Together we form more friends than Pennsylvania’s senior Senator may have, right now. Republican Arlen Specter was one of three GOP Senators to approve the $838 billion stimulus package, which now lands in a committee of House and Senate leadership charged with drawing up a compromise plan.
I think Specter knows the waters are closing in on him. You have Democrats on the left, who are tantalizing close to having the filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate, which would make the GOP minority nearly powerless to stop the Democratic agenda. So you can understand why the left is geared up for Specter’s 2010 re-election bid.
Then you have the right, which seems to be sharpening their knives to take down the moderate Specter, which makes me laugh. To echo colleague Gil Smart, when I read about how the influential National Republican Trust PAC is ramping up efforts to unseat any Republican who supports this bill, I wonder if they slept through the Nov. 4 election. Here’s what the National Republican Trust said Tuesday, according to CNN:
“The American people don’t want this trillion-dollar political payoff that will just line the pockets of non-governmental organizations who supported [President Barack] Obama in the election,” said Scott Wheeler, the executive director of The National Republican Trust PAC, an organization that calls for less government spending and lower taxes.
“Republican senators are on notice,” he said. “If they support the stimulus package, we will make sure every voter in their state knows how they tried to further bankrupt voters in an already bad economy.”
Okay, fine, but unless no one else noticed this, lemme say it: Historically, the country is divided into thirds. About 20 percent are liberal, about 20 percent are conservative, and you have the middle 40 which tends to shift back and forth. And that middle 40 moved to the left during the last four years, especially here in Pennsylvania. So when Wheeler says the “American people don’t want this,” what I suspect he means is the 20 percent that are conservative; or in other words, the people who support his PAC and not the American populace across the board.
And if conservatives want to take down Specter during the 2010 GOP primary, I’m sure Democrats are just fine with that. Can anyone name the last time a solid right conservative won in a competitive statewide race? Wasn’t George W. Bush. He lost Pennsylvania twice. The answer is Rick Santorum circa 2000, and we saw what happened to him during the 2006 general election against Bob Casey Jr.
This is not a state, which has 1 million more registered Democrats than Republicans, for a far right candidate to expect to win without siphoning off moderate Democrats. So how can their message convince Democrats, who for the first time in 8 years have the White House back, to forego the Obama agenda and support a dedicated fiscal conservative, one would likely oppose the Obama administration in Congress?
Specter may be the best chance Republicans have of winning that Senate seat in 2010.
