"The people that call me a RINO would call Ronald Reagan a RINO"

“The people that call me a RINO would call Ronald Reagan a RINO,” he protested. “Reagan worked with Tip O’Neill to increase taxes to save Social Security.” What’s changed is that “purity is replacing principled compromise,” he lamented, as ideology enforcers in both parties threaten primary challenges against those who stray…

It will take some courage for Obama to defy his liberal base — but nothing like the courage Graham will need to take on the Republican purity enforcers. “I’d be glad to argue with my colleagues in the Republican Party about the problems with Guantanamo Bay,” he boasted.

That’s the sort of talk that won Graham censures from GOP leadership in two South Carolina counties. He reasons that he “could stay in this job forever” by telling GOP primary voters what they want to hear. But he took a different route. “I’m not job-scared,” he told me, because it has come to the point where “fear stops you from acting in the best interests of the country.”