Specter's switch

Arlen Specter: Harry Reid's new member of the Republican wing of the Democratic Party

Arlen Specter on Tuesday switched from the Senate Republican Caucus to the Democratic one, thereby making both caucuses more conservative.

I'm not celebrating having Arlen Specter as a Democrat. Because he's not. He's an opportunist who is running in the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania next year because he thinks he has a better chance there than with his own Party.

I used a lot of the material in this post in a comment on another blog, but I thought I would post it here as well.

I would love to see a real Democrat challenge and defeat Specter in the 2010 primary. And if the post I saw at Media Matters today is correct, he couldn't pull a Joe Lieberman and then run as an independent in the general, because Pennsylvania election law forbids someone who ran in a party primary and lost from doing that.

I'm now convinced that Harry Reid and some of the more timid Senate Democrats are hiding behind this 60-vote business as an excuse for their failures. What kind of Democratic majority do we have to have to get universal health care, protect union organizing and get highly qualified appointees approved on a timely basis?

As far as I'm concerned, the whole deal over the "nuclear option" and the Gang of 14 in 2006 abolished the filibuster in practice. The Democrats can just vote the filibuster rule away with a 51-vote majority, in any case.

So why in the name of Andy Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt are they allowing Specter to come over, recognizing his full time in the Senate as Democratic seniority (and therefore possibly bump a real Democrat from an important Committee Chairmanship) when in his press conference to announce the switch he says he's going to oppose the Dems on the critical union rights vote and oppose Obama's anti-torture nominee for the Office of Legal Council? What kind of deal-making is that? Harry Reid style, I suppose.

I will say with very high confidence that most voters who went for Obama and Democratic Senate and House candidates did not intend to vote for welcoming people like McCain loyalist Joe Lieberman and hardline rightwinger Arlen Specter into the Democratic caucus with open arms.

One of the rare bad books that the great Theodore Dreiser wrote was a left-wing isolationist one called America Is Worth Saving (1941). But it does have a couple of memorable moments, especially a chapter called "Does England Love Us As We Love England?" in which he argues that England repeated takes advantage of the United States with slick diplomacy and the US just keeps coming back for more. That's a crude and misleading framing of the situation in 1941. But substitute the Republican Party for England and the Democrats in Congress for the United States, and this is an excellent metaphor:

The most superficial reader of our American history cannot deny that, of all countries in the world, England is the one that has shown the least affection for us - and consequently, one might think, deserves the least affection from us.

But no. It doesn't work that way. We are as a people what Professor Freud calls masochistic. Our greatest thrill is being kicked in the tail - as long as England, the object of our blind adoration, does the kicking. In fact our nation motto in so far as our relation to dear old England is concerned is: "Kick me again, daddy!" Kick me and kick me again, please.

If the Republican Party really implodes in 2010 and 2012, then the Democratic Party might actually break into two separate parties, hopefully the more liberal one being far more willing to fight for their voters than the Dems are today. But until then, primary challenges by Fighting Dems are a key way to address this. Because voting for Republicans to protest against Harry Reid is not an option. As bad as Specter is, he was one of the least bad Republicans in the Senate. As of Tuesday, he's now one of the worst Democrats.

Come to think of it, when is Harry Reid up for re-election in Nevada?

Tags: arlen specter, democratic party, republican party