Matt Yglesias

Specter Six Years Ago

I don’t think we should take the fact that Specter has sometimes voted in a moderately progressive manner to mean that he’s “really” a moderate progressive. Nor do I think we should take the fact that he has sometimes voted in a hard-right manner to mean that he’s “really” a solid conservative. He’s just flexible. Look at, say, anything he said today and compare it to this ad (hat tip to Chris Bowers) he made when trying to convince Pennsylvania Republicans to back him in the 2004 primary against Pat Toomey:

I think the evidence suggests that a party switch will cause Specter to drift ideologically somewhat to the left, but clearly this is a guy capable of adopting a diverse set of views depending on circumstances.

Where Specter Stands

Over at the Wonk Room, they’ve got some posts on Arlen Specter’s policy views. On labor rights, as you know, he’s flip-flopped and now stands firm against employee free choice. On climate, Specter has tended to join forces with moderate Democrats in undermining effective action to tackle the climate crisis.

On health care, Specter’s record looks quite a bit better on a number of specific issues. Still, there’s a bloc of senators out there who sound generally supportive of health care reform, but seem opposed to every possible way of paying for comprehensive reform. To me, Specter’s “no” vote on the 2010 budget gives me some worries on that score as well.

Long story short, while Specter’s clearly not the most conservative guy in the senate, he’s not much of a progressive either. The extent to which the right is glad to be rid of the guy is a sign of how far-right mainstream conservatism has gone.

Specter and the Flat Tax

The full implications of Arlen Specter’s move are a bit hard to work out, because over the years he’s been such a flip-floppety opportunist. He was against Robert Bork, but he led the charge in favor of Clarence Thomas. He was for EFCA when he needed unions to fend off a general election challenge in 2004, but against it when he needed wingnuts to fend off a primary challenge in 2010. At his press conference today he was pretty open about the nakedly opportunistic motives involved in his decision to switch parties. But the same opportunistic instincts mean he’s spent the past couple of months sprinting to the right.

Thus, there’s stuff like this from March 30:

Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) today introduced legislation that would scrap the 17,000 pages of current IRS code in favor of a 20 percent flat tax for all individuals and businesses. The revenue-neutral legislation would allow tax-payers to file returns on a postcard that could be completed in 15 minutes.

“My flat tax legislation would make filing a tax return a manageable chore, not a seemingly endless nightmare, for most taxpayers,” Senator Specter said. “This legislation will fundamentally revise the present tax code, with its myriad rates, deductions, and instructions.”

That’s 100-proof wingnuttery right there. Presumably Specter-the-Democrat isn’t going to be spending his time dishing out that kind of policy. But will he really back progressive tax policy? If the Democratic Party leadership promises to guard his left flank, as they seem to have, without extracting any clear concessions on policy specifics, does that mean he’ll drift to the right? It’s hard to predict.

Arlen Specter’s Ideological Meandering

Dave Weigel takes an informative look inside Arlen Specter’s pre-primary efforts to remake himself into a more conservative figure, the better to fend off a strong challenge from former Congressman Pat Toomey. The basic gist of Specter, as I understand it, is that Pennsylvania conservative see him as fundamentally a liberal squish who dashes right whenever he’s facing a challenge from the right. Pennsylvania progressives, meanwhile, see him as fundamentally a conservative who dashes left whenever he’s facing a challenge from the left. Everyone hates him, in other words, except the voters of Pennsylvania who seem to like him just fine.

The fundamental situation looks quite good for Toomey to me. He almost beat Specter in 2004 at a time when a very popular conservative incumbent president was strongly backing the more moderate choice. Without those kinds of friends in high places to back him up, Specter should be in big trouble. The question then becomes whether or not a top-tier Democrat will emerge to run against Toomey. There’s no real evidence that an orthodox conservative can win in Pennsylvania anymore than an orthodox conservative could win in Maryland or Delaware or New Jersey. But Specter is hugely popular so PA Democrats haven’t been clamoring to get into a hard-to-win race against him. Toomey, by contrast, would be very beatable if a solid candidate emerged.

Organizing for America Kicks into Action

Chris Cillizza reports that Organizing for America, the successor-organization to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, is going to kick into gear for the first time to try to mobilize support for the president’s budget. That seems like a good idea to me. Ordinarily, you think of a brand-new president’s main initiatives as being able to attract a fair amount of support from opposition party legislators whose constituencies he carried in the election. After all, an Obama platform of letting the Bush tax cuts expiring and auctioning carbon permits in order to pay for health care and a tax cut for working people carried the day in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Maine, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, and Iowa so you might think that Richard Burr, Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, George Voinovich, Dick Lugar, Mel Martinez, and Chuck Grassley would be a bit leery of opposing a budget framework that just lays out those campaign promises. But instead Obama’s seemed to have trouble getting Democrats on his side—including Democrats in whose states he’s popular.

