Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Specter to Switch Parties

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Chris Cizzilla breals the story.

Can we say no? As a Republican, I sort of like Specter. As a Democrat, he’ll drive me crazy.

Yeah yeah, the filibuster … can’t we just break the GOP of that habit?

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  3. Spencer wasn’t going to beat Toomey, that much was obvious.  What isn’t obvious is whether he’ll be a Democratic vote worth having, but he’s got several months to prove himself.  If not, the people of Pennsylvania are welcome to compare him to other Democratic candidates.

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    p>First order of business: end this filibuster against Sebelius for HHS.  We need a Health Secretary NOW.

    • he’d beat a real Democrat in the Dem primary either…

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      p>Guy should gracefully retire, already. He’s not a real Dem. He’s not a real Republican (as they want to define themselves now). He’s a relic.

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      p>The HHS thing is freaking RIDICULOUS. We have a damned flu problem and no HHS secretary? Because she agrees with her president on abortion??? Ug.

      • Specter’s better than Toomey, but he’s worse than Tim Murphy.   Ideally, we’d replace Specter with someone better, but you can say that about several Democratic senators.  That said, I’ll wait for some initial polling before I commit to purging Specter.

      • …there’s no place in your worldview for a truly independent voice?  I suppose the Lieberman option is always theoretically available, but it’s much easier to be the nominee of one of the two parties.  Yes, there may be political survival at play here, but as a Democrat I’m quite happy he finds our tent to be bigger than the GOP’s at the moment.

        • The Senate has one.  Bernie Sanders.  He didn’t run as a Dem and then eschew Dem principles.  He didn’t run as a GOPer and then eschew GOP principles.  He ran as neither.  That’s cool.  I like that.  I support that.

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          p>I don’t like DINOs in states where we can have politicians who stick closer to the Democratic party platform.  I suspect Lynne feels the same way.

          • To clarify, I was refering to moderates who are too conservative to win a Democratic primary and too liberal for the Republican Party.  Lieberman’s the closest example to that I can think of who was successfully run as an independent, yet he caucuses with the Democrats for the purpose of committee assignments and STILL gets grief for it.  To use your word I would prefer to “eschew” purity and loyalty for its own sake on either side.

            • not just for running against his party’s Senate nominee, but for major water-carrying on behalf of the other party’s presidential candidate. The Democratic party and his state would be better off with Lamont in that Senate seat.

            • For the first six years of the Bush Administration, talk shows were very generous with Lieberman. He was interesting! sensational! amazing! an undemocrat Democrat! What’ll he say next!? Let’s tune in and find out!

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              p>Television is drawn to that.

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              p>Lieberman took frequent advantage of it, getting himself interviewed constantly and making the message of the Democratic Party very muddy indeed. As the Iraq debacle was becoming justly unpopular, there was Lieberman muddying things up. Even on Social Security, as the Bush Administration was trying to figure out how to demolish Social Security surreptitiously, Lieberman was available to “consider” “alternatives”.

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              p>Nor was he a loyal dissenter. By his view, his distinguished colleagues didn’t have a different idea about national defense policy. No, they were “weak” on defense. To top it off, he campaigned for John McCain.

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              p>So even though Lieberman’s votes are better than Collins’, Spector’s, or Snowe’s, his national presence has been far more inimical to Democrats.

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              p>Oh, and if the election were held today — or a year ago, Lamont would win.

            • just like I am, because the democratic party accepts folks like Spector and Lincoln.  

        • … are all about how to stop things.  More than at any time I can remember in recent history, we need a Senate that moves things along.  Deliberatively to be sure, but moving nonetheless.  In this context, the more people willing to selectively vote with the ‘save no’ crowd on the basis of their ‘independent voice’, the more stuff will get stopped.  

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          p>I probably wouldn’t mind so much if it were not for the fact that there is a significant part of the press that push a ‘cult of the centerist’ meme that ‘responsible governing’ translates into ‘Democrats need to move right’, even when they don’t run that way and get elected.  

        • He would have gone Indy, but PA law prevents an incumbent from switching to independents he can only switch over to the other party.  

