(h/t
Carl) Illinois Republican Senator
Charles Percy
The death on Saturday of former U.S. Senator Charles Percy at 91 was noted today in a laudatory obituary in the New York Times.
Percy had a distinguished career in business and served three terms in
the Senate from Illinois as a Republican. The Times quoted a scholar
from the liberal Brookings Institution lamenting the fact that members
of the GOP today are nothing like Percy. But that ought to be a cause
for celebration. He is best remembered today as the exemplar of a type
of Republican that is now extinct: a liberal establishmentarian who was
an opponent of the state of Israel.
Percy blamed supporters of
Israel for his defeat in 1984. This is a theme that was picked up by
Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in their ludicrous book The Israel Lobby
in which the duo paints Percy as a martyr to the power of the
all-powerful conspiracy for Zion. It is true that many in the
pro-Israel community embraced the candidacy of Paul Simon, his
Democratic challenger. However, the Times, which omitted any
mention of Percy’s record as one of the most vociferous opponents of
Israel in the Senate, was closer to the mark than Walt and Mearsheimer
when the paper said of his defeat that the senator had become “old
goods” to Illinois voters when they rejected him despite having a
triumphant Ronald Reagan at the top of the GOP ticket. By that time,
having a Rockefeller Republican senator with higher ratings from
liberal groups than conservative ones wasn’t something that excited
voters from either party.
Though the Times’ cheers
Percy’s pose of bipartisanship, his was a Republicanism that fit the
mode of the party’s old-line establishment that was dying even when he
reached the Senate in 1966. It was a party that stood for nothing but
protection of corporate interests and had long become complicit in the
corruption of the liberal welfare state. It combined that concept of
backing for the Democratic program minus five or ten percent with a
snooty elitism that disparaged faith and the rights of taxpayers as
well as having little sympathy for Jews or Israel. Fortunately for the
country, that Republican Party and the moneyed establishment that Percy
embodied, is now as dead as he is. Read the whole thing.