Organizing, roughly speaking, is the difference. The top two percent and the pollution lobby don’t really care who won the election, aren’t impressed by slogans about how elections have consequences, and don’t care if people have health care or if the working class gets a tax cut. They just go to work every day to press for their agenda, and they’ll get their way unless people are pressing back.

Toomey’s In

Pat Toomey, the wingnut congressman who challenged Arlen Specter in a 2004 primary before becoming the head of the super-insane Club for Growth, is officially throwing his hat in the ring for a second challenge. This is very bad news for anyone hoping to see the Employee Free Choice Act passed in this congress. Specter voted for cloture on EFCA in the previous congress, which should be understood in part as payback for receiving labor support in his 2004 general election. But a vote for EFCA could be an enormous liability in a GOP primary race. Ordinarily, most establishment types in the GOP/business nexus would back an incumbent against a challenger, but your typical executive would sooner strangle his children with his bare hands than sign a collective bargaining agreement.

As I’ve said before, one possible answer would be for Specter to back Obama’s budget and EFCA and switch parties. To be a happy Democrat he would need to reposition himself ideologically somewhat, but he’s meandered quite a bit ideologically over the years. This, however, is what tends to happen with party switchers. Jim Jefford went from a voting record that would have been extremely conservative for a Democrat to being a standard-issue Vermont liberal after he switched parties. And you saw something similar with some Clinton-era D-to-R party switchers.

Specter’s Dilemma

Pat Toomey nearly beat Arlen Specter in a 2004 primary. Earlier this year, he ruled out another primary challenge to Pennsylvania’s senior senator, but more recently he’s been ruling it back in. This sets up an interesting dilemma that Dave Weigel explains:

A weekend poll showed that 66 percent of Republicans, boiling over in anti-stimulus anger, would support replacing Specter. But only 42 percent of Democrats oppose Specter. A slight plurality of Democrats want to keep him, and that’s complicating Democratic efforts to find a first-tier challenger against the senator.

In 2004, Specter benefitted from the support of unions like the AFL-CIO. If Specter votes for the Employee Free Choice Act, he knows he will probably win union support that’s crucial for the general election while firing the starting gun for conservative groups who are only really useful to him in the primary.

In the 2007-2008 congress Specter, no doubt in part as a token of appreciation for that AFL-CIO support, was the lone Republican to back EFCA. If he votes for it again this congress, it’ll be tough for him to win the primary. But if he votes against it, I think he’ll find it tough to win the general election when his support from Democratic-leaning interest groups vanishes. I doubt Specter will avail himself of this option, but the obvious solution would be to stick to his guns on EFCA and follow up his support for the stimulus by switching parties and, like Jim Jeffords, reposition ideologically somewhat. In other words, stop being a vulnerable moderate Republican and become a plain-vanilla Democrat with a safe seat. It would be pretty easy for Specter, as a Democrat, to beat GOP nominee Toomey in a general election. But beating Toomey in a primary without becoming too right-wing to carry the state will be tough.

Are State Aid-Hating “Centrists” Trying to Sabotage Their Governors?

Ed Kilgore reads an Arlen Specter op-ed and develops a hypothesis that might do something to explain how it is that the Senate “centrists” zeroed-in on the most-effective element of the stimulus package for elimination: “A cynic might observe that all of the four senators that Arlen Specter identifies as the organizers of the ‘centrist’ coup-by-amendment–himself, Ben Nelson, Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman–happen to come from states where the governor is of the other party.” Ed’s no cynic, I guess, but I am and I think this is important. I suppose it might be too cynical to suppose that the Gang of Four is deliberately trying to sabotage their states’ opposite-party governors. But at a minimum, you have to think that if there were political allies sitting in the relevant governor’s mansions that these legislators might have taken their calls and listened to good sense.

Either way, the tragedy is that unless the conference committee reverses these cuts we’ll all be paying the price—not just the governors or the residents of those four states.

Specter’s Fine Whine

Via Steve Benen, it seems Barack Obama hurt Arlen Specter’s feelings:

Specter said in prepared remarks Tuesday that Obama did not consult with him before choosing Eric Holder Jr. to be attorney general, and he tells Legal Times that Obama also did not consult with him or notify him before announcing four other Justice Department nominees Monday.

“History demonstrates that presidents who seek the advice of members of the Senate prior to submitting a nomination frequently see their nominees confirmed more quickly and with less controversy than those who do not,” Specter (R-Pa.) said…. “In contrast, on the nomination of Mr. Holder, President-elect Obama chose not to seek my advice or even to give me advance notice in my capacity as Ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, which is his prerogative.”

Maybe Specter forgot that he’s in the minority party in the Senate and his party lost control of the White House, too. But to review, Holder’s last government appointment was as Deputy Attorney General where he served for four years. Try as conservatives might to huff and puff over him, that’s the very model of a banal choice of a well-qualified candidate. The idea of having lengthy discussions with people about whether or not a guy who was unanimously confirmed as Deputy Attorney General could be qualified to serve as Attorney General is a little silly. The Transition has a lot on its plate what with the two wars and the economic crisis.