We’re now at 60 Dems in the Senate (assuming Norm Coleman gives up before the heat death of the universe).
Thank you, Arlen Specter, you politically motivated hack of a sell-out. Thank you.
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Ya know I figured one of them would flop, but I’d given up hope. I kinda thought it would be Olympia, but, what the hey. And (May it Please God) it might be the first of several. I wonder if he’s really a “politically motivated hack.” I mean, I suppose Jesse is right. But still, the GOP has moved away from Arlen more than he’s moved away from them. He’s been pretty pro-choice over time. He’s not a total Neanderthal on some other social issues. While I agree that his motivations are painfully obvious (He’d lose to the wingnut in a primary), I’m thankful that we have a big enough tent to hold both a Specter and a Feinstein.
It is a growing and ominous phenomenon. The Republican tent is getting smaller and smaller. The “moderate” Ford/Rockefeller/Eisenhower Republican is almost extinct. I truly fear for all of us. We have a two-party system and what with the GOP engaging in self-immolation I wonder what will follow? It scares me that we are living in such ‘interesting’ times.
I still think the point of switching was to avoid a loss to Toomey in the primary, coupled with an embarrassing “Pennsylvania for Specter” third-party bid.
...but, wait…
What if we don’t want him? This doesn’t exactly fit the bill for “more and BETTER” Democrats…
What if we don’t want him?
Take a deep breath and count to 60.
Take a deep breath and count to 60.
That’s really hard to do when you still need to get through Landrieu, Nelson, Nelson, Bayh, Feinstien… I think you underestimate the power of conservative Democrats.
Still, I can’t reasonably complain.
Jack K—run against him in the primary. Specter now has to guard his left flank, not his right. He’s already shown how willing he was to tack in that direction; it’ll be interesting to watch how far he’ll drift the other way.
He’s probably further to the left than Bayh or Blanche Lincoln, and we manage to find room for them.
Next flop candidates:
Murkowski-AK (May not want to put up with Palin’s bullshit. It would be a good vengeance move).
Burr-NC (Can smell the way the wind’s blowing. It is the famous ‘cursed’ seat that flips every time)
Vitter-LA (Only [R] Senator since reconstruction. Mary’s brother may take a shot if he doesn’t pre-empt him)
Thune-SD (SDak is changing rapidly.)
Magis—
I hope you’re joking.
I would welcome Collins and Snowe, though.
We have a two-party system and what with the GOP engaging in self-immolation I wonder what will follow? It scares me that we are living in such ‘interesting’ times.
Eh, once the Democrats are THE party, a splinter group will break off and it will be lefters versus moderates. Which is, I think, infinitely better than “lefties” (not really) versus wingnuts.
I think this is particularly apt today:
When the water reaches the upper deck, follow the rats.
* Mencken quotes this in Newspaper Days, 1899–1906 (1941) as a maxim he learned from Al Goodman
Eh, once the Democrats are THE party, a splinter group will break off and it will be lefters versus moderates. Which is, I think, infinitely better than “lefties” (not really) versus wingnuts.
I think it more likely it would be “barely-left-centrists” versus “Rockefeller Republicans”. The Democratic Party used to be the conservative party. Considering the low esteem in which they hold the Left, I would hardly be surprised to see them return to their old conservative ways.
Ben D.:
Not joking. Especially about Murkowski. I’m not saying that it would be wonderful to have them but that they might do it.
I’ve actually always kind of liked Specter. Yeah, that Anita Hill stuff was really shitty, but he’s made a lot of other decisions I supported, and he’s stood up to his party on numerous occasions. I agree that his party has moved away from him far more than he moved away from the party. Yes, he’s politically motivated, but Pa. is kind of conservative for a blue state. I’d rather have him as the Democrat than a conservative Republican in that seat. I also like the message it sends about how ridiculously extreme the Republican Party has become.
So ... Welcome Sen. Specter!
Atrios is hearing noises about the DSCC making promises to clear the Dem primary field for Specter. He may think that protects him, but with labor pissed off over EFCA, on top of the netroots always eager to flex their muscles Lamont-style, I’m not sure he’s safe.
What is clear—Specter has zero personal integrity. He may grandstand, Lieberman style, for some Broder-istic ideal, but he can be bullied into delivering his cloiture vote where we need it. And if not, we’ll kick him out of the party in 2010.
Us. Not the DSCC.
Then there is his whole stupid obsession with trying to get congress to waste time on hearings about some video tapes that a team took a long time ago and whether it was against NFL rules. not state laws, not federal laws, NFL rules.
Seriously.
Pennsylvania is a LOT conservative for a blue state—we’ve got sufficient cognitive dissonance management abilities that we can elect a pro-choice Republican (Specter) AND a pro-life Democrat (Casey) to the Senate at the same time. But I will say this: Specter has good reason to fear losing a primary challenge from Toomey, as our reichwing is fulsomely crazy and has only grown crazier since the election, and more determined to take Specter down. Trust me when I say that a Blue Dog Specter is a thousand orders of magnitude better for the Republic than Senator Toomey, Second Coming of Man-On-Dog.