              • That’s why he had to switch.  He faced the prospect of either convincing thousands of former Republicans to switch back so they could vote for him or go do where they were.

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                p>No surprise which route he took.

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                p>Question for you: do you think he’ll lose the Dem primary or the general election?  I think he’s a shoe-in for both.  No way Pat Toomey wins PA in a general election.  

                • There’s a Democratic Congressman – name escapes me – who is put out as he was running.  I don’t think he’ll go against Obama, et al, and scotch himself for the next 4 years, so I don’t think there’ll BE a Dem. primary. I doubt party regulars will work for Specter enthusiastically, and I think he underestimates how many moderate/libertarian/conservative voters will ditch him.

                • If he supports EFCA, he’ll cruise to victory in primary and general.  The PA Dem elder statesmen will clear the field, and labor will work for him.

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                  p>If he votes against EFCA, it’s not clear that he’ll win in the primary.  Labor will likely be motivated to work against him, as will party activists.  Specter will be much like Lieberman was in CT.

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                  p>In either case, if Toomey is the GOP nominee, the senate seat will be D following the election.  PA’s got more Ds than Rs, the GOP brand stinks north of DC, and Toomey will be viewed as crazy-go-nuts by enough vote-every-2nd-November moderates that he’ll get creamed.

  4. THERE is some blowback from GOP embarrassments like the Norm Coleman shenanigans.

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    p>For all his foibles and flaws, I’m happy to welcome him to the party.

  5. And now I’m not that impressed at all. He admitted that he’s changing because his reading of the tea leaves says he’d lose the Republican primary. So this is about retaining his seat, not becoming a real Democrat. If he had a clear path to the Republican nomination, this wouldn’t be happening, or at least not now.

  6. If Specter does get a Democratic primary challenger, it will be fun hearing national party leaders talking about how we have to stick with Arlen Specter.  

  7. Specter would have lost the primary.  So the question would be could the Dem beat Toomey?  It’s likely he would, so why exactly should we be happy about this?  Does it even change the math on things like the HHS vote?

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    p>Harry Reid just killed real labor law reform and further surrendered real  health care reform to the conservatives (Democrat and Republican alike).  We could have put PA in the Democratic column for real, we could have sent a real message to folks like Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln, now we have a fake Dem and likely no change in any voting behavior.  

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    p>Kill the filibuster, what’s so democratic about needing an almost super majority to get anything passed?

    • The Dems have no majority without ‘folks like Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln’. If the definition of ‘real democrat’ is ‘democrats that are pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-amnesty, pro-gay rights, anti-war, pro-universal healthcare, pro-welfare, pro-labor’ than you reduce the majority significantly. Not saying I disagree with those values or with using those values to define loyalty to the party platform, but I am saying we are winning elections because we are the bigger tent party. The Republicans are the party of orthodox adherence to their party platform and this is why they are losing seats, alienating moderate conservatives like Specter, and are likely going to lose the next two-three presidential elections.

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      p>Dems gave up being unabashedly pro-abortion, pro-gun control, protectionist, and pro-labor to win this past election and the election in 2006. The party that tries to be ideologically pure is the party that will never be in power.  

      • I agree with most of your post, but I’m not so sure about the first bit:

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        p>

        The Dems have no majority without ‘folks like Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln’.

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        p>The Democratic majority requires 50 of the 99, including Lieberman and Saunders.  The Dem caucus-goers from the Gang of Fourteen still in the Senate are are

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        p>Ben Nelson (D-NE)
        Joe Lieberman (D-CT)
        Robert Byrd (D-WV)
        Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
        Daniel Inouye (D-HI)
        Mark Pryor (D-AR)

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        p>and Inouye generally falls in the middle of the Dems on liberal rankings.  So there are a few more who occasionally give the Dems heartburn, including

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        p>Even Bayh (D-IN)
        Jim Webb (D-VA)
        Byron Dorgan (D-ND)
        Claire McCaskill (D-MO)
        Max Baucus (D-MT)
        Kent Conrad (D-ND)

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        p>but most of these Democrats still fall “in line” most of the time when push comes to shove.

