The moderate shuffle

THINKPROGRESS: What do you think is happening here?

DANFORTH: An effort by some, and apparently a large number, 60% in Indiana, to purge the Republican Party and to create something that’s ideologically pure and intolerant of anybody who does not agree with them — not just on general principals, but right acrorss the board.

THINKPROGRESS: Do you stand by your view that GOP is beyond hope?

DANFORTH: If this trend succeeds, yeah. What they will be left with, if indeed they want to purge the party of all but people who have a particular ideological slant… it’s not a way to win elections, it’s not political sustainable. It might make them feel good for a time but doesn’t work, it hasn’t worked. It didn’t work in Nevada or in Delaware in last election. They won nominations but couldn’t win elections. I don’t know how you win elections without getting 51% of the vote. I don’t see how you’re gonna get 51% of the vote if you make it clear that people in your own party, who don’t absolutely agree with everything you want to do, aren’t wanted.

During this trial, I have concluded that the prosecutors made their case. I will vote to remove President Clinton from office not only because he is guilty of both articles of impeachment, but also because I believe the crimes committed here demonstrate that he is capable of lying routinely whenever it is convenient. He is not trustworthy. Simply to be near him in the White House has meant not only tragic heartache for his wife and his daughter but enormous legal bills for staff members and friends who admired him and yearned for his success but who have been caught up in his incessant `war room' strategies to maintain him in office. Senator Feinstein begins her censure resolution with the appropriate word `shameless.' The President should have simply resigned and spared his country the ordeal of this impeachment trial and its aftermath.

We have been fortunate that this damaged presidency has occurred during a time of relative peace and prosperity. In times of war or national emergency it is often necessary for the President to call upon the nation to make great economic and personal sacrifices. In these occasions, our President had best be trustworthy--a truth teller whose life of principled leadership and integrity we can count upon. Some commentators have suggested that with the President having less than two years left in his term of office, the easiest approach is to let the clock expire while hoping that he is sufficiently careful, if not contrite, to avoid reckless and indefensible conduct. But as Senators, we know that the dangers of the world constantly threaten us. Rarely do two years pass without the need for strong Presidential leadership and the exercise of substantial moral authority from the White House.

Of particular concern are the implications of the President's behavior for our national security. As Commander-in-Chief, President Clinton fully understood the risks that he was imposing on the country's security with his secret affair in the White House. Even in this post-Cold War era, foreign intelligence agents constantly look for opportunities for deception, propaganda, and blackmail. No higher targets exist than the President and the White House. The President even acknowledged in a phone call with Ms. Lewinsky that foreign agents could be monitoring their conversations. Yet this knowledge did not dissuade the President from continuing his affair. With premeditation, he chose his own gratification above the security of his country and the success of his presidency. Then he chose to compound the damage by systematically lying about it over the span of many months.

I believe that our country will be stronger and better prepared to meet our challenges with a cleansing of the Presidency. The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the world because we are the strongest country economically and militarily, and in the appeal of our idealism for liberty and freedom of conscience. Our President must be strong because a President personifies the rule of law that he is sworn to uphold and protect. We must believe him and trust him if we are to follow him. His influence on domestic and foreign policies comes from that trust, which a lifetime of words, deeds, and achievements has built.

President Clinton has betrayed that trust. His leadership has been diminished because most Americans have come to the cynical conclusion that they must read between the lines of his statements and try to catch a glimmer of truth amidst the spin. His subordinates have demeaned public life by contending that `everybody does it' as a defense of why the President has erred so grievously. But every President does not lie to a federal grand jury. Every President does not obstruct justice. The last President to do so was President Nixon, and he had sufficient reverence for the office to resign before the House even voted articles of impeachment.

On the eve of Richard Lugar’s landslide loss in an Indiana Senate primary, Nate Silver published an analysis of the recent turnover in Senate Republican ranks sorted by their relative ideology. The word “relative” needs to be stressed; using DW-Nominate ratings, Nate splits the GOP Senate Caucus as it existed after the 2004 elections and assigns half of it the “moderate” label. That’s how you get Rick Santorum listed as a “moderate.”

If you want to understand fully how long this “drift” has been going on, you could check out a piece I wrote way back in 2001 (when Jim Jeffords’ defection from the Caucus cost Republicans control of the Senate) looking at the composition of the Senate Republican Caucus 25 years earlier, in 1976, when nearly half were genuinely “moderates” or even “liberals” (Javits, Case, Brooke, Weicker, Schweiker, Mathias and Percy) by then-prevailing standards, and the chamber itself was presided over by vice-president Nelson Rockefeller, the very bete noire of movement conservatives.

I mention this primarily because some political observers still seem to think the current ideological rigidity of the Republican Party is a sudden phenomenon created by the startling appearance of a Tea Party Movement in 2009. The often-unstated premise is that the GOP can be returned to its senses by a healthy general election defeat or two—or perhaps a win if it forces Republicans to come to grips with the responsibilities of governing.

Sorry, but I see no reason to think any sort of “course correction” is inevitable. The latest ideological lurch of the Republican Party came after two consecutive cycles in which the party was beaten like a drum. But it also drifted to the right during every recent Republican presidency; there’s a reason that GOPers were muttering about the “betrayals of conservative principle” their chieftains were exhibiting during W.’s, second term, his father’s one term, and yes, even Ronald Reagan’s second term. Like the tax cuts for the wealthy that are their all-purpose economic policy proposal, a shift to the right has become the all-purpose response to any political development over more than three decades. The Tea Party Movement is simply the latest incarnation of the conservative movement, which has been thundering against RINOs all the way back to the days when they actually existed.