I’m with chingona—I didn’t vote for Specter in ‘04 because of the Anita Hill stuff and I just felt like too often he’d talk tough but then roll over and do whatever the Republican party told him to do, but ultimately, he’s been a good senator. He’s gotten a LOT of funding for medical research in PA, and I knew that as the Republican party pushed further against science, research, and medicine, that the strain on Specter would show.
Honestly, I’m happy that he’s in the party as a Dem. There are still going to be things I disagree with him on but I’m willing to bury the hatchet. If he shows us half as much loyalty as he’s shown the Republicans (up until now), we’ll do OK.
Senator Specter said:
I am unwilling to have my twenty-nine year Senate record judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate.
Odd how he was willing to have his Senate record judged by Pennsylvania Republican primary voters in the years he thought he’d win.
Well, I’m proud to say that I voted for Pat Toomey in the 2004 Republican senatorial primary, and for Constitution Party candidate Jim Clymer in the 2004 general election. Senator Specter has just proven—again—how wise my votes were.
Hopefully, Pennsylvania Democrats will run a strong candidate against Mr Specter in the Democratic primary; I might just switch registration to vote against Senator Specter! 
Yeah, I’d rather have a conservative Republican in office, but I’d prefer an honest Democrat to a slimy one.
I love it when Dana shows up and makes it easy for us to buy whatever horseswill is coming out of the DC rightwing.
Boy the Republican brand really sucks big time, doesn’t it? How many rats are going to jump ship? Here’s the EPIC FAIL reaction from RNC chair Michael Steele:
“Some in the Republican Party are happy about this. I am not.
Let’s be honest-Senator Specter didn’t leave the GOP based on principles of any kind. He left to further his personal political interests because he knew that he was going to lose a Republican primary due to his left-wing voting record.
Republicans look forward to beating Sen. Specter in 2010, assuming the Democrats don’t do it first.”
And rubbing it in at the White House...
Obama ‘thrilled to have’ Specter
President Barack Obama talked to Sen. Arlen Specter at 10:32 this morning from the Oval Office, said Dems are “thrilled to have you,” according to a White House aide.Obama was informed of Specter’s decision to switch parties at 10:25 this morning while receiving his daily economic briefing in the Oval Office, according to a White House official.
And NRSC’s Cornyn left twisting in the PR wind:
National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn released a letter today offering a full-throated endorsement of Sen. Arlen Specter in his coming primary against former congressman Pat Toomey, a decision driven by a concern that the challenger cannot win a general election in Pennsylvania.
“My job as head of the NRSC is to guide the GOP back to a majority in the Senate,” wrote Cornyn in a letter to Pennsylvania Republicans. “I can’t do that without Arlen Specter. With him as our nominee, I can target our campaign resources toward beating Democrats and growing the Senate Republican Conference.”
...and today:
WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), Chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), issued the following statement today regarding U.S. Senator Arlen Specter’s (R-PA) decision to switch political parties in the face of a seemingly insurmountable bid for re-election next year:
“Senator Specter’s decision today represents the height of political self-preservation. While this presents a short-term disappointment, voters next year will have a clear choice to cast their ballots for a potentially unbridled Democrat super-majority versus the system of checks-and-balances that Americans deserve.”
Well…we can run hard against him in the primary. If we lose that? Eh…just like Chicago, the Dem primary will be the real contest. Wingnutty Repub will find himself out there all alone save for the 29%ers.
It should upset the GOP that they’ve lost Specter. Their tent is becoming the Theocrats playground. Limbaugh will try to spin it as a good riddance, but whackadoodles aren’t a majority in this country.
our reichwing is fulsomely crazy and has only grown crazier since the election, and more determined to take Specter down.
I’m not surprised, after Palin spent so much precious campaign time in a tight race stomping around - it led them to think that there were actually enough of them to matter.
Ms. Kate ~
I’d be less concerned about PA’s homegrown wingnuts if we hadn’t, well, at one point elected Rick Santorum to the US Senate. Our crazy, it can sometimes pull out an election.
Dana loves personal freedom so much she voted for a guy who wanted to make it a federal crime to burn a flag and sought to ban on a federal level the rights of same-sex couples to wed. He also fought to ban same sex couples from adopting in D.C. She loves personal freedom so much that she voted enthusiastically for the guy who doesn’t want women having any control over their body. Thank heavens his love of personal freedom extends to objects, which I suppose is what Dana cares about, because he voted in favor of reducing the waiting period for purchasing a firearm from 3 days to 1 day. Thank heavens he wants to increase the prosecution and conviction of juvenile crimes, and voted against mandatory DNA testing prior to executions, because all those brown people Dana’s been seeing in her neighborhood are making her antsy.
Caren wrote:
It should upset the GOP that they’ve lost Specter.
It did—years ago. In 2004, he barely beat Representative Pat Toomey in the primary (about 1% of the vote), even after President Bush and Senator Santorum came out for Mr Specter, when the notion was that we’d lose the Senate seat to the very liberal Joe Hoeffel.
