How DeMint Turned His Back on Inglis

Rep. Bob Inglis once served as a mentor to Jim DeMint. But when DeMint's career flourished, the new senator would turn on his old friend.

I just finished reading the WSJ's poignant narrative of the rift between Jim DeMint and Bob Inglis.

In the heat of the 2010 election, Sen. Jim DeMint got a call for help from his old friend Rep. Bob Inglis, a fellow South Carolina Republican locked in a tough primary battle.

The two men had played together, prayed together and politicked together for nearly two decades. Mr. Inglis hoped an endorsement from Mr. DeMint, a tea-party icon and rising GOP star, might appease constituents who thought he'd been too conciliatory to Democrats, despite his broadly conservative record.

Mr. DeMint turned him down. "He's still a friend," Mr. DeMint says of Mr. Inglis. "I've got lots of friends." The two are now barely on speaking terms, say several people who know both.

It's a familiar story: Inglis acted as a mentor to DeMint, helping to incubate DeMint's political career. DeMint's career flourished, and the new senator then turned upon his old friend over political differences.

DeMint partisans will see the grim events that followed as a triumph of principle.

The view in Mr. DeMint's office was that Mr. Inglis had changed—for the worse. Messrs. DeMint and Woodard, the pollster, were writing a book together, "Why We Whisper," calling for laws and policies that discouraged "promiscuity, divorce, illegitimacy, pornography, drug abuse and gambling." They argued conservatives should stand up for their beliefs, not defer to pressure from the left. Mr. DeMint dismisses the idea that theological nuances divided him and Mr. Inglis.

Relations deteriorated so severely by late 2006 that Messrs. DeMint and Woodard held a sort of intervention during a salmon dinner at the Inglis house. Mr. Woodard's brother Toby, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian, served as referee. "We're in trouble as a culture if you keep going the way you're going," Mr. Woodard warned Mr. Inglis.

Mr. DeMint describes the evening's discussion as "friendly banter" over politics and faith.

The dinner ended in stony silence, according to Messrs. Inglis and Woodard, whose wives tried and failed to broker a peace. "I'm going with DeMint," Mr. Woodard says he told Mr. Inglis.

But two considerations:

First - believing that Congress should work to achieve results - that politics is not war - is also a principle.

But second - while of course political differences sometimes divide friends - and while private affection is a different thing from public responsibility - the way a man handles such differences reveals something important about his nature. DeMint may say that he has lots of friends. And speaking personally: I feel a lot safer knowing I'm not one of them.