Swikar Patel/The Journal-Gazette, via Associated PressIndiana G.O.P. U.S. Senate nominee Richard E. Mourdock on Wednesday, May 9, 2012.In my post yesterday on Tuesday’s voting, I mentioned that Richard Lugar lost the Indiana Senate primary to Richard Mourdock, a radical right-winger. I didn’t have time to write at length about his thoughtful farewell letter, but it’s worth revisiting as a sort of treatise on the state of politics.
Mr. Lugar has built himself a reputation as a moderate, at least when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Generally speaking he was not a rebel in the Republican caucus on domestic issues, though he did vote for the auto industry bailout and for Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagen.
Mr. Mourdock, for his part, described bipartisanship as follows: “I have a mind-set that says bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”
It’s impossible to say for sure why primary voters favored Mr. Mourdock over Mr. Lugar. In his letter, Mr. Lugar suggested that the primary was a repudiation of bipartisanship and common sense. That seems less likely than the possibility that voters were simply tired of their current senator, who has served in Washington longer than many of them have been alive.
But Mr. Lugar was right that in his place, voters picked a radical who aims to remove any vestiges of moderation from the Republican Party. Mr. Mourdock recently compared the debate over tax reform to the divisions that led to Southern secession and the Civil War.
Mr. Lugar said Mr. Mourdock stood for “reflexive votes or a rejectionist orthodoxy and rigid opposition to the actions and proposals of the other party. His answer to the inevitable roadblocks he will encounter in Congress is merely to campaign for more Republicans who embrace the same partisan outlook. He has pledged his support to groups whose prime mission is to cleanse the Republican party of those who stray from orthodoxy as they see it.”
That’s a chillingly accurate description of modern-day Republicans. The party has been moving steadily rightward for decades, and has managed to silence or drive out Republican members of Congress who show the slightest tendency toward centrism – like Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, who is not running for re-election.
I take issue, however, with the fact that Mr. Lugar laid the blame for dysfunction in Washington equally on the Democrats and the Republicans. “Partisans at both ends of the political spectrum are dominating the political debate in our country,” Mr. Lugar said.
There is plenty wrong with the Democratic Party, but monolithic adherence to liberal orthodoxy is not one of them. On the contrary the old Will Rogers joke “I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat,” still resonates. Just for example, thirty-four House Democrats voted against the Democratic president’s signature health care legislation. The far left is not dominating the political debate in the slightest; it hardly has a voice at all. What passes as American liberalism today is awfully similar to the Republican platform of the Eisenhower area (something Rachel Maddow has noted.)
As Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in a much-discussed Op-Ed for the Washington Post, “the Republicans are the problem.” Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, famously said his party’s “number one goal” was to keep Mr. Obama from winning a second term. Yet Mr. Mann and Mr. Ornstein trace the roots of blind partisanship much farther back – to Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.
Mr. Gingrich had a single-minded devotion to attaining a Republican majority in the House by “convincing voters that the institution was so corrupt that anyone would be better than the incumbents, especially those in the Democratic majority.” Mr. Norquist created the “no-tax pledge,” which precludes any sane discussion of how to achieve deficit reduction, and which has inspired copy-cat pledges “on issues such as climate change, that create additional litmus tests that box in moderates and make cross-party coalitions nearly impossible.”
For a vivid illustration of what Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Norquist have wrought, one need look no farther than this year’s Republican presidential primaries. Voters jumped from one wild-eyed right winger after another, until they settled on Mitt Romney, who has abandoned his career as a moderate to remake himself in his party’s image.
This blog post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 10, 2012
This post originally stated that Mr. Lugar voted for the stimulus. Actually, he voted against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. But he did vote for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