Senator Specter was good for one thing: his organizational vote in the Senate. With the Senate controlled by Democrats, even that becomes of far less importance. What good does it do Republicans to have a senator who says he’s a Republican bit votes like a Democrat?
So, now he’s a Democrat, but even there, he’s not an honest one. I’d rather see an honestly liberal Democrat in that seat than a dishonest and disloyal hack like Arlen Specter.
The Democratic Party used to be the conservative party.
Say what? The Democratic Party used to be the (more brazen) racist party, yes, but it also had elements of populism—the Populist Party influenced the Democrats, not the Republicans. The Republicans of yesteryear only cared about black people, for instance, as far as they needed them to win elections (in districts where black Americans still were able to cast a vote).
Dearest Might Ponygirl: This Dana, to whom I assume you referred, is male, not female. Of course, I’m used to that assumption being taken.
Heck yes, I voted for Pat Toomey. Come November of 2010, I’ll do so again. I might not agree with Mr Toomey on everything, but I sure agree with him on a lot more than I agreed with Mr Specter.
Yeah, I’d rather have a conservative Republican in office, but I’d prefer an honest Democrat to a slimy one.
Well, Dana, keep in mind that Specter used to be a Democrat before switching to become a Republican to run for Philadelphia District Attorney.
I have to think that Santorum bears the blame for this turn of events for the Republican party. He deluded the PA GOP into thinking that this far-right views had currency within the state electorate. If there were a Democrat or a more moderate GOP officeholder in the other Senate seat, the Republicans would have had more of an incentive to shepherd the GOP in a more moderate direction.
Maybe it is possible to turn away from the dark side of the force after all.
Dana, the fact that you’re a man doesn’t particular surprise or dismay me. In fact, it must make it quite a bit more convenient for you to hate on women and gays, knowing that you’ll never have your own life threatened by Toomey’s policies. Excelsior to you.
I don’t even see why having sixty Democrats is a big deal. You need 60 votes to invoke cloture, but you got Senator Specter’s vote to invoke cloture on the most important vote of the session, the one on President Obama’s Porkulus Plan. It was that vote which led Pat Toomey to challenge Mr Specter in the primary, when Mr Toomey had been planning to run for governor instead.
I’d be less concerned about PA’s homegrown wingnuts if we hadn’t, well, at one point elected Rick Santorum to the US Senate. Our crazy, it can sometimes pull out an election.
Yes. This is the thing that people outside Pennsylvania (excepting Dana who has a different set of priorities) may not understand. I mean, to beat Santorum, we had to run a pro-life Democrat. Specter is pro-choice. As others have said, he’s more conservative than I am, but he’s less conservative on many issues than a number of Democrats in good standing. I’ll take him.
My prediction: Santorum (& LOTS of conservatives) will actually see this as just the context he needs for another Senate run. These people really do seem to be that tone-deaf lately ...
My grammar is off - I understand that Dana lives in Pennsylvania. I just mean that Dana is coming from a completely different ideological position than everyone else in this conversation, Pa. residency, ancestry or otherwise.
Tyro wrote:
If there were a Democrat or a more moderate GOP officeholder in the other Senate seat, the Republicans would have had more of an incentive to shepherd the GOP in a more moderate direction.
Ahhh, but you see, that’s just it: we’re not interested in becoming Democrats Lite, and we don’t want our elected officials to “shepherd” us into someplace we don’t wish to go. We expect our elected officials to be the voice of the people, not to abandon the principles of the people who voted for them.
(Shrugs.) I don’t see how Specter’s defection changes one underlying fact: that the proportion of Dem senators who are right-wing and/or corporate hacks is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay higher than the number of registered Democrats and people who voted Democrat.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but the truth is this: until and unless progressives join the Dems, infiltrate in great numbers and become as proportionately powerful as Christians within the GOP you are going to get nothing but Senators like Specter and Schumer and the other hacks. The fact that the Senate contingent is far to the right of the actual party and voters that put them there is a factor of failure of ideological and practical effort at a precinct and primary level.
As for Dana, he’s pretty standard. While always polite (which is always a plus) he’s fairly predictable: he says that he is for freedom and is more a libertarian than a Republican but he’s pure right-wing GOP and against every single damned freedom that he doesn’t agree with… and that’s a pretty large number.
I don’t even see why having sixty Democrats is a big deal.
For the most part, party members vote almost entirely in lockstep with each other with the exception of a few choice “controversial” votes. Republicans used to be able to count on Specter’s vote against cloture as a matter of general procedure. Now Democrats can count on Specter’s vote in favor of cloture as the default.
Also, declining down to 40 votes is a psychological barrier that serves to demoralize the Republican party.
we’re not interested in becoming Democrats Lite, and we don’t want our elected officials to “shepherd” us into someplace we don’t wish to go.
Perhaps so. But 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania decided that the Republican party wasn’t going in a direction they wanted to go, and instead became Democrats. What makes you think that you’re so much more important than those 200,000 other voters?
