WASHINGTON -- It's a commentary on the state of moderation in today's Republican Party that the challenge to Senate Republican Whip Alan Simpson for re-election to that post by Sen. Trent Lott was raised on grounds that he wasn't conservative enough. Calling Simpson a moderate is like calling a card-carrying liberal like Ted Kennedy a moderate on the Democratic side.
But everything, in politics as in life, is relative, as in the old vaudeville gag: "How's your wife?" "Compared to what?" The Grand Old Party has moved so far to the right in the past 20 to 30 years that good upstanding conservatives like Simpson are obliged to defend themselves against what he himself the other day called a "saliva test of purity" to remain acceptable within the club.
The poverty of genuine Republican moderates in the new Senate is going to create a serious problem for the new Democratic leadership when the 104th Congress convenes on Jan. 4. With only 47 Democrats in the ranks, and some of them conservatives who cannot be relied on to give loyal support to President Clinton's legislative agenda, the new Senate minority is going to have its hands full achieving anything for him, let alone blocking Republican initiatives.
Sen. Chris Dodd, as a candidate to succeed retiring Sen. George Mitchell of Maine as the Democratic leader in the Senate, spoke optimistically the other day that there would be Republican moderates willing to do business on such key issues as welfare and health care reform in the coming Congress. But there aren't many who fall into that category.
During this year's health care debate, Republican Sens. John Chafee and David Durenberger took the lead in creating a "mainstream" group to find a middle-road course that would win enough bipartisan support to get a bill.
But the effort foundered and Durenberger, chased into retirement by personal financial irregularities, has been replaced the voters of Minnesota with an unvarnished conservative in Sen.-elect Rod Grams. And one other sometimes moderate, John Danforth, is yielding his seat to conservative former Missouri Gov. John Ashcroft.
Chafee was easily re-elected on Nov. 8 from Rhode Island, one of the nation's most liberal states, and remains a key prospect for bipartisan cooperation with the Democrats. Others who qualify as moderates on their past voting records and styles include Mark Hatfield, an old Nelson Rockefeller supporter; fellow Oregonian Bob Packwood, William Cohen, Arlen Specter, James Jeffords, Nancy Kassebaum and, on some issues, Richard Lugar and John McCain.
But by and large the Republican Party no longer has a recognizable moderate wing in the tradition of Rockefeller, let alone any liberals of the sort represented by the late Jacob Javits and Clifford Case.
The Democratic leadership in the Senate will be hard-pressed to court enough Republican votes to produce a respectable legislative record for Clinton in the next two years on any issues other than those, like trade, in which there is already substantial Republican constituency in the Senate.
The small band of modestly moderate Republicans may be more helpful to the Democrats in blocking conservative legislation that strikes them as excessive -- including bills raced through the House by the new right-wing speaker, Newt Gingrich, in the full flush of the conservative Republican sweep on Nov. 8 that
elevated him to a powerhouse role in the legislative process.
Dodd the other day expressed hope that the more deliberative processes of the Senate could lead to a tempering of House Republican zeal, with the help of Republicans who don't quite share it.
Unspoken is the Democratic hope and expectation that the new Senate majority leader, Bob Dole, will be of a mind to make sure that Gingrich doesn't run roughshod over him, and over fellow Senate Republicans, with the product of his ballyhooed "Contract With America," to which the Senate Republicans as a group were not a party.
But the Democrats know that at a time when some Republicans think Alan Simpson isn't conservative enough, finding Republican moderates to side with them won't be easy.