If you listen to some pundits these days, you’d think that the U.S. Department of Justice was an arm of the Republican National Committee. Not so fast — prosecutors from the department indicted Republican Sen. Ted Stevens on federal corruption charges, alleging that he lied about gifts he received from a constituent.

This is obviously bad news for Stevens, but it is a good house-cleaning opportunity for his party.

Already infamous for pork-barrel spending, the Alaska senator has come to epitomize the cohort of long-serving politicians — Stevens was first elected in 1968 — perennially sabotaging the party’s fiscally conservative platform in order to secure taxpayer funds for their constituencies.

Joined by West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd — the other senator from Porkland, first elected in 1959 — in a decades-long bipartisan orgy of big-government waste, Stevens is best known to the nation for his failed bid to fund the “bridge to nowhere.”

The efforts of Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, among others, to counter this shameful behavior have been overshadowed by Stevens’ struggles to protect it. The amendment to kill the bridge was thankfully one of Coburn’s victories.

The indictment may also prove to be a blessing for anti-pork crusaders like Coburn because it weakens the case for “bringing home the bacon” as a viable political strategy. While influence peddling and pork spending are separate behaviors, they are both rightly seen as corruption in the eyes of voters.

Even Alaskan voters, despite nominally being the beneficiaries of the senator’s largesse, can be very hostile to politicians perceived as crooked.

In 2006, incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski finished a distant third in the Republican primary amid severe ethical troubles. Republicans instead nominated former Wasilla, Alaska, mayor Sarah Palin, who ran on an anti-corruption platform and went on to defeat popular former Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat.

Political realists who support propping up the likes of Stevens often criticize these sorts of intra-party revolts, asserting that ideologically motivated candidates who defeat less principled incumbents in the primaries often wind up delivering the contested office into the hands of the other party. While this does certainly happen, Palin’s victory showed that a strong candidate can defeat an unpopular primary incumbent from her own party and still triumph in the general election.

Much has also been made of the need for the parties to be unified and avoid internal bickering. Party unity, however, must coalesce behind ideas rather than people.

Parties that win elections by relying too heavily on the strength of candidates’ personal characteristics or ability to waste taxpayer funds cannot hope to govern effectively. One only has to look at the ineffectual Republican Congress of 2004-2006 and the even more incompetent Democratic Congress of 2006 to the present.

Those within the Republican Party who advocate tolerating corruption and wasteful spending in order to protect incumbents are pawning off the party’s long-term ideological foundation and political viability for short-term gains. The party will only achieve these gains if voters want frivolous spending more than they want lower taxes and clean, efficient government. Democrats must likewise expunge corruption and waste on their side of the aisle, for their own good.

In a country where the misdeeds and waste of one man can taint an entire party, politicians of both persuasions may soon find that earmarking our hard-earned money for special favors as a political strategy is not quite the showstopper it used to be.