I’m sure there are many Republicans in Maine who feel like you do, Dana. However, the Republican party in Maine, overall, decided to cast a wider net in attracting voters over to its side in order to keep Snowe and Collins in office.
So, since the Republicans made their big stand against the stimulus, the result has been a lost race in a Republican district in New York and the Democrats getting 60 seats.
Keep it up, wingnuts! Keep standing tall against the “porkulus”!
To expand on keshmeshi’s point, the Republican Party has always been about “morals” and “business”. At the time of Lincoln, there was a lot of moral clamoring about slavery (finally), and a LOT more clamoring from the northern business community about the pro-slavery states being able to have really really cheap labor forces whereas they had to pay their laborers (oh, the horror!). Slavery being now morally wrong, The Republican Party sided with Northern business instead of Southern business.
A lot of people think that the Republican Party changed in the last 150 years, but it really hasn’t. It became more religious, but in reality, our morals have changed. Most African Americans started voting Democrat with FDR, not during the Civil Rights Movement, because they, along with other Americans, realized that this “pro-business” zealotry wasn’t helping anyone but the already wealthy.
Well Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t pro-business, but he did leave the party eventually.
Or, in the alternative, no thanks.
I see what you’re saying. Any rejoicing on the Democratic side is more about schadenfreude towards the Republicans than it is about rejoicing at a wonderful turn of events: the ideal scenario would be for the Danas of the PA GOP to come out in favor of Toomey leaving a Democrat to take Specter’s place. But you can’t have everything. Specter won’t be a Feingold-style liberal hero, but he’ll be a reliable Democratic vote on most legislation.
Via metafilter, someone found this choice comment on Specter’s switch and the reaction by people of the likes of Dana:
Keep purifying your party, Republicans. Pretty soon it will be small enough to drown in a bathtub.
Does that make him a DRAINO?
Maybe his manatee-like skill in navigating political “currents” has caused him to evolve and become a NARWHAL (Not A Republican/Whore/Hack Any Longer).
Oh, and thanks for coming here, Dana- your whining just heightens the sensuality of the moment.
Tyro: Yes I could have everything, assuming I was a PA voter, by not wetting my pants in anticipation of an 80-year-old relic who opposes EFCA and Dawn Johnsen and promises us nothing in return he couldn’t give by independently voting, thereby letting an actual Democrat win the contest 2010. It may still happen, but it sounds like Pennsylieberman to me.
Tyro noted:
Specter won’t be a Feingold-style liberal hero, but he’ll be a reliable Democratic vote on most legislation.
He will follow the Lieberman model: he’ll be a reliable vote on stuff the Dems were going to win anyway, and then backstab the party each and every time on key votes, taking a position indistinguishable from the GOP.
What the Dems have here is roughly equivalent to the US Navy dealing with its shortage of trained crypto/commo staff by bringing back John and Michael Walker.
As for the “purification of the GOP”, do try to remember that this means that many, many GOPers will bring their very conservative (but just not batshit) views into the Democrats, driving that already right-right-centre-right party even further to the right, even further marginalizing the left and progressives. Not. Smart. The Dems barely listened at all to progressive voices even when they were an indispensible part of the base; how much are they going to listen to you now with GOP senators in the party and hundreds of thousands of GOP voters in the ranks? Progressives: to date the message from the Dems has just been, “who asked you?”, but you might want to get used to the phrase “fuck off”, because you’ll be hearing it said openly or impliedly for a very long time.
He will follow the Lieberman model: he’ll be a reliable vote on stuff the Dems were going to win anyway, and then backstab the party each and every time on key votes, taking a position indistinguishable from the GOP.
I don’t want to sound like a prick, but Specter is 80 years old and a cancer survivor. It’s not like he’s going to be in there 30+ years.
And if he really does vote like a Liebertool Joe Sestak can challenge him. The mere threat may chance his mind on the EFCA.
In other states, like Arkansas (Blanche Lincoln) better a DINO than a wingnut, says I. You’re not going to elect a Feingold in Arkansas.
Why it matters that Specter is a Democrat, now?—He has to run in a Dem primary, he depends on Dem leadership for his committee assignments, all of which allows us to influence him. When the Republicans had the same leverage on him, we saw him flip on EFCA.
I just hope the Democrats in the Senate can be taught to grow some spine.
I’m hoping labor fields a pure-labor challenger, a union official rather than an office-holding Democrat. If the party leadership thinks Specter doesn’t need to be challenged, after EFCA, then the Democratic voters need to reeducate them by electing a true pro-labor outsider.
Remember, Lamont’s victory was a shot across the collective Democratic bow, and it did make a difference.
Tyro asked:
Perhaps so. But 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania decided that the Republican party wasn’t going in a direction they wanted to go, and instead became Democrats. What makes you think that you’re so much more important than those 200,000 other voters?
