The Republican turned Democrat turned loser turned stand-up comedian made a crude comment on national TV:
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter took a jab at presidential hopeful Mitt Romney Wednesday by teasingly comparing him to an adult film star.
Americans Against Government Takeover Of Health Care Should Expect A Major Offensive From Leftists
Senator Snowe’s Bipartisan Health Care
Sorry, moderate-to-lefty Republicans… Tom Ridge is not gonna be your savior in Pennsylvania:
WASHINGTON – Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge says he’s not going to challenge Sen. Arlen Specter next year.
Ridge is a moderate Republican who was the nation’s first homeland security chief. He said in a statement Thursday that his party is facing challenges and he will work with the GOP, but he will not seek the nomination.
Guess the weak-kneed wanna-be-Democrats will have to find someone else to challenge Toomey.
Has “Benedict Arlen” Specter been taking lessons from Joe Biden? He sat down for a quick interview with the New York Times, and laid this egg (emphasis in original):
With your departure from the Republican Party, there are no more Jewish Republicans in the Senate. Do you care about that?
I sure do. There’s still time for the Minnesota courts to do justice and declare Norm Coleman the winner.
Now, if Specter was still a Republican, I could see him saying that, but not as a Democrat.
He has, of course, come forward with some quick damage-control spin… er… a clarification:
But questioned outside the Senate chamber Tuesday, Specter said the comment was a mistake.
“In the swirl of moving from one caucus to another, I have to get used to my new teammates,” he said. “I’m ordinarily pretty correct in what I say. I’ve made a career of being precise. I conclusively misspoke.”
The big problem with that spin clarification is that the question itself should have reminded him at least once, if not twice (“your departure from the Republican Party” and “no more Jewish Republicans”) that he wasn’t a Republican any more.
So, did Specter not listen closely to the question, not understand the question, or forget between the time the question was asked and when he answered (probably not more than a second or two) that he had switched parties? None of those possibilities puts Specter in a very good light.
Democrats, you’re welcome to him!
Arlen Specter shows his lack of a soul:
Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Democrat, said part of the reason that he left the Republican Party last week was disillusionment with its health-care priorities, and suggested that had the Republicans taken a more moderate track, Jack Kemp may have won his battle with cancer.
<snip>
Mr. Specter continued: “If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine.”
Of course, it is totally lost on Benedict Arlen that the US has the highest rate of survival for breast and prostate cancers, bar none.
Specter is not only a liar, he is an absolute scumbag for trying to use the death of a great man to make a political point, and the Democrats are more than welcome to him, for as long as they have him… if he keeps saying things like this, he’s probably gonna have a real uphill battle come 2010.
More trouble in paradise for Former-Democrat-Turned-Republican-Turned-Democrat-Again (yes, he switched before, back in 1965) “Benedict” Arlen Specter:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) deal to allow Sen. Arlen Specter to retain his seniority after he switches to the Democratic Conference has not been received well by senior senators in the party.
Several Democrats are furious with Reid for agreeing to let Specter (Pa.) keep the seniority accrued over more than 28 years as a Republican senator. That could allow him to leap past senior Democrats on powerful panels — including the Appropriations and Judiciary committees.
“I won’t be happy if I don’t get to chair something because of Arlen Specter,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), who sits on the Appropriations Committee with Specter and is fifth in seniority among Democrats behind Chairman Daniel Inouye (Hawaii), Sens. Robert Byrd (W.Va.), Patrick Leahy (Vt.) and Tom Harkin (Iowa). “I’m happy with the Democratic order but I don’t want to be displaced because of Arlen Specter,” she said.
So, looks like either Reid breaks his deal with Specter, or he infuriates a lot of the senior Democrats in the Senate. Given Reid’s track record, it looks like his deal with Specter is kaput. After all, what’s Specter gonna do if Reid breaks his promise? It’s not like Specter can re-join the GOP at this point; that bridge is well and truly burned.
