The Fall of a Good Guy

Geoffrey Kabaservice disputes that Richard Lugar is best described as a Republican "moderate."

Lugar, ultimately, was not really a moderate so much as a remnant of the Republican breed that believed in cooperation, pragmatism, tradition, stability, and gentlemanly restraint. That breed included many conservatives as well as moderates, and Lugar’s downfall marks its virtual extinction in Republican politics. The current breed does not feel, as he did, that a president from the opposing party deserves any measure of deference in his appointments of Supreme Court justices, or that a senator’s mind and conscience should be his own rather than the property of a hard-edged ideological movement. Lugar’s defeat, due in part to the offense the Indiana GOP took at his Virginia residency, ensures that now all Congressmen will become Tuesday-to-Thursday part-timers whose ideological purity will be unsullied by any temptation to view their partisan opponents as human beings worthy of respect