I think that’s a misleading number. There were a lot of party-switchers prior to the 2008 Democratic primary, because for once Pennsylvania’s voice was important in the selection of the nominee. <i>I was one of those who switched to the Democrtic Party in 2008,<i> specifically to vote against Hillary Clinton. I was less lazy than some in switching my registration back to the GOP right after the primary.
What norbizness said at 3:19,
And am I the only one who’s royally pissed at the Dem leadership [pause for oxymoron-induced giggling fit] passing on the seat with full promises of support to him as if they were Renaissance princes passing on a bishopric to some favoured—if wholly ungodly—candidate?
Yes, Dana, it was all “operation chaos”. /snark
Wow you guys really do live in an echo chamber. The right wing noise machine has been so effective, it now drowns out reality for those that listen to it.
I don’t want to sound like a prick, but Specter is 80 years old and a cancer survivor. It’s not like he’s going to be in there 30+ years.
And Strom Thurmond wasn’t going to live to be a hundred.
seeker—you make Norbiz sound positively biblical. :p
And Strom Thurmond wasn’t going to live to be a hundred.
Even if he lives for 30+ years (doubtful) this switch still opens up Specter to be pressured from the left. If he doesn’t move, he will be challenged in a primary. Pennsylvania is a liberal enough state where that can happen, and there’s a sore loser law so he can’t pull a Lieberman.
I’m just willing to give him a chance, that’s all. Since he’s clearly interested in his own political survival above all I’m thinking he will move left because of that, if nothing else. At least on EFCA and health care.
“I just hope the Democrats in the Senate can be taught to grow some spine. “
Would you like a pony with that?
Well Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t pro-business, but he did leave the party eventually.
Bwuuuuuhhh??
Ben, you should sue your history teachers for malpractice. Teddy loved him some big bidness, and bidness knew it.
But yeah, at least he finally did leave the GOP when it finally dawned on him because of Taft that the membership of his party had absolutely no clue how to talk to anyone not in the bidness class.
Seeker, the greatest failing of our political system is low interest and low participation in primary elections.
Its why the party elders feel like they can dictate bullshit like that to us. We need to change that.
Also, on Dana—I bet there is some truth that the Dem presidential primary was more interesting and had some inspiring candidates, and that drew a lot of interest from “moderates.” They also voted for Democrats. Most of them will again.
After all, if voting for Fred, Mitt, Rudy, Mike or Paul wasn’t enough of a reason to stay with the Republicans in 2008, what will bring them back in 2010?
“seeker—you make Norbiz sound positively biblical.”
I’ll take that as both a compliment and an insult! I TOO can have it both ways!!!
I still think the point of switching was to avoid a loss to Toomey in the primary, coupled with an embarrassing “Pennsylvania for Specter” third-party bid.
Specter doesn’t even attempt to hide his own political expediency in this matter:
“I am unwilling to have my twenty-nine year Senate record judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate.”
Ya know I figured one of them would flop, but I’d given up hope. I kinda thought it would be Olympia, but, what the hey.
I wouldn’t rule that one out necessarily, given what she was just quoted as saying to Politico:
My take on this is similar to that of Nate Silver - this isn’t necessarily great news for the Democrats, but it is certainly LOUSY news for the Republicans. I don’t think that this will substantially impact how voting goes down over the next two years (though Specter may be forced into a pro-EFCA stance when it becomes clear that AFL-CIO will primary him if he remains opposed), but it definitely reinforces the meme that the GOP becomes more and more of a wingnut party everyday, when they can’t even retain their own moderate members.
Michael Chait at The New Republic also has an interesting blog post up titled “Unprincipaled Hack (D-PA)”, in which he offers some pretty harsh condemnation of Specter’s blatantly cynical political move, but also notes how much this illustrates the stark differences between the start of Obama’s Administration compared to that of Bill Clinton. While Bill Clinton was smacked pretty hard early on by congressional special election defeats and the defection of several Southern Democrats to the GOP (Alabama’s Richard Shelby among them), the opposite seems to be occurring with Obama - the Democrats just won their first special election last week (in a GOP district) and now a prominent moderate Republican has switched parties. Shortly after Clinton took office, the GOP began to show quick signs of rebound; since Obama has taken office, the GOP has only taken more hits.
Overall, while not necessarily great news for us, I think this has to be seen as an overall win today for the Democratic Party - the GOP has just managed to marginalize itself even more than ever, which is becoming a daily source of comedy gold.
Come to the light, Olympia… you know you want to.
“I’m just willing to give him a chance, that’s all. “
Yeah, it’s not as if he has been in the Senate for three decades working against pretty much everything that you stand for or anything. Hey, you’d have something to go on if that were the case.
Teddy loved him some big bidness, and bidness knew it.
Not as much as the rest of his party did in the Gilded Age. He wasn’t Eugene V. Debs, no, but the establishment of the Republican Party disliked him for a reason.
Seeker—
Robert Byrd used to be a Klan member, for God’s sake. People can change (or at least do what is in their political interest, and it is now clearly in his political interest not to piss off labor).