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        p>

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        p>Bottom line: big tent is important, but keep in mind that the majority within the majority sets the agenda — it’s the Speaker and Senate Majority Leader who’ve got the juice.  If the Democrats get bigger in numbers by taking in more conservative members, then the mean shifts right and we’ll have more moderate leadership.  I want more progressive results than that.

        • He remains a man for whom I have a lot of respect, but he is likely to settle into a role more moderate than left-wing.

          • based on past history or expected futures.  But remember, they don’t all ebb and flow on the same issue, so for any given issue many of them will vote the Dem position, each peeling off occasionally for various issues or reasons.

      • All three made lasting political change in this country by seizing ground when they won.  So while I actually do disagree with your point, that’s not relevant.  

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        p>My point is that the democrats just gave PA to the moderates.  Toomey would have won the primary and likely lost the election.  We’d have a junior senator who actually owes something to the party and would be more susceptible to the influence of party leadership.  If they were told to support EFCA or real health care reform (an easy choice for a Dem in PA) or risk committee appointments, they would.  That’s not the case with Specter, he holds all the cards.  We now have a powerful Senator who’s on the wrong side on the big issues for seven more years.  

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        p>This isn’t Lieberman and Connecticut, this is Chafee and Rhode Island.  Unless someone can show me actual votes before 2010 that will go a different way because of this, Obama and Reid just stuck a knife in the Sheldon Whitehouse of Pennsylvania’s  back.

        • In the long view, this pretty much finishes off Pennsylvania as a two-party state.  There are some Republican Congressmen, but at this point PA has to be regarded as blue, not purple.  And 2011 would almost definitely be the start of Specter’s last term, one that he may well not finish.

          • Which would have been much better, and PA would still be blue.  We gave up a lot and got nothing in return, except the ability to say we can stop a filibuster, even though our actual ability to do that didn’t change at all.  

            • and start thinking strategy.  It’s true — from a tactical point of view, this isn’t a good deal.  We may get a few votes from Specter we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, but by and large we’d have been better served by a 2010 candidate running to his left.

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              p>However, from a strategy point of view, this is gold.  The GOP had three known moderates — Specter, Snowe, and Collins.  They just lost 33% of them to the Democrats.  It cements the idea that the GOP is moving right, well past acceptable limits to well respected moderates.  The narrative is important.  Dems are more reasonable.  Dems have a big tent and will accept a wider breadth of ideas.  The GOP is ever shrinking and ever shrieking.

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              p>In the mean time, the Dems will not have to spend oodles of money in PA in a senate race — which frees it up to go to other states.

              • I want a worker based economic policy and a strong social safety net, how do I get it?  Big improvements to society like: public universities, the 13th and 14th amendment, social security, unemployment insurance, minimum wage laws, the civil rights act, medicare and medicaid were won during brief periods of victory.  When they’re good policy, folks enjoy the benefits and refuse to give up the entitlement.  

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                p>We then get to have policy debates about how to maintain them or make incremental changes – a time when moderates like Specter, Snow, Nelson and their ilk are quite useful.  We’re not at that point now.  People have seriously been talking about nationalizing banks, it’s a unique time where we can actually inject a level of democracy in the workplace, where we can make health care universal, where we can institute a renewable energy plan, where we can reintroduce a regulated economy and demonstrate that thoughtful planning for the benefit of many is an improvement over profits for the few.  

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                p>Instead we pander the the right (what some might call the center) when it doesn’t serve us at all.  Specter having to come to the democrats does demonstrate that the GOP is imploding, for the next election cycle, the moderates have no other place to go.      

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                p>Pandering to a fringe that doesn’t support the party line doesn’t move the platform of the democratic party forward.  The US has always had a strong conservative streak and it’s foolish to imagine that we won’t see a resurgent Republican party at some point in the very near future.  The “death” of the GOP is good copy but the idea of building a permanent majority under the dems is not real, whether it falls apart from the center or the left.  

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                p>Obama might be able to beat history, but my read is we’ve got 18 months to make something happen, after that the reforms will get weaker and weaker.      

