WE HACKS have made a tidy little cottage industry out of lamenting the death of moderation in American politics. Moderation is an abstract noun; there is no actual death involved. So let us take a moment and lament the all-too-real death of an actual moderate: Arlen Specter, who succumbed to lymphoma on Sunday at the age of 82. You would have to search long and hard to find a story as quintessentially American as Mr Specter's. The son of an American mother and a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant father who served in the first world war and sold fruit and scrap in Russell, Kansas (the same town that produced Bob Dole), Mr Specter attended the University of Pennsylvania and Yale Law School before prosecuting municipal corruption as a district attorney in Philadelphia. Then-congressman Gerald Ford put him on the Warren Commission, where he investigated the murder of John F. Kennedy. His initial forays into national electoral politics were rocky: he lost Republican senate and gubernatorial primaries in 1976 and 1978. In 1980 he defeated Pete Flaherty, a former mayor of Pittsburgh, to win the senate seat he would go on to hold for five terms—longer than any other senator from Pennsylvania.

Mr Specter's longevity was all the more surprising considering that he possessed a rare and valuable trait in a politician: the ability to annoy both parties. In 1987, while a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he bucked his own party and its president by voting to oppose Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court, saying he had "substantial doubt about Judge Bork's application of [the] fundamental legal principle" of equal protection, and expressed doubt more broadly about how Mr Bork "would apply fundamental questions of constitutional law." In the end Mr Bork's nomination failed; the nomination passed to Anthony Kennedy, who was confirmed unanimously and who remains on the bench today (also probably to the equal annoyance of both Republicans and Democrats). Four years later, he subjected Anita Hill, who had accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, to intense, some might say lurid questioning. Mr Specter was a rare pro-choice Republican, who as late as 2008 received a 100% rating on his voting record from NARAL; no doubt many expected him to take Ms Hill's side, or at least to not interrogate her so aggressively (not for nothing was he nicknamed "Snarlin' Arlen"). During Bill Clinton's impeachment hearings Mr Specter cited Scottish law to vote "not proven", thus freeing him from having to vote either guilty or not guilty.

But as the Republican Party tacked right, particularly in the last four years, it left him behind. In 2009, facing a primary challenge from Pat Toomey, an orthodox right-winger, Mr Specter abruptly switched parties. He said he was "not prepared to have my 29-year record in the United States Senate decided by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate." One might point out that he was perfectly willing to have his record decided by precisely that electorate five times before—ie, until it looked like he would lose. And one might also detect in the above series of votes, and in his career, a whiff of opportunism or fence-sitting. But condemning politicians for being opportunistic is like condemning water for being wet. And there is a broader sense, as we see in the fierce, gridlocking partisanship today, in which slavish adherence to party doctrine turns counterproductive. Not to the party itself, perhaps—Republicans in the Senate probably prefer a good soldier such as Mr Toomey to a prickly independent such as Mr Specter, and the Democrats do not seem to be going to any great lengths to save their disappearing Blue Dogs—but to the country as a whole. To put it another way, who serves the national common good best: Arlen Specter or Michele Bachmann?

(Photo credit: AFP)