Multiply 365 Day 240 - Pissing off Pennsylvania Democrats

 

There was a time, not long before the end of my radio career, when those of us in the great state of Pennsylvania were gearing up for a US Senate race. The race proved to be an interesting one, in that the seat in question was being held by Arlen Specter. Arlen Specter can be described as a career politician, with his career in public service starting as assistant council during the Warren Commission and was one of the co authors of the “single bullet theory” regarding President Kennedy's assassination. His first foray into elected public life would come in 1965, when as a Democrat, he was elected District Attorney of Philadelphia. He would subsequently change his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican and in 1980 would win one of the two US Senate seats.

During his time in the Senate Specter would prove to be a guy that would be hard to pin down, never completely towing a specific party line. While he was Republican, he had his critics in the Republican party, for among other things, his support of stem cell research, his effort in blocking the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court (which would enter into the political lexicon the verb “Borked”) and his unwillingness to support the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, invoking the Scots law principle of “not proven”. While this would seemingly make him a friend of the Democrats, he wasn't that either. His blistering questioning of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, where he claimed that Hill had perjured herself during her testimony, his support for the authorization of the Iraq war, and he wrote the clause in the Patriot Act regarding the appointment of interim US Attorneys, which allowed President Bush to appoint 8 such attorneys without term limits and without Senate confirmation.

Basically, Specter was a pain to everyone, which I sort of liked. But in 2004 Senatorial race, Specter found that his support on the far right side of the Republican aisle was tenuous at best. Specter's strongest challenge that year did not come in the general election, but in the Republican primary, where he barely beat out Pat Toomey, gaining 51% of the vote in that contest.

I would argue that probably had a lot to do with his flipping of party affiliations again in 2009. With another Senatorial campaign about to begin and again Pat Toomey looming as a contender for the Republican primary, Specter switched his party again, going back to Democrat. Maybe he is telling the truth in why he switched, the party had gone too far right for him and he felt more closer to the Democratic line of thinking, maybe it was a purely political move to dodge a potential primary loss. Whatever the case, the last year of Specter's time in the Senate would be as a Democrat.

I say last year because, while Specter may have switched parties to better avoid an upset in the Republican primary, what wasn't figured into the calculus was that the Democrats have a primary too. And Specter would not be running unopposed in that primary, instead he would be running against Joe Sestak, a former three star admiral and as in the case with most primaries, it is the more ideological voters that come out. So while Specter was able to dodge the social conservatives in the Republican party during the primary races, he wasn't able to dodge the far left in the Democratic primary, who viewed Specter as simply a political opportunist who couldn't be trusted if reelected.

It was at this point in my radio career, while working with Lynn Cullen (a liberal talk show host) that I suggested that I would vote for Specter for a couple of reasons, those being that Specter's voting record in the Senate made him his own man, he wasn't always going to tow a party line, which I find refreshing in a candidate and that secondly, from a strictly party perspective, the best way for the Democrats to hold that Senate seat is Specter, who has beaten Toomey once in the past (Toomey did win the Republican primary this time) and even if Specter were to pull, say, 10-15% of the Republican vote and he carries the Democratic vote, its a winning formula (Specter still carried a 55% approval rating among Republicans in the state). Sestak, despite his distinguished military career, isn't going to pull those numbers among Republicans, and it will become an ideological pissing contest, one in which I feared Toomey would win. And Toomey did win, by about 80,000 votes.

The reason I bring this up now is because sometimes actions that can seem pointless at the time indeed do have ramifications, far beyond what we would like to think. So Pat Toomey goes to Washington as US Senator from Pennsylvania, so what? Well enter the whole debt ceiling debate, one in which some Republicans actually argued against extending the debt ceiling because the idea of the United States defaulting on its payment obligations isn't that big a deal. In Toomey's world, we could just prioritize the payments, a situation some of us of lesser means are all too familiar with. We get our paycheck and begin to figure out which bills have to be paid, which ones we can just pay on and which ones that, eh, maybe we can put this off another week or two. But it isn't the way I would argue you want to run a country. The United States doesn't need to be seen as the country with a truck up on blocks out in the front lawn.

However, before the country could go all defaultish on it's payment obligations a compromise was reached amongst the Democrats and Republicans in Congress that allowed the debt ceiling to be raised and the United States to continue to meet it's financial obligations. But at a cost. Part of that compromise was the creation of a “super committee” of 12 members (6 Democrats, 6 Republicans) whose job it would be to cut 1.2 trillion in spending over the next decade.  One of the 6 Republicans on that committee is, you guessed it, Pat Toomey. Where those cuts will come from remains to be seen. One of the places that would seem to be an obvious place to begin would be to let the Bush era tax cuts expire in 2012, but Toomey is staunchly anti tax (he was previously the head of the anti tax Club for Growth) and would most likely view such a move as a tax hike. And it doesn't look good for those of you who aren't running a business, as just today it was reported that Toomey wants a lower corporate tax rate from 35% to somewhere in the 20s, but he doesn't say exactly where (http://dailyitem.com/0100_news/x890684479/U-S-Sen-Pat-Toomey-Deb-trimmers-sorting-through-options), so we know who he doesn't want to cut from? Any guesses where he is going to come looking for money? Any at all? 

So I ask you, fellow Pennsylvanian Democrats, how's that Joe Sestak vote working out for you now?