WASHINGTON – Most Americans change their religious affiliations at least once in their lives, generally without being called names or having their integrity impugned.
Not so in politics.
The decision last week by Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania to become a Democrat some 40 years after he left the Democratic Party to become a Republican is a betrayal (Club for Growth), pure political opportunism (Indiana GOP Chairman Murray Clark), a defection (national GOP Chairman Michael Steele).
Specter’s party change brings Democrats closer to the 60 votes they need to choke off a GOP filibuster but doesn’t guarantee it. (Specter has already said he won’t vote for a bill to make unionization easier or for one of President Obama’s nominees who’s proving controversial.)
Besides, the magical 60 votes is achieved only if both independents vote with the Democratic caucus, the Minnesota election is finally resolved in favor of the Democrat, and the three most conservative Senate Dems – Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu – don’t bolt.
However, the filibuster-stopping 60 is now possible without any Republican support, and that’s what so frustrates the GOP into labeling Specter a traitor.
There’s no question that one of the GOP’s complaints about Specter’s switcheroo is correct: Facing almost certain defeat in the 2010 Pennsylvania GOP primary, Specter jumped to the Democratic side of the ballot to save his political skin.
But Republicans were their own worst enemy in Specter’s case, and a Hoosier was a central player in pushing Specter to add to the Democrats’ Senate majority.
Here’s the background: Specter was nearly defeated in Pennsylvania’s 2004 GOP primary, and the same opponent – Pat Toomey – looked sure to beat Specter in a rematch next year.
Toomey is from the wing of the Republican Party that has neither “pragmatism” nor “big tent” in its diction-ary.
Even before Specter switched parties, Chris Chocola, a former two-term congressman from South Bend, has been leading the charge against Specter, calling him a Republican in Name Only and asking the GOP faithful to contribute money to Toomey’s campaign.
Typical of Chocola’s messages to Club for Growth members: “It’s clear that Keystone State Republicans are upset with Specter over his multiple defections to the left.”
So I guess Specter showed Chocola.
What Republicans like Chocola and Toomey are doing is shrinking the GOP by demanding a philosophical purity that is not matched in American society. Specter’s ability to be (for instance) for both abortion rights and less stringent gun laws is indicative of how most of us are neither radical conservatives nor all-or-nothing liberals.
(Imagine what they might say about Sen. Richard Lugar, who supports trade with Cuba, some gun control legislation, many programs that benefit children, and who has shown he won’t block Obama appointees whose only “sin” is that they are Democrats, not Republicans. Will they call Lugar a RINO?)
Meanwhile, many independents and Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to Democratic last year to vote in the hotly contested Obama-Clinton primary. Unlike Hoosiers, voters in Pennsylvania must register as a member of a party ahead of time and may only vote in that party’s primary.
Thus, the number of people who will vote in the Republican primary has been reduced, and the likeliest Specter supporters are the likeliest to have switched their party affiliation last year.
What’s left in the Pennsylvania Republican Party is a higher concentration of super-conservatives. That bodes well for Toomey (and not so well for Specter), but it does nothing to capture the independents or conservative Democrats who will decide the state’s Senate race.
The Club for Growth demand for purity is emblematic of the wrestling going on in the GOP nationwide. Do they want to be narrow and ideological pure, or do they want to find room in their ranks for moderates like Specter?
Sen. Lindsay Graham – fierce partisan and pretty darn conservative – urges a more pragmatic approach:
“If we pursue a party that has no place for someone who agrees with me 70 percent of the time, that is based on an ideological purity test rather than a coalition test,” he told the New York Times, “then we are going to keep losing.”
Graham was referring to losing elections, but his caution applies just as well to moderate Republicans, whether they are senators or voters.