The Pennsylvania Senate Race: Specter Under Fire

Arlen Specter has always been a survivor. The Pennsylvania Senator has endured two bouts of Hodgkin’s lymphoma and the chemotherapy that goes with it, a couple of procedures for a recurrent benign brain tumor, and heart-bypass surgery that sent him into cardiac arrest. And in a political career that has spanned 45 years, he has regularly sidestepped doom. Specter’s most celebrated swerve came last April, when he switched parties to avoid a Republican primary against a conservative challenger he had barely beaten in 2004. He acknowledged he could never win the GOP nomination for a sixth term after voting for Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package–a move that was one heresy too many for the shrinking Pennsylvania Republican Party.

At the time, Specter’s switch was hailed as a heady affirmation that Barack Obama had ushered the nation into a new, post-partisan era. With the defection of one of its last Senate moderates, what was left of the GOP appeared to be careering rightward, to a hard-core base that was beginning to resemble a cult as much as a political party.

But a year later, those calculations have been tossed upside down. Obama’s poll numbers have come back to earth. And the filibuster-proof Senate majority that Specter’s defection delivered to the Democrats vanished when Massachusetts voters handed Teddy Kennedy’s old seat to Scott Brown. Democratic control of the House is in jeopardy, and the party stands to lose at least a half-dozen seats in the Senate. “Unless something significant changes,” political handicapper Charlie Cook wrote last month, Democrats “are headed toward the losses of the magnitude we saw in the midterm elections of 1958, 1966, 1974, 1994 and 2006.”

A Shifting Keystone

Nowhere is the political shift more evident than in Pennsylvania, a quintessential swing state, where Specter now finds himself in the political fight of his life. Last year’s party switch has left him exposed on both his left and his right in a 2010 political environment that has turned decidedly toxic for incumbents. This is despite the fact that the Democratic establishment has locked arms around its 80-year-old convert. After Specter became a Democrat, he spent the next few months wooing party officials in all 67 Pennsylvania counties and reminding them of all the federal dollars he had brought home over the years. It paid off. The state Democratic committee endorsed him in February with an overwhelming 229-72 vote. “I have been involved in many, many elections but never one quite as thrilling as this one,” Specter said as he accepted the party’s benediction. “I feel good about being a Democrat and being able to continue supporting those Democratic values.” Obama has also come through for him, raising more than $2.1 million at a single event in September for the party and its new champion.

In addition, Democratic leaders tried to clear the field for Specter in the primary. But they couldn’t stop Democratic Congressman Joe Sestak, a retired Navy admiral whom the party had initially been recruiting to run against Specter back when he was still a Republican. Sestak has said the White House went so far as to offer him a top job in the Administration to get him out of the race; he has declined to provide details but has hinted that it may have been Secretary of the Navy. The White House denies it.

Sestak, who grew up in Delaware County, has the potential to draw the liberal Democratic base away from Specter in the May 18 primary. He’s striking a chord with those who have spent the past three decades working to get Specter out of office. “I think there’s been too much Republican lite and not enough real Democrats around,” says Darwin Roseberry, a Democratic committeeman from West Rockhill Township who showed up to hear Sestak speak at a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in Bucks County. “Specter is not a real Democrat.”

Thus far, Sestak has failed to meet expectations; he was 24 points down in the latest Quinnipiac University poll. But the same survey revealed that Specter has vulnerabilities. More than half of the Pennsylvanians surveyed said their senior Senator does not deserve another term; among Democrats who know the candidates well enough to have an opinion of both, Sestak led Specter 54% to 37%. “My challenge is name recognition,” Sestak says. “That’s the one challenge I have.” If so, it is one Sestak may be able to surmount once he starts tapping a campaign war chest that has grown to $5.2 million.