The U. S. Senate is always going to be more conservative than the House. It’s designed that way. It was designed as a bulwark against rash popular sentiment by the Founders. The Senate will, if controlled by the Dems, do the right thing but they’ll later than sooner. Specter has some, some I said, decent instincts that have been stifled by the lockstep GOP caucus.
I think the Party ought to let Specter takes his chances but there have been rumors of ‘promises.’ What that mean is that the DSCC has promised not to fund any challenger to Specture if he/she wins the primary. I doubt they’d have the guts to stick with it but it would probably ‘chill’ any challengers to Specter from the left. It is the kind of prickish thing Schummer would do.
Next flop candidates:
Vitter-LA (Only [R] Senator since reconstruction. Mary’s brother may take a shot if he doesn’t pre-empt him)
I think the odds are better that Obama will lose Illinois in 2012 than of Diaper David Vitter becoming a Democrat.
Which is OK, because I wouldn’t want that turd in our party anyway. That dude makes Arlen Specter seem like the most liberal member of the Senate by comparison.
My take on this is that for whatever reason, the Senate and the WH apparently felt better about having Specter on their side now rather than an unnamed Democrat in 2011.
I’d be less concerned about PA’s homegrown wingnuts if we hadn’t, well, at one point elected Rick Santorum to the US Senate. Our crazy, it can sometimes pull out an election.
That happened in 1994, when the Republicans experienced their strongest resurgence since Reagan stormed into office 1980.
Times have changed. 200,000 PA Republicans switched their party registrations last year to Democrat, and while the state Republicans have become significantly more conservative in recent years, they have also become significantly smaller in their overall representation.
Toomey would have destroyed Specter in a primary challenge, but when all Pennsylvanians go to polls, if it winds up being Toomey vs. Specter (appears most likely), Toomey will get destroyed.
Personally, I’d like to see Specter get primaried out, but I don’t think it will happen. He’s gonna have Governor Rendell firmly on his side (word is, Rendell and Biden were largely influential in guiding Specter to switch parties), and I have a feeling that when EFCA comes up, he’s gonna wind up getting behind it, because he won’t want to have to deal with the AFL-CIO dumping tons of money into a primary challenger.
I think what Specter did was totally out of crass political expediency, but I also think that if his goal was to keep his job, it was probably the smartest thing he could have possibly done. His odds of keeping that seat just went up tenfold today.
I’d guess they’re worried about the 1980 NY Senate race. Javitz ran third party, drew lots of moderate votes, and put D’Amato into the Senate. In a 2-way race Toomey would be toast, but a 3-way might elect him.
I think the odds are better that Obama will lose Illinois in 2012 than of Diaper David Vitter becoming a Democrat.
Well, I suppose but there is that little sex scandal thing going on and there a ton of Rethugs lining up for a shot against him. It’s a stretch but he might take a shot at it. I think he’s pretty much toast either way.
Tyro, I concede your point on “now”, but all I could think of was paraphrasing LBJ: The Democrats would rather have him inside their tent ... pissing in.
Yes, Ben D., I concede that Byrd used to be in the Klan ... and spent decades working against his past. Specter has spent the better part of 28 years taking positions directly contrary to mainline Dem positions. Your position (if I may say so viciously but with a truly affectionate smile*) is akin to saying that a whore has reformed because he’s now working the corner by the church instead of the one where his psycho pimp was looking for him.
By their works shall ye know them, is, I believe, the biblical phrase.
* - Don’t take it personally, in other words. I like and respect you.
Yeah, Spector was going down in 2012, and personally, in the long run, we may have been better off to just let that play out. He’ll never be any kind of liberal at all, and he may end up just making the Democratic conservatives that much stronger. I would have liked to see a Liberal come out of PA, I think we can get one there. Other than the obvious fact that I take great, great, nearly unexpressable pleasure in the misery and suffering of national Republicans, I’m not really otherwise all that thrilled about this. I’d be much happier if the news were that those cowards managed to get Frankin seated.
USS Harry Reid, a rescue vessel. Ship’s Motto? Screw the Passengers, Save The Rats.
Look, I’d be a lot less caustic about it if this was a Canadian- or British-style floor-crossing, where one knows that certain policy prices are exacted to permit/facilitate the switch, and that Parliamentary party discipline will make sure that one hasn’t put a dog in the manger. In Specter’s case we can be pretty much sure that he will be near-as-dammit the same GOP Senator in a different party which is now insulating him from the consequences of his policy positions of the past 30 years, a party that will reward three decades of unrelenting partisan animosity by ensuring that he remains seated until he dies.
seeker-
As a lefty, I am full in favor with the switch. The faster the wingnut party becomes marginalized and removed from the seat of play, the less impact and weight the conservadems carry (I mean, their whole, we totally have at least 10 members thing was entirely a desperate realization that they may not have enough numbers to defeat 50 vote needing legislation). Also, the quicker the democrats are settled, the quicker we can form or vote for actual lefty parties in order to create a more canadian/european distribution of votes and/or sell the wingnuts on a PR system of government wherein we can all vote for the parties we want without votes being “wasted”.
