Specter of Irrelevance

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 29, 2009 1:32 PM

Shades of Jim Jeffords!

While Arlen Specter's decision to bolt the Republicans isn't the political earthquake that that the former Vermont lawmaker triggered when he flipped Senate control to the Democrats in 2001, it is one heckuva big deal.

Leave aside the Beltway implications for a second, because I'm going to offer a contrarian view.

The Pennsylvania senator says he will continue to follow his conscience, but he has just stiffed the voters of his state, the way every opportunistic party-switcher does. A majority of them voted for a Republican to represent them in D.C. for six years, and suddenly they've got a Democrat who will work with Obama's party.

Jeffords did it in 2001. Richard Shelby did it in 1994, one day after the Republicans seized control of the Senate, and Ben Nighthorse Campbell the following year, thus giving them the added clout of being in the majority.

Phil Gramm did it the right way in 1983. He quit the Democratic Party, resigned his House seat, ran for reelection as a Republican and won. The voters ratified his choice.

Michael Bloomberg, a lifelong Democrat, ran as a Republican in 2001 because it was the only way he could get elected mayor. Later on, he quit his party of convenience and became an independent. So much for the Republican flirtation (or term limits, which Bloomberg originally backed but has now blown up so he can win a third term).

Specter says the Republican Party has moved "far to the right," and that may be true, but the obvious motive here is that he concluded he couldn't beat Pat Toomey in next year's GOP primary. (He admitted as much, calling his chances "bleak.") So Pennsylvania voters will get a belated opportunity to accept or reject his move.

Specter's defection would make Al Franken the 60th Democratic vote, but the larger question is whether the Republican Party is now all but moribund in the Northeast. The party of Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits has given way to a more southern, more conservative, more religiously based organization that seems out of step with northern moderates, especially pro-choice, independent lawmakers such as Specter, who (joined by Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe) rescued the president's stimulus bill.

The onetime Judiciary chairman has long shown an independent streak, ticking off the right during the Robert Bork hearings and the left during the Clarence Thomas hearings. But make no mistake: this 79-year-old politician is trying, above all, to ensure his future as an octogenarian senator.

The New York Times calls it "a stunning turnabout in political loyalties. . . . Republicans were knocked off stride by the announcement and many had no warning from Mr. Specter, who met a polite but chilly reception when he entered a party luncheon to inform his colleagues. They immediately labeled it, in the words of Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who heads the party's campaign arm, a naked act of "political self-preservation," and they sought to portray it as an isolated case growing out of Pennsylvania's political environment."

Boston Globe: "Obama's allies portrayed Specter's sudden switch as a ratification of the new president's agenda and further evidence of his opposition's irrelevance."

Philadelphia Inquirer: "Specter's move is a major defection for a state Republican Party that has been bleeding voters while clinging to the notion that conservative ideology will bring about victory, analysts said."

Doyle McManus says in the L.A. Times that this is not an unalloyed triumph for the Dems:

"Arlen Specter was never much of a Republican. He won't be much of a Democrat either. His record in the Senate has always been quirkily centrist . . .

"Conservatives dubbed him a RINO: Republican In Name Only. Now he has crossed the aisle to join the Democratic majority, but Specter acknowledged Tuesday that he'll be something of a DINO."

Washington Post's Dan Balz: "The question now is whether Specter's departure will produce a period of genuine introspection by a party already in disarray or result in a circling of the wagons by those who think the GOP is better off without those whose views fall outside its conservative ideological boundaries."

John Harris & Jim VandeHei in Politico: "Arlen Specter's break from Republicans is the latest in a trip-hammer series of reversals that leaves the GOP more beaten and less popular than either major party has been in decades.

"Amid gloating among Democrats and recriminations among Republicans, the Specter divorce is both symptom and cause of the GOP collapse -- leaving the opposition party on the brink of irrelevance in Barack Obama's Washington and facing few obvious paths back to power."

The Washington Times runs a piece by Pat Toomey: "A central question will be whether Mr. Specter can be trusted on anything."

The conservative blogosphere is none too pleased. Michelle Malkin: "Well, it appears that the head of the Turncoat Caucus is finally making it official. Arlen Specter, we have just 10 words for you:

"Don't let the door hit you on the way out."

Allahpundit calls Specter's argument that he's bolting for philosophical reasons "a weaselly lie, and therefore a perfect note for him to depart on. He'd have happily run for re-election as a Republican if not for Toomey getting into the race and quickly jumping out to a 21-point lead."

National Review's Jim Geraghty: "As of April 9, Specter was telling Newsweek, 'I'm a Republican and I'm going to run in the Republican primary and on the Republican ticket.' Good to know his word is his bond." Ouch.

