Well I predicted in my diary on February 13 of this year that Arlen Specter's best bet might be to run as a Democrat. I was quite serious, but I really never though he'd do it. I guess it's kind of obvious when you think about it. What it does say, mostly, is that the Republican Party has marooned itself, a beached whale of ninetheenth-century ideology, tied to Bible Belt, re-trying the Scopes trial, fighting the Civil War all over again with its little wooden sword and Captain-of-the-Pinafore hat. I hope it never finds itself. Pace President Jackson. But it does make a person wonder about how big that Democratic tent has be getting....maybe there's a subsidiary tent in its future? The REAL Republicans are gonna need somewhere to park their keisters one of these days....
The Blue Dogs may be the nascent beginning of a new kind of Republicanism where Lincoln Chafee and Arlen Specter and Olympia Snow can roam on the range with the ghosts of Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Cabot Lodge and Dwight Eisenhower. This aberration calling itself "Republican" may actually be the last incarnation of the 1948 Dixiecrats. Odd place, our country. I'd love to ask Jon Meachum, if he were taking questions, what party he thinks Andrew Jackson would be a member of today? Assuming that he didn't die of apoplexy when he saw that someone had freed the slaves and we had fought a Civil War.