Tuesday, Jul. 22, 2008

There’s something familiar, but different, about GOP purge

“I DIDN’T leave the Democratic Party,” David Beasley always used to say. “The Democratic Party left me.”

Mr. Beasley was far from the only one to use that explanation for his party-switch. I suppose I associate it with him because I had more conversations and heard more speeches about his political conversion than about those of any of the other party-switchers who tipped the GOP to majority status in our state.

By the time Mr. Beasley bolted, the cliche probably was true. But it wasn’t something that occurred naturally. It was an assisted departure.

Mr. Beasley’s election as Gov. Carroll Campbell’s successor, combined with the GOP take-over of the S.C. House, marked the culmination of a brilliant campaign by the S.C. Republican Party. Party officials worked long and hard to create the impression among voters that S.C. Democrats were way liberal. Then they systematically picked off the most moderate elected Democrats, offering the campaign assistance that the Democratic Party couldn’t provide, and a warm welcome — usually complete with a big, made-for-TV announcement with a popular Republican governor — into a party that was finding increasing favor among voters.

Each departure moved the Democratic Party’s center slightly to the left, making it easier for Republicans to convince voters that the party was too liberal for them and to convince officeholders that they couldn’t win if they remained associated with a discredited brand. It became a chicken-and-egg spiral until the Democratic Party was so small and weak that it could no longer compete on the state level except under extraordinary circumstances.

The strategy worked because electoral success — like the majority of voters — lies at the political center: Push your opponent to the extreme, and victory is yours.

That’s what makes what we seem to be witnessing today so bizarre: Less than two decades after it came to power by pushing the other party to the political fringes, the S.C. Republican Party is itself veering away from the center, as moderates leave the ranks of elected Republicans. But this time, the change isn’t the result of a brilliant plot by the other party; it’s happening because people who call themselves Republican are set on purging their party of the very people whose conversions catapulted the party to hegemony in our state.

In a recent article examining last month’s party primaries that saw the defeat of six Republican legislators, many of whom had been attacked as “RINOs,” or “Republicans in name only,” The Spartanburg Herald-Journal quoted local Republicans as describing the results as a “cleansing period” and a “winnowing” of moderates.

“That’s why the right side is becoming a lot stronger, and it’s going to make that line between the right and left more defined than it has been for a number of years,” House Speaker Pro Tem Doug Smith, who did not seek re-election, told the paper. “That’s why the moderates took it on the chin this time.”

It’s hard to say who, if anyone, in South Carolina is behind this eat-their-young strategy. Critics inside and outside the Republican Party associate it with Gov. Mark Sanford, and he clearly supports at least some of the effort, but most of the campaigning has come from a handful of secretive organizations whose funding, in turn, can be traced back to the out-of-state libertarians who want our state to give parents tax money, or else a bye on paying their taxes like the rest of us, in return for sending their kids to private schools. Whether Mr. Sanford controls the outsiders or the outsiders control Mr. Sanford is anyone’s guess.

The out-of-staters’ S.C. handmaidens will disagree strongly with the idea that they could be hurting the party that previous generations of actual Republicans worked so hard to build. They insist they are the political center, and that they are trying to rescue their beloved party from disaster by pulling it back from the leftist brink over which it is about to tumble. No surprise there. Moveon.org and other nut cases on the political left think they’re the political center, too. That’s what you get when you live in the echo chamber of the blogosphere, which has magnified exponentially the tendency people already have to associate only with those of like views.

What makes this purgation campaign so dangerous for the Republican Party is the fact that the motivating issue for those benefactors — vouchers, or tax credits, or whatever you want to call it — is immensely unpopular among S.C. voters. That’s why the attacks on “RINOs” tend not to mention this issue and instead focus on trumped-up charges or even outright lies about incumbent support for tax increases or “liberal judges” or wasteful spending.

Of course, there’s only so much damage a party can do to itself. Even self-inflicted wounds won’t cost the GOP much if the Democratic Party isn’t smart enough to exploit it — to start wooing the GOP moderates before they are purged, and in so doing shift itself back to the center and start making the case that the Republicans are just too radical. If Democrats don’t do that, then they deserve their political obscurity; and if they do, Republicans will have no one to blame for their loss of power but themselves.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.