At 78--79 on Lincoln's Birthday a month from now--Arlen Specter is on the cusp of clinching the Republican nomination for a sixth six year term in the Senate. The man once the target of the Republican right in Pennsylvania and around the nation is slowly morphing into the indispensable ally of the Republican right for the 2010 election.
With the Republican Party now down to 41 seats in the U.S. Senate, Republican Senators around the country are bailing out. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, 65, and Sam Brownback, 52, are running for Governor of their respective states of Texas and Kansas.
Three Republican Senators are just retiring, not wanting to explain why they were solid Bush votes or why they are relevant in 2010. They are, in order of recency of retirement announcements, George Voinovich, 72, of Ohio, Kit Bond, 69, of Missouri, and Mel Martinez, 62, of Florida. I am looking for Democrats to win all three of the above seats, and I would not be unduly surprised if Democrats won one or both of the Texas and Kansas seats as well.
Before the Barack Obama inauguration has taken place, the Democrats are moving closer and closer to the landslide margins in Congress they had in the Administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Two of the last three midterm elections have been won by the party in power, violating the historical norm, and 2010 looks like it is shaping up as potentially the greatest pro-incumbent President landslide since the 1934 Democratic landslide two years after Roosevelt's election.
Arlen Specter, a longtime Philadelphia assistant district attorney who prosecuted corrupt Teamsters and served as a staff counsel to the Warren Commission and gubernatorial special investigator of magisterial corruption, first was elected to office--District Attorney of Philadelphia-- in 1965, one year after the LBJ landslide. He was a registered Democrat then, running on the Republican ticket.
He was a recruit out of desperation: he was the only one who could win. He was even promised by Republican leader Billy Meehan that he would not have to do any fundraising; Meehan would take care of that. Nor was he required to promise to appoint all Republicans to assistant D.A. positions: his appointees would include current Democratic Governor Ed Rendell, current Democratic Philadelkphia District Attorney Lynn Abraham, and current newly elected Chester County Democratic State Rep. Paul Drucker.
Forty-four years after Specter's first D.A. Candidacy, he has cast many votes for orthodox Republican positions (flat taxes, Clarence Thomas, the Iraq war) and many votes against orthodox Republican opinions (Robert Bork, the Clinton impeachment, the Reagan Budget). He is bright, tenacious, and almost uniformly irritating.
At this point though, the Republicans have no choice. They can win with Specter, whose vote on almost any hotly contested issue at almost any time is very difficult to predict in advance, or they can lose with a conventional Republican conservative.
If I were a political cartoonist, I would have written a cartoon after the 2004 Republican primary, in which Specter defeated Rep. Pat Toomey by all of 7,000 votes statewide. My cartoon would have had Pat Toomey consoling Democratic challenger Rep. Joe Hoeffel, a good friend of mine who in 2004 was a leading opponent of Bush's policies in Iraq, who would be crying uncontrollably about Toomey's defeat. "I did the best I could, Joe; I didn't mean to let you down," Toomey would be saying.
The simple fact is that the personable, articulate, and tenacious Hoeffel would be either in the Senate or the Vice-President's office this month had Toomey defeated Specter in 2004. Instead, he is now a County Commissioner in Montgomery County, serving with Chris Matthews' Republican brother Jim.
How long can Specter's balancing act last? Who knows? But Specter has repeatedly praised Strom Thurmond for lasting in the Senate until had celebrated his 100th birthday.