As long as the wingnut party is relevant or at least can be painted as relevant by our corporate media, we’ll never get the correct pushback.
Plus, democrat dominance might remind people why having 12% less retarded monkeys in charge is a good thing and we can shift the overton window back to sane.
In short, I welcome Spector to “our” party, let him signify the beginning of the Deomcrats forming a European conservative party while we elect some more Greens and Socialists to high office.
All right, Cerebus, point taken. You’re arguing from the viewpoint of the long term of wrecking the current ossified system (one party, the money party, with two branches, to use Gore Vidal’s phrase). That’s fine by me. Just don’t go too far in your love of a Canadian system; ours has some pretty shocking flaws, not least of which is the first-past-the-post system.
Yeah, Spector was going down in 2012, and personally, in the long run, we may have been better off to just let that play out.
Actually, his race is coming up in 2010, not 2012, but I do agree that this is more of a short-term win for Democrats than a long-term one, and could be a long-term loss, if it means that we have Sen. Specter (D-PA) in January 2011 instead of Sen. Sestak (D-PA).
At the same time, I think it largely hinges on what happens overall in 2010… if we can somehow get to 65 Democratic Senate seats in the next go-round (tough, but hardly impossible), then those Democrats who hang on the right flank of the party (Specter, Bayh, Lincoln, etc.) will have less influence overall, and may find it more difficult to go against the overwhelming bulk of their party in key legislation.
I’ll wait and see what Specter does with EFCA before I have a more concrete opinion. Right now, he says he’ll still oppose it, but two weeks ago, he said he would always be a Republican, so his word doesn’t necessarily mean much. His vote on EFCA will likely be predicated by how much he thinks it will impact his electability next year.
I’m not a Specter fan, but I disagree with those who think he “always” votes against progressive interests. He voted for ARRA, and he holds fairly non-conservative positions on abortion and embryonic stem-cell research. He’s no liberal, but neither is he a staunch conservative (at least not relative to most of his former GOP colleagues in the senate). He’ll be a fairly right-leaning Democrat, much as he used to be a fairly left-leaning Republican before.
From RINO to DINO. Today’s news is no huge win for the Democrats, but I do think it’s a huge loss for the Republicans.
a party that will reward three decades of unrelenting partisan animosity
Except that’s not true.
You speak of Specter as if he’s always been a hardline conservative party-line voter, but it wasn’t two months ago that he went completely against 93% of his fellow GOP Senators in voting for the stimulus bill. Now, I’ll concede that his position there was most certainly due to the fact that Pennsylvanians as a whole would be pissed if he hadn’t supported ARRA, but by doing the right thing, he essentially lost the GOP support that day. Pat Toomey immediately surged to the position of being the likely GOP Nominee in 2010, and it is because Specter chose to do what was right by his state’s voters, not what’s right by the hardliners of his party. And he paid a huge price for doing the right thing.
I don’t have his lifetime voting record in front of me, but I believe that he has been one of the least dependable members of the GOP Senate Caucus, which necessarily means that he has often sided with Democratic legislation against the wishes of his own former party.
Will he be a good, strong, progressive? No, unfortunately he will not. His performance in the Anita Hill hearings was most certainly shameful and inexcusable. And I’m not suggesting we should welcome him with open arms - I would most likely support his primary opponent in PA if I lived there. But my main point is that while I would certainly prefer more progressive Democrats in the Senate than conservative ones, I don’t think it’s fair to lump Specter alongside the most conservative members of the GOP, when his voting record clearly indicates otherwise.
And I’m not suggesting we should welcome him with open arms…
Why not? As long as one does it in a Michael Corleone kind of way.
I don’t disagree with your points, DTG, they are sound and my annoyance with the Dem tendency to give knob-polishing to people who kick them and the boot to people who support them may have led to an intemperate response. But it’s not just AS coming aboard, it’s AS coming aboard with the complete support of the party leadership, meaning that they mean to gut any primary challenger, period.
chingona, maybe he did, but I for one am rather sick of the DLC/Obama view that a “moderate” Republican is a better choice than a progressive Democrat…. unless one is choosing a rug for the gun room.
I understand that frustration. I share it. But I’m from Pennsylvania. The guns and God part of Pennsylvania. I don’t think a true progressive could win there. Or if you got someone good on labor issues, they’d be bad on gay rights and women’s rights.
Nailed it, Cerberus. The celebratory feeling some of us have is about the extreme right losing more of their grip on politics. There are a few ways this could go, but most of them offer hope for more progressive possibilities in the future.
But it’s not just AS coming aboard, it’s AS coming aboard with the complete support of the party leadership, meaning that they mean to gut any primary challenger, period.
I’m 100% with you on that point.
It appears as though part of the deal behind getting Specter on board was that the DSCC would not support any Democratic primary challenger in 2010, which I think is unfortunate.
Specter is going enter next year with the backing of the Senate Democrats, Governor Rendell, and probably even President Obama, with virtually no strings attached, other than that he caucus with the Democrats.
