Pennsylvania: Toomey Grabs Defeat Out of the Jaws of Victory

The Pennsylvania US Senate race is one that I have been watching with interest from clear on back to when outgoing Senator Arlen Specter ratted out on his Republican brethren and joined the ranks of the Democrats in the US Senate, giving Democrats, for one brief shining moment, a filibuster proof majority.

Specter wasn’t going to win in a head-to-head primary contest against Teabagger Pat Toomey, whose uber-conservative group, Club For Growth was once tagged by former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee the “Club For Greed.”

Specter only outpolled Toomey once in a Quinnipiac poll taken in February 2010.

So when Specter switched sides, he met with yet another primary challenger in retired Navy Admiral and present Congressman Joe Sestak. And Sestak cleaned his clock. Democrats don’t like voting for Republicans who say they are Democrats just for the convenience of job security.

Sestak, however, faced the same problems that Specter did in polling himself against Toomey. His numbers have always been slightly better than Specter’s ever were, but he has always trailed Toomey in any Pennsylvania poll.

Until the latest Hart Poll conducted between October 8 and October 10, a telephone poll of 604 likely voters. A poll with a 4% margin of error.

The Hart Poll has Joe Sestak leading Pat Toomey by 3%, 47% to 44%.

Now that is still within the margin of error, but the point is that this is the first time that we see Sestak’s numbers higher than Toomey’s. It shows a trend.

The trend is just this: people are starting to realize that the change that the Republicans are promising if they are elected is a change back to status quo ante. That is, Republicans promise to bring back everything that Bush and a Republican majority put in place between 2001 and 2006. Back to a kleptocracy. Back to Wall Street greed.

Back to the bad old days that inspired two successive Democratic victories.

Pat Toomey along with Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, Christine O’Donnell, and Mike Buck are way out there on the political spectrum. When moderate Republicans and Independents start to realize that undeniable fact, they will see that they have little choice but to support Democratic candidates who, unlike their Republican opponents, haven’t completely lost their minds.

And when that happens, there goes a Republican majority in the Senate.

Santorum: “Arlen Is With Us On The Votes That Matter”

Democrats who oppose the travesty of a Republican running as a Democrat in their primary because his party has lurched to the right will have to give their thanks to someone we would never have expected would have merited it.

Former rightwing Senator Rick Santorum, who got his clock cleaned by Senator Bob Casey, Jr. in 2006, has left a legacy that will come in pretty handy next year when Arlen Specter is opposed in the Democratic primary by either Joe Sestak or Joe Torsella. Or both.

It is a video from a 30 second ad from Specter’s successful primary campaign over Pat Toomey in 2004. We now find that it has been on You Tube as of April 29^th.

The money line? “Arlen is with us on the votes that matter, to move our agenda forward for this president and for the country.”

Thank you, Rick Santorum.

Arlen Specter is Confused

In the hardball that is Democratic Caucus politics, the tables were turned on Arlen Specter last night. Boy, would that confuse me.

Mostly in response to Specter’s comments on the Franken/Coleman deadlock in Minnesota’s second senatorial seat, the senate voted to strip Arlen Specter of his seniority, a thing that he himself claimed on Meet the Press was “an entitlement.”

Obviously Specter was dead wrong on the entitlement thing.

Clearly Specter was signaling to his new caucus colleagues that there was nothing they could do to him. He had assurances from Majority Leader Reid, and he had promises from President Obama.

But my, my, my, isn’t it amazing how quickly those assurances dissociate into quarks and electrons resulting in an explosion, a nuclear one, that made his entitlement vaporize.

The senate, it seems is taking a wait and see attitude on Specter. Holding hostage, as it were, any committee chairmanship that Specter could claim with a high seniority, a thing that he craves almost as much as he craves re-election.

With the Senate message being, obviously, that he should actually be that loyal Democrat that he claims he won’t be, or no dice.

Specter, as you can imagine, was all apologetic. In explaining his very odd remark to the New York Times about his preference of Norm Coleman (a fellow Jew) over Al Franken (also, as it turns out, a fellow Jew) because the Senate needs to have a Jew in the body, he claims that he was confused.

From The Washington Post:

“In the swirl of moving from one caucus to another, I have to get used to my new teammates. I'm ordinarily pretty correct in what I say. I've made a career of being precise. I conclusively misspoke.”

So everything’s OK, right? He was just a little confused about what party he was allied to because of all the swirl.

That would be confusing, huh?

Yes, except that switching parties is clearly a singular event in the man’s political career. Something that he shouldn’t have to consult his notes about when he responds to questions on his opinion about things. Votes and stuff.

You know, I don’t know if that is all there should be to this. As I see it, there are actually two possibilities we need consider:

1. Is Arlen Specter going to get along in his new party or is he going to vote with his former brethren more often than not?
2. Is Arlen Specter suffering from incipient Alzheimer’s Syndrome?

If he simply forgot that he was a Democrat in the swirl that was a direct question from a New York Times reporter, maybe we ought to consider the latter. The man is nearly 80 years old, after all, and I have known younger men and women who have come down with this debilitating disease. I know this disease. Years ago I had a neighbor, a perfectly pleasant man, who introduced himself to me on a weekly basis, and then would politely ask me whether I knew where he lived, and could I show him.

So really, it’s either one or the other. Either we have (as Al Franken would put it) a lying liar that we cannot trust, or we have a tragic case of incipient Alzheimer’s or some sort of dementia where he is confused over where he calls “home” now.

In the latter case, maybe retirement on that attractive federal pension available to him as a multi-term senator is an option he should consider. In the former case, as I mentioned before, maybe he should be primaried until the cows come home.