Update and bump: As expected, Reid has broken his promise to Specter.
Specter says that Reid has promised to let him keep the seniority he accrued as a Republican since first winning election to the Senate in 1980. This would make Specter senior to all but a few Democrats when the Senate is scheduled to next organize committee assignments. (Panel positions for the 112th Congress will be decided after the 2010 election.)
But several senior Democrats have pushed back strongly against Reid’s deal with Specter, which was negotiated in secret.
Under pressure, Reid now says it will be up to the Democratic caucus to determine whether to recognize Specter’s 28 1/2 years of seniority.
Furthermore, Reid now does not think Specter will displace any senior Democrat atop a coveted committee or subcommittee.
Reid acknowledged Friday that the question of Specter’s seniority will be up for the entire Democratic caucus to decide, not him alone as leader.
This shows a measure of ineptitude on several fronts. Why did Reid make the deal in the first place? Did he really think he could bully or sweet-talk his Senate colleagues into accepting it? Why did Specter accept it? He should have realized once he burned his bridges with the GOP he’d be at Reid’s mercy. If Specter had been smart, he’d have left a door open to rejoining the GOP (perhaps being a bit less harsh in his press conference), but he decided instead to vent his spleen and cut off any chance of coming back. Reid was at least smart enough to realize what Specter had done.
Uh-oh, poor Arlen Specter can’t get no respect in either party.
JOE SESTAK: The question is, what’s he running for? He also, somehow, failed to use his leadership to shape the Republican party to be towards what he believes in. So he’s now going to shape the Democratic party? So the final analysis is, would he have done this if an election wasn’t pending? Because we in Pennsylvania tend not to want to have something that has to do with politics, but about what the future’s about rather than legacy.
Sestak makes a very good point… Arlen didn’t jump ship until it became clear that he was going to lose in the GOP primary, and he did so quite soon after that fact became clear. A more obvious case of trying desperately to save one’s own skin would be hard to find.
Update: One question for the pseudo-conservatives who’ve been heaping scorn upon Pat Toomey for having the audacity to (gasp!) run against our Republican stalwart Arlen Specter (sarcasm off). Will you also be denouncing those Democrats like Mr. Sestak who are apparently getting ready to contest the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, or is your approbation reserved only for those in the party you claim as your own even as you oppose many of the core principles of said party?
Just curious.
So, most folks know by now, Arlen Specter, Senator of Pennsylvania, is switching from the GOP to the Democrats.
Good friggin’ riddance.
First off, let’s be clear. Specter is no Reaganite conservative. His lifetime ACU rating is 44.47… that means he took the conservative position less than half the time he spent in the Senate. His 2008 score is even lower, at 42.
Second, Specter is a hypocrite. When Jim Jeffords did the same thing in 2001, Specter called for a Senate rule to forbid the very thing Specter is now doing himself.
I intend to propose a rule change which would preclude a future recurrence of a Senator’s change in parties, in midsession, organizing with the opposition, to cause the upheaval which is now resulting.
I take second place to no one on independence voting. But, it is my view that the organizational vote belongs to the party which supported the election of a particular Senator. I believe that is the expectation. And certainly it has been a very abrupt party change, although they have occurred in the past with only minor ripples, none have caused the major dislocation which this one has.
Third, his claim in his press release that the GOP has moved too far to the right is laughable. The reason the GOP is in trouble is because they have become “Democrat-Lite,” following the pattern of the lefties in spending and expansion of entitlements under Mr. Bush.
Arlen Specter moving to the Democrats is really just him moving to the party that embodies what he believes, and at least he has the intestinal fortitude to do so. I hereby applaud his honesty, and can’t wait for Pat Toomey to return Specter to private life where he’ll have to live under the laws he’s helped pass.
Update: Oh, Specter is also a liar. In an interview with Newsweek published on 9 April 2009 (yep, about a month and a half ago), he said (emphasis in original):
Newsweek: Would you consider running as an independent.
