The Washington Times
Monday, May 4, 2009
DAVIS: The Specter switch

Lanny Davis

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

"We are not losing blue states and shrinking as a party because we are
not conservative enough. If we pursue a party that has no place for
someone who agrees with me 70 percent of the time, that is based on an
ideological purity test rather than a coalition test, then we are going
to keep losing."

-- Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican

When I read Mr. Graham's comment last week regarding the switch to the
Democratic Party by Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, I was reminded
of one of my favorite movies from my preteen years, the 1957 movie
classic "The Incredible Shrinking Man."

It's about a man who is exposed to a combination of radiation and
insecticide and slowly begins to shrink. By the end of the movie, he has
become so small that his wife puts him in a cage to protect him from
their house cat and then, at the end of the movie, he is tragically
washed down the drain of his sink.

The Republican Party cannot blame radiation and insecticide for its
shrinkage. Sooner or later, it will have to face up to the reality that
its problems are not a result of bad political strategy or
communications, the current most popular self-deluding rationalizations.
Rather, the shrinkage is primarily due to two facts about the current
Religious Right-dominated Republican Party: unpopular ideas and bad
attitudes.

First, polls show that the Religious Right's views on the social issues
are not in accord with the views of growing majorities of moderate
Republicans and independents, the key swing voters who decide general
elections. Indeed, a recent ABC/Washington Post poll showed a plurality
of all Americans for the first time now support gay marriage. And
second, these swing voters are increasingly alienated by the intolerance
of the Religious Right and their insistence on 100 percent agreement on
social issues.

As Sen. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, one of the few remaining Republican
moderates in the Senate, wrote last week after the Specter announcement:
"There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a
majority party while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing
to retract into a regional party. ... It was when we began to emphasize
social issues to the detriment of our basic tenets that we encountered
an electoral backlash."

After Mr. Specter's switch, it looks likely that Pennsylvania
Republicans will nominate in 2010 former Rep. Pat Toomey, the very type
of Republican who has most alienated moderates and independents and is,
thus, least electable. Thus Pennsylvania is a virtually certain
Democratic pickup in 2010, whether that Democrat is Mr. Specter or
someone else.

There is a vague deja vu for me in seeing the right taking down a
Republican lawmaker who voted 70 percent of the time with his party's
Senate colleagues. I am reminded of how the Democratic left treated
incumbent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut in 2006. Mr. Lieberman had
voted with his fellow Democrats not 70 percent of the time, but rather
90 percent of the time. Yet he was opposed by the Democratic left and
lost a close race for the party's nomination in the 2006 primary. But he
went on to win as an independent in the general election by a
substantial margin.

While Mr. Lieberman offended many liberals by his support for the Iraq
war, the fact is, on all the critical domestic litmus test issues, he
had, indisputably, one of the most liberal voting records in Congress:
pro-choice, pro-labor (including the so-called "card-check" bill),
pro-social-spending programs, pro-environmental regulation, pro-civil
rights and affirmative action, pro-women's rights and gay rights, and so on.

And yet, despite this record, people on the left, particularly on the
most hateful liberal blogs, continue to hate him and mischaracterize him
as a conservative, and are still planning to oppose him again if he
chooses to run in 2010. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, whose liberalism and
intelligence I admire, rarely misses a chance to criticize Mr.
Lieberman, sometimes with very personal overtones. But she never
mentions or credits his liberal voting record, including his support for
President Obama in the first 100 days.

So, once again, we see the irony that the sanctimonious far right and
the sanctimonious far left seem to have more in common than with their
fellow conservatives and liberals, respectively. Clearly they agree that
it is better to lose a general election and win a primary than to allow
any variation from what they define as true conservatism or true liberalism.

Meanwhile, back to the Senate's newest Democrat: Mr. Specter did not
have an auspicious beginning in his career as a Democratic senator. His
first major vote was cast against Mr. Obama's budget, which is a
fundamental blueprint for the Obama presidency and his electoral mandate.

That may not be a great start for Mr. Specter in the eyes of many
Pennsylvania Democrats, who believe in Mr. Obama and want a senator they
can rely on to support the core programs of the Obama administration.
For this reason, it would be understandable if Mr. Specter has a
Democratic primary opponent - at the very least, to remind him of
political accountability if he opposes a Democratic president on his
fundamental priorities.

I would not be surprised if that opponent is Rep. Joe Sestak, a retired
Navy vice admiral who is a true liberal Democrat but also has national
defense credentials and a centrist/consensus-building instinct.

Mr. Sestak represents Pennsylvania's 7th District, in the suburbs and
exurbs of Philadelphia. In 2006 he defeated a seemingly invulnerable and
popular 10-term Republican, Rep. Curt Weldon, by a 12-point margin. In
2008, he expanded his margin, winning by 20 points.

Mr. Sestak's congressional district is a microcosm not only of
Pennsylvania but in large part of the nation - moderate suburbs, exurban
and rural conservatives, blue-collar workers (from oil refineries and
defense plants), and college towns and communities, such as those
surrounding Swarthmore, Haverford, Villanova and Cheyney.

In a Democratic primary, Mr. Sestak has great appeal to the liberal base
as well as centrist, national-defense Democrats, even if the president
keeps his word and campaigns for Mr. Specter in the Democratic
Pennsylvania primary. I predict that if Mr. Sestak runs for the
nomination against Mr. Specter - and that is a big "if" in light of the
senator's endorsements by Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden
Jr. - Mr. Sestak will win the primary and go on to defeat Mr. Toomey by
a landslide.

You read it here first.

Another prediction: The incredibly shrinking Republican Party will find
a way to shrink even further, as it expends even more energy in an
intraparty civil war between the far right and the far, far right. The
result: After the 2010 congressional elections, Democrats will have a
filibuster-proof Senate majority with 62 or 63 members.

Stay tuned.

Lanny Davis, a Washington lawyer and former special counsel to President
Clinton, served as a member of President Bush's Privacy and Civil L