If Specter survives the primary, he will face a stiffer test in November against former Congressman Patrick Toomey–the man whose candidacy drove Specter from the Republican Party. In 2004, Specter beat the far more conservative Toomey by a mere 17,000 votes of the million cast in the Republican primary–which is one reason Specter realized he couldn’t win a rematch against him four years later in a primary that would be decided by a smaller, more conservative party base. After Specter’s party switch, Toomey was down in the polls by 20 points against Specter in a general-election matchup. The GOP scouted unsuccessfully for a more moderate candidate, like popular former governor Tom Ridge. So dark were Toomey’s prospects that Senator Orrin Hatch, the vice chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, lamented to Politico.com “I don’t think there is anybody in the world who believes he can get elected Senator there.”

Now it is Specter who is the underdog. Toomey–who stresses fiscal issues and downplays his conservatism on social issues–has been leading in most of the recent polls. He’s raised more money than any other Senate challenger in the country, thanks in part to backing from the Club for Growth, a well-funded antitax organization, which Toomey ran from 2005 to 2009. He is also a favorite of Tea Party activists, who account for so much political energy on the right these days. “It’s an uphill battle in the general–no ifs, ands or buts about it,” says Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Ed Rendell, who has thrown the force of his political operation behind Specter.

Principle–or Opportunism?

Ultimately, what is going to save Specter or sink him is his record. It’s hard to think of anyone else in politics who has charted a path so quirky and defiant of an ideological label. In fact, last year marked the second time he has switched parties; he started his career as a Democrat but became a Republican when he decided to run for Philadelphia district attorney in 1965. He is pro-choice and pro–gay rights. Conservatives have never forgiven him for sinking Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork in 1987; liberals feel the same about his zealous grilling of Anita Hill when her accusations of sexual harassment nearly killed Clarence Thomas’ nomination in 1991.

The question is whether Pennsylvania voters will see those kinds of moments as evidence of principle or opportunism. As I followed the candidates around the Philadelphia area recently, I found both sentiments. “He’s an independent voice,” insists Charles Johns, an Allentown retiree and lifelong Democrat. Johns says he has voted for Specter ever since watching the Bork hearings on C-SPAN. But for Debbie Goldstein, 54, who changed her registration to Republican to vote for him when she was 18, Specter’s party switch was the last straw. “I always thought Specter was good for Pennsylvania. He fought to keep the Navy Yard open,” says Goldstein, who is active in local Republican politics in the village of Plymouth Meeting. “But now he’s kind of burned-out, more like a puppet being pushed around, and he doesn’t know what he is doing.”

It doesn’t help Specter’s case that he had been vowing not to switch parties practically right up until the moment that he did. Only weeks before, he had argued that it was vital that he stand as a 41st Republican vote in the Senate: “If there’s a Democrat in my place, they’ll be able to do anything they want.”

And though Specter promised not to be a rubber stamp for his new party, he has since shifted leftward into its mainstream. He went from opposing a government-run public option on health care to supporting one and from voting for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 to urging for its repeal. Specter has also reversed himself to support the controversial idea of pushing health care legislation through with “reconciliation,” a parliamentary process that would get it past a filibuster. “That kind of cynical political opportunism turns people off. It’s what people think is wrong with Washington,” says Toomey. “Not everyone is going to agree with every one of my positions and policies. But people know that I believe in what I say and that I will do what I say I will do.” Meanwhile, Sestak warns fellow Democrats that they can’t count on Specter to stay with them if he wins the primary: “He is a flight risk after May 18.”

But Specter professes that he has found a comfortable home in his new party. “Many, many, many people have told me, ‘You’re the only Republican I ever voted for. Now it’s easier,'” he says. What’s happening to him, he insists, is a function of larger forces at work. The Republican Party’s “sole calculation is defeating Obama in 2012,” he says. “The whole country is caught in the cross fire. I would not say no to the stimulus package when it looked to me that the country was about to slide into a 1929 Depression. After my stimulus vote, there were irreconcilable differences between the Republican Party and me.”

Tough races, Specter adds, are nothing new for him. “It’s a challenge, and that’s what I’ve been doing for a lot of years. I think I’m on the right side of the issues,” he says. “There are a lot of things I want to do in the Senate.” The question now is whether Pennsylvania voters see Arlen Specter as a solution to America’s broken politics–or a symptom of them.

Scenes from the Race

For more photos of the Pennsylvania Senate campaign, go to time.com/pa_senate