Specter: No.
Newsweek: No? Definitely not?
Specter: I’m a Republican and I’m going to run in the Republican primary and on the Republican ticket.
Also, as Jim Geraghty points out:
Arlen Specter has made the right decision to win reelection right now; the problem is, he doesn’t face the voters right now. He faces Democratic voters in May 2010, and he faces Pennsylvanians as a whole in November 2010. Right now, being a Democrat and being affiliated with President Obama is a winning hand in Keystone State politics. Today, Arlen Specter bet his next term that the political environment won’t change significantly in the next 18 months.
We will see. But it is very, very rare for a political environment to remain in stasis for an 18-month period.
Indeed. And if economic conditions continue to deteriorate, as many very smart people believe they will, Specter may have just made the blunder that will cost him his cushy Senate seat.
Update II: Gee, looks like not everyone on the left will be welcoming Specter with open arms… at least not Jonathan Chait at The New Republic:
When a politician switches parties, it’s customary for the party he’s abandoned to denounce him as an unprincipled hack, and the party he’s joined to praise him as a brave convert who’s genuinely seen the light. But I think it’s pretty clear that Specter is an unprincipled hack. If his best odds of keeping his Senate seat lay in joining the Communist party, he’d probably do that.
To be sure, Specter is a real moderate on some issues, but his contortions are so comical that no principled read on his actions is very plausible. Specter favored the Employee Free Choice Act favored by labor, turned against it when he faced a primary challenge, and then abandoned his party altogether when it became clear he couldn’t win his primary. In the meantime, he came out in favor of a Hooverite spending freeze after backing the stimulus bill.
Even though Chait doesn’t come right out and say it, though he hints at it in the second paragraph above, Specter is no more a safe vote for the Democrats than he ever was for the GOP. He is at his core a wishy-washy wet-your-finger-and-stick-it-in-the-air weathervane of a politician. Hope the Democrats are ready to deal with that.
So says one of the best-connected political watchers, John Gizzi of Human events:
What Sen. Arlen Specter (R.-Penn.) dubbed the “moderates’ compromise” that he and two other moderate Republican senators voted for Tuesday is fast becoming the “last straw” with the five-termer for conservatives in the Keystone State.
“I consider Sen. Specter a friend and, despite disagreements on a number of issues, I admired his work to confirm [Supreme Court nominees] John Roberts and Samuel Alito,” Pittsburgh businessman Glen Meakem told me today, “But his support of [the $838 billion stimulus package] is too much. Pennsylvania voters are fed up with Specter’s perennial charade.”
Predicting that “there will be a Republican primary fight for Specter’s Senate seat in 2010,” Meakem echoed almost word-for-word the prediction made to me by another prominent conservative two weeks ago. Referring to the 79-year-old Specter’s “very perplexing” behavior in asking tough questions of Obama attorney general nominee Eric Holder and then voting for his confirmation, former Rep. Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) said that “his latest behavior regarding Holder means that Specter should definitely face a primary challenge next year.”
Today Toomey (who drew 48% of the vote against Specter in the ’04 primary) joined Meakem in weighing in against the incumbent’s pivotal support for the Obama-backed economic package. Writing in National Review Online, the former congressman charged that Specter and Maine Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins (who also backed the stimulus package), “the Republican party lost the opportunity to pass a true compromise bill that would have encouraged economic growth. By unanimously voting against the stimulus bill, House Republicans empowered Senate Republicans to demand substantive, pro-growth amendments. After all, without sixty votes in the Senate, President Obama would not have been able to pass any bill, good or bad.”
It’s quite possible that Meakem himself could be Specter’s primary opponent, and he’d probably be tough for the moderate-leftist Republican to beat. Factor in the probability that the so-called “stimulus” bill won’t help and will in fact make things worse, which Specter would face his share of the blame for, having officially supported it now, and Specter could be in big trouble.