The center does not try to read anybody out of the party

From The Washington Post by E.J. Dionne, Jr.:

"The center does not try to read anybody out of the party," the experienced Republican politician declared. "But the farther you go in either direction, the greater the inclination to read others out." He deplored party purges as "political cannibalism" and insisted: "The center must lead."

That was Richard M. Nixon, about a week after Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat at the hands of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

Nixon was to succeed in reconstituting a Republican center that propelled him to the presidency four years later. But that center could not hold. As J. William Middendorf II recounts in "A Glorious Disaster," his book on the Goldwater campaign with the pitch-perfect title, the movement led by the conservative Arizona senator, not Nixon, shaped the Republican future.

This fall's election defeat was inglorious for Republicans because it ratified Nixon's original worries about the cost of chasing away the GOP's moderates and revealed that the Barry Goldwater-Ronald Reagan political settlement has expired.