In New Hampshire… How A “Moderate” Sacrificed His Political Principles
By JACK KENNY
Republican Gordon Humphrey, a former U.S. senator from New Hampshire, sacrificed a lot to support the election of Democrat Conor Lamb to Congress from a blue-collar Democrat district in Pennsylvania that went solidly for Republican candidate Donald Trump in the last presidential election.
Humphrey trumpeted his support for the Keystone State Democrat in an article appearing in the New Hampshire Union Leader. He even boasted of making the maximum campaign contribution allowable. But as Ben Franklin said long ago, Humphrey “paid too much for his whistle.” He sacrificed more than the $2,700 he contributed to the Democrat’s campaign. The increasingly maverick — make that renegade or even apostate — Republican has sacrificed a good deal of his moral and political principles, assuming he has any left after endorsing Hillary Clinton for president in 2016.
And it’s a sure bet that among a good many conservative Republicans, Humphrey has lost all, or nearly all, credibility.
Yes, Gordon has swallowed the political Kool-Aid. He hails Lamb as a “moderate.” But what is the formerly conservative Humphrey’s definition of a “moderate”?
True, Lamb doesn’t propose to disarm the nation’s gun owners or send them to the Gulag. He may be moderate on economic issues and he has presented himself as no crusading liberal on hot-button social and cultural issues, where he is, presumably willing to let sleeping dogs lie with whatever the Supreme Court says marriage is; and how many genders there might be is probably above his pay grade. Let the theologians debate it, along with the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
So if you make the term vague enough, Lamb might qualify as a “moderate.” But on abortion, notes the conservative National Review, “Lamb is a far cry from moderate. . . . Lamb has invoked the common ‘personally opposed to abortion’ line, which has given him a reputation as occupying a reasonable middle ground on the issue. But in practice, his position is just as extreme as that of the most pro-abortion members of his party.”
Lamb has said, for example, he would vote against the ban on abortions after 20 weeks, when the unborn child is believed to be capable of feeling pain.
So in America today, one can favor legal protection of the “right” to carve up babies in the womb as late as the 20th week of pregnancy and still be a “moderate.” At least Gordon Humphrey, the self-proclaimed “Reagan Republican,” apparently thinks so. So I guess you could call the pro-abortion Lamb a “Humphrey moderate.”
It calls to mind the late columnist Joseph Sobran’s response to a description of The New York Times as a “middle-of-the-road” publication. Sure, said Sobran: “If the road is in North Korea.”
Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Another was a cartoon lampooning the effort of the Reagan administration back in the late 1980s to bribe the “moderates” in Iran. The cartoon depicted some Iranians marching with placards declaring “Death to America,” while others held signs saying, “Serious Injury to America.” Two Americans — Reagan and National Security adviser “Bud” McFarland, perhaps — stood on the outskirts of the demonstration, holding a Bible and a cake, with one advising the other, “The ones on the right are the moderates.”
More than “serious injury” is at stake here, but “pro-choice” advocates are not honest enough to carry signs saying, “Death to the babies.” Pro-lifers sometimes see themselves in a position analogous to that of the defenders at the Alamo — though as Editor Peggy Moen, a hardy Minnesotan, has reminded me, “It was warmer at the Alamo.”
Weather and climate notwithstanding, we pro-lifers were once happy to have Gordon Humphrey with us in our version of the Alamo, where he often sounded like Davy Crockett. Now, it seems, he has defected to the bloodthirsty troops of Santa Anna.
But Humphrey is still a Reagan Republican and might have declared himself an Andy Jackson Democrat as well, under a bipartisan banner. Because Humphrey, I am sure, would have endorsed only the “moderates” in Santa Anna’s command. Humphrey and Lamb would have been “personally opposed” to killing Texans and other Americans, but not enough to fight against it.
They’re “moderates,” you see.