Heather Wilson's War

While Republicans publicly fret over the possibility of an electoral "disaster" in November we find our thoughts turning to New Mexico, where one of our favorite members of Congress, Heather Wilson, is in a fight for the Republican nomination for Senate against Steven Pearce. The morning line is that Ms. Wilson is not quite as conservative as Mr. Pearce but would have a better chance of beating the liberal Democrat, Tom Udall, that the winner of the Republican primary will face in November. Our view is that if the Republican Party of 2008 would prefer to lose with Mr. Pearce than win with Ms. Wilson, it deserves its fate.

We first met Ms. Wilson in Brussels in the 1980s, when she was a young captain of the United States Air Force and was assigned to the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A graduate of the Air Force Academy and a Rhodes Scholar who'd done a Ph.D. thesis on wars of national liberation, she struck us then, as she does now, as someone to watch. After her tour with NATO, she joined the staff of President George H.W. Bush's National Security Council and then married an erstwhile law professor at the Academy, Jay Hone, settling in Albuquerque and starting a family.

After serving as cabinet secretary for child welfare in New Mexico, she has spent 10 years in the Congress as what she characterizes as a common-sense conservative. She has built a reputation for doing her homework. She's a supporter of a hard-line in the war on terror, is a stickler for command accountability in the military, backs making permanent President Bush's supply-side tax cuts, has never voted against a free trade agreement, and has emerged as a pro-family leader informed by her experience in this area in state government.

She has achieved all this while representing a relatively liberal congressional district and managing to earn respect across a wide swath of the New Mexico polity. We would suggest that she's the natural heir to Senator Domenici save for the fact that it would under-state her potential somewhere down the line on a national ticket. Yet Ms. Wilson is under attack from Mr. Pearce for, among other things, voting for spending too much on border security and the big government laboratories in New Mexico whence our atomic arsenal sprang and is kept competitive.

The Club for Growth, whose free-market policies this newspaper supports, is putting huge amounts of money into an effort to deny her the nomination, in favor of Mr. Pearce. If one credits analysts who reckon he stands less of a chance to win in November, the Club for Growth has emerged as, in effect, the Club for Udall, since a vote for Mr. Pearce in the June primary is tantamount to a vote in November for one of the most liberal political dynasties on the map. The president of the Club for Growth, Pat Toomey, defends his practices, in general, as hunting for Republicans in Name Only. But in New Mexico, his club has entered against a candidate who stands for Republicanism in all its best principles and who has been on the front lines of our war her whole adult life.

What lifts the drama in New Mexico to a story of national interest is the plight of the Republicans more broadly. We are in a season where the pundits are wringing their hands and worrying about a blowout in November that could give the Democrats a supermajority in the Senate, allowing them to defeat a Republican attempt at even a routine filibuster. This is not a time when one wants to seek the unattainable perfect (not that Mr. Pearce is perfect) at the expense of the achievable good — particularly when the good, in the case of Heather Wilson, is a rising star with a record of winning tight races.