In today’s Wall Street Journal Daniel Henniger argues that the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger is generally viewed as a political moderate suggests “the definition of political moderate has moved seismically to the right.” He points out that Arnold’s views on taxes and spending are nowhere near those of other “moderate Republicans” such as Lincoln Chafee and Olympia Snow. What Henniger fails to note is that the entire spectrum has moved “seismically” to the left during the last 30 to 40 years. When I first joined the conservative movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s the conservative position on Social Security was to abolish it. Conservatives opposed Medicare and Medicaid. When was the last time we heard a conservative politician advocate abolition of any part of the welfare state? During the 1970s conservatives were against establishing and then were in favor of abolishing the two DOEs and the EPA. Now conservatives complain that the Department of Education is not running a voucher program and they leap to defend President Bush’s ill-conceived Clear Skies Initiative. The fact is that nearly all of the liberal initiatives of the last 40 years have been, in one form or another, embraced by “conservative” politicians.