THE SCALPHUNTER

Fight Club (MATT BAI, August 10, 2003, NY Times Magazine)

I always say politicians are cowards, and they really are,'' Stephen Moore told me recently. ''We say we're going to run someone against them, and they start wetting their pants.''

Moore, the president of a group of zealous economic conservatives known as the Club for Growth, was talking about Arlen Specter, a giant of the United States Senate and the only Republican moderate in the Senate leadership. Specter is running for a fifth term next year in Pennsylvania, but he now finds himself facing an unexpected, potentially serious primary challenge from the party's right flank. That challenge, from a brash conservative congressman from industrial Allentown named Patrick Toomey, is being engineered by the Club for Growth, whose 10,000 members, most of them gray-suited bankers and businessmen, seem to be on a mission to banish taxes from the earth. Moore has vowed revenge on Republican incumbents who don't worship at his antitax altar -- he calls them ''Republicans in Name Only,'' or ''Rinos'' -- and unseating Specter, he says, is his top priority.

Although Specter is a powerful committee chairman and can count on the strong support of the White House, he is clearly anxious; he is already spending much of his time shaking hands back in Pennsylvania, and he has called some members of the club himself to plead his case. A few months ago, Specter even invited Moore over to his Capitol office for a chat. A masterly politician, Specter gave it all the charm he could muster, graciously showing Moore his trove of family photos before launching into a defense of his voting record, which, he rightly pointed out, is broadly more conservative than Toomey's, according to National Journal's ratings. Specter is, after all, the man who got Clarence Thomas confirmed, and he has long supported the balanced-budget amendment and, for that matter, the flat tax.

To Specter's astonishment, however, Moore, a nerdy 43-year-old economist with an affable, self-mocking laugh, didn't seem to care much about Specter's record. It was simple, Moore said: even though Specter eventually voted for President Bush's $1.3 trillion tax cut, Moore could not forgive him for first voting to trim the president's original, bigger tax-cut proposal by $250 billion so that the money could be spent on education.

For his part, Specter came away from his meeting with Moore feeling somewhat bewildered by what was happening inside his own party. He took note when Moore later told a reporter that he wanted to beat Specter because having ''a major scalp on the wall'' would make the Club for Growth more intimidating to other Republicans. (Moore said the same thing to me when I interviewed him in his office, motioning to a spot near his desk, as if Specter's scalp might actually hang there someday.) ''I have been in public life since I became an assistant D.A. in 1959,'' Specter told me. ''And I've never heard talk like that.''

Given the likely dynamics of the race it's hard to believe the GOP would lose this seat, regardless of whether Senator Specter or Congressman Toomey wins the primary. But Mr. Moore seems like a pretty good example of the kind of ideologician for whom the only issue is really whether a politician agrees with him personally often enough. That's what makes this kind of intra-party bloodletting so suicidal. No one is pure on each and every issue that is popular within a party and if each group will only vote for someone who toes the line on their issue you'll end up with every election looking like the CA Recall race, with 300 names on the ballot. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 9, 2003 6:36 AM