The Outsiders
April 29, 2009
No, I won’t miss Arlen Specter. In fact, I can’t think of anyone who will.
So the Pennsylvania moderate has finally decided to wash his hands of the GOP. “I have been a Republican since 1966,” Specter said in a statement explaining his defection to the Democrats. “I have been working extremely hard for the Party, for its candidates and for the ideals of a Republican Party whose tent is big enough to welcome diverse points of view. While I have been comfortable being a Republican, my Party has not defined who I am. I have taken each issue one at a time and have exercised independent judgment to do what I thought was best for Pennsylvania and the nation.”
The independent man continued: “Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.”
Specter finds more in common with donkeys than elephants now? Well, good for him. As Billy Joel once said, do what’s good for you, or you’re not good for anybody. The pursuit of happiness, and all that.
I’m sure Specter is a good husband and father, but I’ve never found him impressive as a Senator. I tolerated Specter’s “moderation” for some time, but I wrote the guy off in the fall of 1998, when he expressed his reluctance to find President Clinton guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Monica Lewinsky mess. Remember when he cited “Scottish law” and declared that the charges against Clinton were “not proven?” Ugh.
Specter had been a thorn in the side of conservatives for years, but his support for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (known to conservative talk-radio listeners as “porkulus”) drove that thorn further into the right’s flesh. Those who desired fiscal responsibility in Washington—and those who were sick and tired of Specter’s self-righteousness—found their own hope-and-change hero in Pat Toomey, a former Pennsylvania congressman who almost defeated Specter in the 2004 Senate primary and planned to challenge the incumbent again in 2010.
Clearly, Specter realized that his support for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would lead to his defeat in next year’s primary. “When I supported the stimulus package, I knew that it would not be popular with the Republican Party,” Specter noted. “But, I saw the stimulus as necessary to lessen the risk of a far more serious recession than we are now experiencing. Since then, I have traveled the State, talked to Republican leaders and office-holders and my supporters and I have carefully examined public opinion.”
He continued, “It has become clear to me that the stimulus vote caused a schism which makes our differences irreconcilable. On this state of the record, I am unwilling to have my twenty-nine year Senate record judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate.”
I’d like to see a solid conservative like Toomey defeat Specter in a general election, but I’m under no illusion that it will actually happen. By the time November 2010 rolls around, Toomey will have been successfully smeared as a right-wing troglodyte, a demented demagogue who takes his marching orders from Rush Limbaugh and his ethical cues from Dick Cheney. There would have to be an anti-Obama backlash of extraordinary intensity to sweep Toomey to victory—and so far, there’s no real evidence of such a backlash in the making, those tea parties notwithstanding.
However, if Specter beats Toomey, at least he’ll do so as a member of a party with which he has actual affinity. Specter was always a poor match for the GOP; the age of the moderate Republican has long since passed. Most moderates are known by another name today: Democrats.
Perhaps Maine Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins will also hear voices encouraging them to leave the GOP for the Democrats. They should listen to those voices. Snowe and Collins are simply not conservative enough for the Republican Party; they are throwbacks to the Bob Michel era, an era that few conservatives miss.
Granted, the GOP will not survive if it engages in an overly broad ideological purge. The party needs its centrists; a political organization that demands ideological fealty to every last issue is a political organization that is doomed. However, centrists and moderates are two different creatures. A centrist is someone who agrees with the lion’s share of a given party’s views but dissents on one or two issues: someone like former McCain campaign adviser Steve Schmidt fits this description, because he lines up with the GOP on most of the major issues (except for same-sex marriage). A moderate, on the other hand, is someone who is technically a member of a given party, but has no real ideological connection to that party. That’s what Specter is—or was.
