GOP’s Great Ex-Specterations

 

 

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter switched from being a Republican to being a Democrat around noon on Tuesday. This action made him (check one):

 

            ___ A crass opportunist whose polls told him he was going to get creamed in the 2010 Republican primary election.

            ___A principled advocate and leader, a1980 Reagan Republican who signed up for the Grand Old Party and couldn’t watch it become the Gotterdammerung Old Party.

            ___One more nail in the Republican Party’s clever plan to crucify itself in the hopes that it will arise from the dead.

            ___Some parts of all of the above.

 

Specter’s own statement puts it this way:

 

“Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.”

 

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, presumably after clearing it with Rush Limbaugh, put it differently:

 

“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.”

 

A politician of any sort beginning a sentence with “Let’s be honest” obviously admits that this is an unusual action worthy of special notice, so it’s worth a quick visit to the web site of Americans for Democratic Action, whose spring newsletter rates members of Congress according to how much their votes agree with the ADA’s ultra-liberal positions. Specter agreed with the ADA 45 percent of the time.

 

So he didn’t even vote “left wing” a majority of the time. Republican Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon did, coming up with a 60 percent rating. And Republican Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine found common cause with the ADA respectively 75 and 80 percent of the time. (The last three senators should give any invitations for an RNC-sponsored quail hunt with Dick Cheney very careful scrutiny.)

 

Specter’s decision to join the Democrats puts them one vote short of the 60 needed under Senate rules to end filibusters, the GOP’s one-size-fits-all response to any 21^st century issue. Vote number 60 depends on Minnesota finally deciding whether Democrat Al Franken or Republican Norm Coleman won the election, a choice now with the Minnesota Supreme Court and almost certainly heading to a federal court after that.

 

Now we all know aboutletting Republicans win in the courts what they lost in the polls, but it’s the positions of the arch-conservatives who have hijacked the Republican party that are giving everyone from Senators to seniors pause.

 

Ronald Reagan was a giant of a man and his Big Tent Republican Party had enough room for diverse views. Arlen Specter’s switch today highlights that the Big Tent has become a holding corral for a huge herd of WAT (We’re Against That), producing little but political dung and unaware that the only exit is the slaughterhouse of the 2010 elections.

 

Or, as South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, he of the just-15 percent ADA rating, was quoted Tuesday in Politico, “As Republicans, we got a problem.”

 

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