Balance of Power

Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a conservative who still bucks the party line from time to time, said the Republican Party should learn from the example of how the Democrats treated Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the independent who caucuses with the Democrats but who supported Republican Sen. John McCain for president last year.

Many Democrats wanted to strip Lieberman of his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. But President Obama urged the Democrats to show leniency — even though he was on the receiving end of Lieberman’s attacks when the Connecticut senator campaigned for McCain — and Lieberman kept his chairmanship.

“From a red-state perspective, I understand the value of having blue-state Republicans,” said Graham. “If we don’t understand that factor, and that’s not our desire, we will be a minority party forever. And the Democrats would be a minority party forever if they took that view. They’ve done a pretty good job of recapturing a foothold in red states.”

Snowe said the GOP should have learned lessons from the 2006 election, when the party lost control of Congress but she won re-election with 74 percent of the vote. “Nobody asked me, ‘How did you do it?’ ” Snowe said. “It seems to me that that would have been the first question that would have come from the Republican Party to find out so that we could avoid further losses.”

As for the Club for Growth — the conservative group whose former leader, Patrick J. Toomey, planned to challenge Specter in next year’s Republican primary and had a 21-point lead — Graham said his message was simple: “Good luck.”

“I want to be a viable, balanced national party, center-right. I’m not looking to be a member of a club,” Graham said. “I want to be a member of a vibrant national Republican Party that can attract people from all corners of the country and can govern the country from a center-right perspective.” At the moment, his goal seems to be slipping out of reach.