[Christopher Caldwell is a conservative columnist for the Weekly Standard and the FT]
November 10, 2006 Financial Times
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The most significant rightward shift will be among Republicans, not Democrats. This may sound odd. Since this election was a repudiation of their party, you would think that the most "typically" Republican candidates -- the theocrats, imperialists and supply-siders of popular caricature -- would have been hurt most. But the opposite is true. One can point to a few arch-conservatives who lost, including the senator Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania and the representatives J.D. Hayworth of Arizona and John Hostettler of Indiana. But most of those who paid the price were the very people the Republican party's opponents found most palatable. The list of moderates toppled goes on and on.
There was Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, the only Republican senator to oppose action against Saddam Hussein; the environmentalist Nancy Johnson in Connecticut; Sue Kelly and John Sweeney in New York, both of them pro-trade union; James Leach of Iowa, the sweater-wearing Princeton-educated banking expert who would not be out of place in a European parliament; Charles Bass of New Hampshire, an abortion-rights advocate . . . and this is only a partial tally. The so-called "Main Street Partnership", with 56 moderate Republicans on Capitol Hill, lost about a third of its members this week.
This shift is not a matter of voters making fine-tuned choices. It is a mathematical irony of elections in a heavily gerrymandered system. A variety of factors -- the dawn of primary elections in the late 1960s, rigid interpretations of voting-rights legislation in the 1970s and 1980s (to guarantee minority seats), the invention of redistricting software in more recent years -- have made US electoral districts friendly to incumbents of the hard left and hard right. Vulnerable members tend to be centrist ones.
This creates problems for losing parties that go far beyond their diminished numbers. In 1994, in addition to losing 52 seats, Democrats also became, through attrition of centrist members, a more dogmatic and out-of-touch party -- adding a fillip to Republican momentum that would last well into this decade. Something similar happened to Republicans this week. A big election loss ought to be a spur to two things: a period of institutional soul-searching, followed by a recalibration of a party's ideology. But the decimation of Republican moderates deprives the party of the very people capable of carrying out that task. Indeed, reporters who attended Republican meetings after the election found an atmosphere that was surreally fancy-free. "This was about the Republican party not behaving like Republicans," conservative activist Richard Lessner told the Los Angeles Times. Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform diagnosed the conservative movement as "perfectly healthy".
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Michael