              • http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t…

                Mr Obama, who had once hoped to secure bi-partisan backing for his agenda, began his 100th day in office by holding a breakfast welcoming ceremony at the White House for Arlen Specter, the veteran Pennsylvania Senator, who on Tuesday had announced that he was defecting to the Democratic Party.

                “I’d like to think that Arlen’s decision reflects a recognition that this Administration is open to many different ideas and many different points of view, that we seek co-operation and common ground,” said Mr Obama. He has promised his full support to Mr Specter in next year’s Democratic primary when the 79-year-old will seek to win his sixth term in the Senate.

                Mr Specter insists that he will remain independent of the White House – and, indeed, was one of three Democratic Senators who voted against the budget yesterday – but he also indicated he would assist in pushing legislation on health care reform, global warming, and immigration through Congress.

              • … is similar to what Ezra points out (by way of Yglesias) with respect to Brooks:

                …nicely articulated by Matt:

                The appeal of a pundit outreach strategy focused primarily on the “reasonable right” is not lost on me-absent the outreach, it’s overwhelmingly likely that Brooks’ columns would be much harsher, whereas progressives who like most of Obama’s administration on the merits are likely to be nice anyway. But I do think it’s a bit shortsighted. I first thought about this when during the campaign Obama tried to assuage Jewish voters’ fears by courting Jeffrey Goldberg rather than by using one of the many, many, many progressive Jews in the punditry game. On the one hand, it’s arguably more effective to have the kind of guy who writes bogus stories about Iraq/al-Qaeda links in your corner than it would be to have a progressive Jew.

                But the danger here is that while this sort of thing may work in the short-run, in the long-run one impact of this sort of courtship is to entrench Goldberg as the arbiter of what kinds of political opinions are kosher. And at the end of the day, a progressive politician is going to be better-off having progressive Jews in the position to define that.

                Similarly with Brooks. The coverage Brooks has given Obama thus far has, I think, been on net helpful to the administration. But at the moment Obama’s riding high. His approval rating is in the sixties, his opponents are acting like idiots, and he’s no wracked by any kind of scandals. That sort of situation isn’t going to hold up forever. Any administration features some dark days sooner or later. And when those days come, the people in the media who’ll still stick with you are the people who really care about the substantive agenda. So for the long run, it’s useful to raise the stature of the kind of media figures who are going to be helpful for the long run. Brooks is a good conservative columnist, well-worth reading. But he really is a conservative columnist. And so elevating him as the columnist is ultimately going to be self-defeating.

                Which is all to say there’s a tradeoff. When the president’s chief political adviser spends a night extolling the virtues of a conservative columnist, that makes the conservative columnist both friendlier to the administration but also more important as a media figure. David Brooks is made more influential by the fact that everyone has to go read David Brooks when the administration releases a new policy initiative because he’s the the columnist who can best convey the administration’s thinking. Eventually, that friendliness may lapse. But the expanded influence won’t. And Brooks will be a more credible critic for having been a cherished ally.

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                p>The danger is in cementing legitimizing the notion that democratic positions should err slightly to the right because ‘slightly to the right’ has been legitimized by the investment of the political capital on the left, even though that’s not how they got elected.

    • Remember when Bill Frist tried to change that just three years ago and how Senate Democrats and political observers called that move the death of the republican nature of the senate?  The move would be just the same now. This is because democracy cannot be narrowly defined as the dictatorship of the majority, rather it is defined, especially in the senate, as defending the interests of all the people and especially the interests of the states. If you kill the filibuster you might as well be pissing on James Madison’s grave.  

      • And democracy is doing quite well throughout Europe with the Parliamentary system where the dictatorship has ensured a strong social safety net, environmental protections and thoughtful, efficient public infrastructure.  

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        p>I didn’t believe the Dems when they were attacking Frist, I don’t believe the Republicans now.  Like Madison’s Federalist #10, the filibuster isn’t an ideology, it’s a political tool.  

      • NOW is the time to change the rules!  When ‘we’ have the votes!  Why, they’ll never be in power again anyways!

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        p>(I supported the Gang of Fourteen for exactly this reason)

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