If he is willing to vote like a Democrat and support the core principals of the Democratic Party on key legislation that will need his vote (like healthcare, EFCA, cap-and-trade), I’ve got no problem with him getting the support of the bigwigs. But that support should be conditional on him supporting the agenda of his new party when it counts.
Dear George W Bush and Rick Santorum: Your staunch backing of Arlen Specter in his 2004 primary campaign against Pat Toomey has just been repaid.
To some degree, you’re right on that last aspect Dana. It does seem like their endorsements were a waste now, if one is coming from your ideology. I recall a somewhat similar anecdote recently, when Joe Lieberman repaid Obama’s endorsement of him during the CT primary by endorsing his opponent. Oh wait, that’s different. That was even worse, since it was about specific opponents! It’d be like if Specter endorsed Casey and/or Kerry.
Either way, I guess I’m saying that sometimes there are more important things out there than party labels.
Well DTG, I think you are underestimating the possible pulling of the Democratic party to the right. If the people had been the deciders in this case, we almost definitely would have ended up with someone well to the left of Specter. Specter himself said that he is a Reagan Republican and that the party left him. And that he is now more at home in the Democratic party. Well, I think that’s true. Think about what it means though. It means that the Repubilcan party has become a true wingnut party of crazies, and the Democratic party has moved to the right. So Reagan Republicans and right wing crazies both have a home in our 2 parties.
I’m not a party person. I want to make sure that the left has a home too.
Fair enough, DTG; you and are on complete agreement on your 642pm point: that unless they have him by the short hairs on some key issues and demand compliance in exchange for support then the switch isn’t really worth anything.
My own view is the cynical and mopst probably accurate one: Specter will throw the Dems a few bones to show what a good boy he is, won’t give them shit on key issues, and won’t be made to suffer by his BFFs in the Dem Senatorial caucus and leadership for doing so. In essence, he will be the Nice Guy™ of politics: “you should be satisfied just because I’m nice to you and don’t slap you around… I am entitled to utmost loyalty for this magnificent treatment of you for which you should be endlessly grateful”.
Caton wants the left to have a home. They do: as far at the DLC / Senate leadership is concerned it’s this one:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/93/272415757_dbb0ead0ca.jpg
LOL @ Seeker’s pic.
I am just listening to Hardball, which is really hard to do with that Matthews barking like a dog, and apparently Tom Ridge is talking about possibly looking into running for the PA Senate seat. Now wouldn’t it just be some real irony, if by selling their souls, the Democrats end up losing that seat in 2010? You know sometimes, I really find that doing the right thing pays off in the long run.
But, what’s done is done, and I’m not going to deny I am soooo enjoying watching people like Mitch Mconnell with their faces purple and their little fists pumping in the air, claiming that Specter switching parties is a “threat” to the country! Oh funny, I seem to remember talk of a “permanent majority”? That people like Mconnell were all for? I think some guy Rove was talking it up?
Well, isn’t that some fine justice. I guess they really loved mixing up the medicine, but now that they are the ones drinking it, all we hear is a lot of whining.
They had their turn. They told the people who voted them in that they would turn the country into a tax-free Christian Utopia.
They fucked up, fucked up badly, and fucked up because they followed their ideology, not because they didn’t. Everybody saw this, and droves of people they lured in with their too-simple and too-pat answers ran the other direction as their jobs vanished, their cars were repossessed, and the bank foreclosed on their houses.
Only the “true believers” remain. Being the extremely reality-resistant lot that they are, the shit continues to fall on their heads as a result of their stupidity and they continue to deny that the brown streaks on their faces are not intentional makeup.
Worldview Fail.
I wonder if he’s really a “politically motivated hack.”
He is. He’s not even pretending that this is about anything but losing to Toomey in the primary.
Mr Scribe wrote:
He is. He’s not even pretending that this is about anything but losing to Toomey in the primary.
For once, Mr Scribe and I are in complete agreement.
But Mr Specter created his own enemy here: Pat Toomey was planning to run for governor in 2010; he changed his mind following Mr Specter’s vote for cloture on the Pork bill. Had Mr Specter done the right thing and voted against cloture, cloture would still have passed, but Mr Specter would have gone unchallenged in the Republican primary.
In case anyone here still bothers to read Dana’s posts, you can find out about the loony Toomey—whom he voted for—here (this makes him considerably saner than he is):
http://www.ontheissues.org/PA/Pat_Toomey.htm
Wow. What a voting record. Pretty good fit for Dana, though, with the cognitive dissonance between FREEDOM! (TM) talk and banning and/or criminalizing everything that they don’t like.
Anyways, the Dems aren’t going to get to sixty for a very long time yet. Coleman and the courts will stretch this sort of thing out for-evah; he will always find some GOP judge who will nod and do whatever the GOP wants them to. Even if the Clinton thing didn’t show you that, the dismissal of charges against Kay Bailey Hutchison (re her Senate run) should have told you.
Does that make him a DRAINO?
(democrat-republican ambidextrous in name only)
When is he going to have a same-opposite marriage to Lieberman? It would be legal in Connecticut.