Notes of Concern…
Jack Blair
THE SPECTER OF ARLEN
In the early 1960’s Arlen Specter served as the district attorney in Philadelphia, PA. Arlen was a Democrat. He was then, as now, a very ambitious fellow.
Specter wanted to be a United States Senator. The Democratic Party of Pennsylvania wanted to run someone else.
The “not long on loyalty, or philosophical conviction”, Arlen Specter ,then began an effort to land the nomination for the U.S. Senate from the Republican Party of Pennsylvania. That took more than a little chutzpah!
Perhaps the fact that he did receive the Republican nomination and won in the general election, to launch a very long career in the United States Senate, says as much about the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s commitment to philosophy as it does about Specter.
I speak with a little authority on this subject because I was a member of the Executive Committee of The Republican Party of Pennsylvania in the early 1960’s. I had a front row seat to a lot of the maneuvering that took place, not to mention the smoke filled rooms that were typical of both major political parties in those days.
To this day I still wonder why the Pennsylvania GOP felt they needed to run a Democrat for the U.S. Senate. That is a tactic that a party accustomed to losing elections often will utilize. However, the seriously powerful and influential Hugh Scott sat in the United States Senate and ultimately became Majority Leader. The popular William Warren Scranton held the Governor’s office and then turned down an offer to be Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State while later accepting Gerald Ford’s offer of Ambassador to the United Nations, and he would be succeeded by his own Lt. Governor, Raymond P. Shafer, also a Republican, who went on to serve as Special Assistant to the Rockefeller family and to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. These folks had no career problems requiring a deal with Specter. Their stars were rising. They needed nothing from Arlen Specter.
Hugh and Marion Scott, Bill and Mary Scranton and Ray and Jane Shafer were friends of mine. I went to the presidential nominating convention with Bill Scranton when he sought the presidency. I was with the Shafer family the night he was elected governor. I saw Hugh Scott often in Washington as well as in Pennsylvania.
And I still don’t know what motivated their decision.
Certainly, it was their decision. They controlled Pennsylvania politics at that time. No one could get the nod for U.S. Senator in the Republican Party without their support. Why did they feel they needed the liberal Arlen ?
So today we read that Republican Senator Arlen Specter is now Democrat Senator Arlen Specter. This comes as no surprise to me.
Watching his votes for decades I wondered how long Pennsylvania Republicans would put up with him. They almost knocked him off in a primary six years ago. After his vote for the Obama bailout, money was coming into Pennsylvania from conservatives all across the land to defeat Specter in the Republican primary.
Specter has a long memory. He knew the old “switcheroo” was the only way to go. The Democrats owed him for a lot of important votes he cast over the years against Republican positions. They owed him for the stimulus vote. They owed him for making it impossible for Robert Bjork to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court after being nominated by a Republican president. And they owed him for a lot of other votes, big and small, that served as precursors to his jump back to the Democratic Party.
So the Democrats of Pennsylvania shelved whatever ambitious young Turk might have wanted their nomination and welcomed the 80 year old with serious Hodgkin’s lymphoma
(cancer )problems to be their candidate.
No loss to the GOP!
Specter wasn’t with them on labor issues, taxes, abortion, spending bills, or the stimulus.
Big gain for the DEMS.
This virtually assures them of a filibuster proof margin in the U.S. Senate.
Political scientists always talk about philosophy, convictions, and party platforms, the structuring of majorities and the importance of loyalty. They were not using Arlen Specter as their model.
Someone much older, and long dead, predicted the successful strategy of a fellow named Arlen Specter. Nicolo Machiavelli had a version of Arlen in mind when he wrote “The Prince. “
Arlen is nothing if not Machiavellian.
Specter is currently the 12th-most senior member of the U.S. Senate and the fifth oldest Senator. After all these years in a career presented to him by the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, 30 years of Senate work, Arlen Specter has forgotten the old, and very appropriate adage: you should always dance with the one who brought you!
This senator is an opportunist. He was an opportunist 30 years ago and that character flaw has been often hidden and dormant for the long span of his Senate career. It is not an admirable quality. That said, in Washington, DC, he is in good company.
Democrat-Republican-Democrat Arlen Specter has a good chance of winning another six-year term in the United States Senate. And he will lose little as a result of his defection because, by defecting, he gave the national Democrats something they really wanted, another vote in the Senate and a huge public relations coup.
They will reward him with no challenger in the Democrat primary in Pennsylvania (this deal was undoubtedly signed, sealed and delivered before he made public his plans), they will let him retain senior positions on Senate Committees, and they will pour money into his race in Pennsylvania.
Hugh Scott has died. Ray Shafer has died. Bill Scranton continues to live out his old age at “Marworth” in Dalton, Pa. Unless Arlen chooses to tell me what happened back there in the 1960’s I will never know.
So Arlen, accustomed to winning at all costs, will probably win again.
The only open question is what party banner he will hold aloft in 2016 when he seeks yet another term at the age of 86!
One thing for sure, the Democrats in Pennsylvania had better keep an eye on him.
What a specter!
