A Commonplace Book

I had a fascinating meeting with Bob Inglis the other day. Bob Inglis was an extremely conservative Republican congressman from South Carolina. He was a three-term-pledge guy in the nineties. He got out, ran for the Senate against Ernest Hollings, lost. Then he won his House seat back. And he had an accident. Fell in his bathroom or something. It was awful. During his recovery, he had a long time to think, and he told me, "I had an epiphany." He said, "I realized I didn't have to hate the Democrats who disagree with me." And a lot of Democrats had been nice to him, the people in Congress, when he was recovering. And he also was persuaded -- as was Lindsey Graham, by John McCain -- that global warming was real and a problem, so he set about trying to find a conservative solution to it that is good for the market and consistent with conservative principles. He also acknowledged that President Obama is an American, not a Kenyan. He's a Christian, not a Muslim. I like him, he said, but I disagree with him on everything. And for those things, Bob Inglis, he lost his primary in 2010. A guy that had a 100 percent conservative rating.

So he came to me and he said, "I just want you to know, when you got elected, I hated you. And I asked to be on the Judiciary Committee in 1993, because a bunch of us had already made up our minds that no matter what you did or didn't do, we were going to find some way to impeach you. We hated you. You had no right to be president." And he said, "That's wrong." And he said, "I'm sorry."