God-sort-'em-out Social Conservatives.
Oddly enough, even with substantial assistance from the White House and Social Conservative and fellow Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, Specter barely survived his primary.
With all this help, Specter still got thrashed in many parts of the state outside his home base in the Philadelphia area, notably in and around Pittsburgh. As James O'Toole, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's politics editor, pointed out last Thursday, the region's Republicanism had once been defined by the moderation of the late Sen. John Heinz and is now in the mold of Santorum's conservatism.
The 74-year-old Specter's victory is thus a last hurrah, not the next new thing. Those conservatives gathered around the Club for Growth, a political action committee devoted to pushing moderate Republicans either to the right or out of office, can claim a tactical triumph for the nearly $2 million the group directed toward helping Toomey.
Stephen Moore, the Club for Growth's president, always saw the effort as having a double purpose: to replace Specter with a conservative if possible, but also to demonstrate how much anguish conservatives could create for Republican moderates who did not fall into line. "It serves notice to Chafee, Snowe, Voinovich and others who have been problem children that they will be next," Moore said before the primary, referring to Republican Sens. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Olympia Snowe of Maine and George Voinovich of Ohio.
That it took such strenuous efforts by the White House to prop up Specter serves notice as to how conservative the Republican primary electorate has become. Even if the moderate incumbents hold on until retirement, their successors on the Republican ticket will be well to their right. "No moderates need apply" may become a rule in Republican primaries even as many moderates drift away from politics.
In New York state alone, Amo Houghton and Jack Quinn, two House members representing two faces of Republican moderation, have announced their retirements. Houghton is a warm and thoughtful patrician who loathes the hyper-partisanship that has enveloped the Capitol. Quinn is a scrappy, pro-labor former teacher who appealed to moderate independents and Reagan Democrats. Though Quinn may eventually run for another office, there just are not very many Houghtons or Quinns in the Republican pipeline.
Conservative pressure will also force moderates to twist themselves into ideological pretzels. To win primaries, the moderates will need to bend to the right. To hold their general election majorities, they will have to bend back to their old selves again, fast.
Republican True Believers may not eat their young, but they certainly don't have much patience for those who "stray" from strict Social Conservatism. The one good thing about this for Democrats is that strict Social Conservatism doesn't always play well in a general election. While one may no longer be able to reasonably hope to win a Republican primary without the backing of the more activist Social Conservative wing, a candidate may not be able to carry a general election in the same manner.
Tip O'Neill once described politics as "the art of the possible", the essence being that compromise is part of the political process. Welcome to the Brave New Republican World Order, y'all. Check your ideas at the door; compromise is not welcome here.