At Real Clear Politics, Sean Trende cautions conservatives to think long term: "Some on the right will now declare 'good riddance' or 'he was a Democrat anyway.' Perhaps this is true. But I think many will live to regret this . . .

"Specter's chances of being re-elected as a Republican were close to nil no matter what; Specter's choice here is the rational one. But this presents a long-term problem for the Republican party. American politics are played between the 40-yard lines. But when a substantial portion of the party demands that their players occupy territory somewhere around the 10-yard line -- even in states that are positioned more around the opposing 40, how does that party ever claim a majority?"

Andrew Sullivan: "If you subtract 200,000 moderate Republicans from the Pennsylvania base, Specter essentially ran out of support from his own party. It's a classic pattern of the losing party actually becoming more extreme after it loses - because the rump is more marinated in ideology than the less committed and more pragmatic members. You can spin this as cowardice on Specter's part, and many will. But it does not strike me as a good sign for the GOP."

David Frum: "The Specter defection is too severe a catastrophe to qualify as a 'wake-up call.' His defection is the thing we needed the wake-up call to warn us against! For a long time, the loudest and most powerful voices in the conservative world have told us that people like Specter aren't real Republicans -- that they don't belong in the party. Now he's gone, and with him the last Republican leverage within any of the elected branches of government. For years, many in the conservative world have wished for an ideologically purer GOP. Their wish has been granted. Happy?"

As for liberal bloggers, they are pleased but wary of their new ally. The Nation's Christopher Hayes: "This is a huge deal psychologically and in terms of the media narrative. Both coverage and polling shows the GOP is increasingly a marginalized party, controlled by its most reactionary, zealous members. This really furthers that (largely accurate) impression . . . I don't think the Democrats really owe him anything, in terms of the primary."

At Salon, David Sirota wants only a short-term fling with Arlen:

"The idea of Specter running in a Democratic primary is really crazy - and I'm hopeful it will be a contested primary. State/local Democrats shouldn't simply defer to this guy, who Pennsylvania's rank-and-file Democratic voters/activists have been trying to dislodge for years (and rightly so). Even as we applaud Specter for switching parties, we shouldn't simply concede the primary."

Day 100

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll gives the president a 61 percent approval rating. Says GOP pollster Bill McInturff: "We are watching a Reagan-like early presidency."

A Project for Excellence in Journalism report on Obama's first two months confirms that he's been getting a good ride:

"Roughly four out of ten stories, editorials and op-ed columns about Obama have been clearly positive in tone, compared with 22% for Bush and 27% for Clinton in the same mix of seven national media outlets during the same first two months in office . . .

"The study found positive stories about Obama have outweighed negative by two-to-one (42% vs. 20%) while 38% of stories have been neutral or mixed . . .

"On Fox, the majority of Obama stories were clearly negative in tone, the only outlet studied where that was the case. On MSNBC, the majority of stories were clearly positive in tone, the only outlet studied other than Newsweek where that was the case . . . CNN, meanwhile, looked a great deal more like the rest of the media."

Plane Crazy

The spectacular incompetence of sending Air Force One to buzz lower Manhattan buildings for the sake of a photo op draws fire from Brian Williams:

"Networks like ours switched our footing to preparation to report the incident. People who looked on from a distance were horrified at the sight. What's worse, people who were close to the 'fly-over' were even more troubled -- as some of them recognized the world-famous livery -- the paint scheme on the fuselage: it was Air Force One. The real one. The fighter jet was real. Was the President on board? Was he in jeopardy? Could this really be happening in the sky over New York? . . .

"This was dangerously mishandled. As I said the other evening at a gathering of New York City firefighters: even after all these years, among many New Yorkers, 9/11 still feels like it was about 10 minutes ago. The pit is still there, though it's now a construction zone. The losses don't go away. No one is bringing my neighbor back to me. I will drive by his house on my way home from work tonight, and he won't be there. We still look up at the sky (in ways we never did before) when we hear low-flying aircraft, and we still worry. Lower Manhattan is no place for an unnanounced low-altitude jumbo jet-and-fighter-jet flyover.

"Someone should pay for this."

But Obama doesn't seem to be firing anyone. And this moronic photo op cost $328,000 when we're supposedly in a fiscal crisis.

Candidate Cheney?

The NYT's new conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, makes his debut by imagining that Dick Cheney had run for the top job in 2008:

"At the very least, a Cheney-Obama contest would have clarified conservatism's present political predicament. In the wake of two straight drubbings at the polls, much of the American right has comforted itself with the idea that conservatives lost the country primarily because the Bush-era Republican Party spent too much money on social programs. And John McCain's defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise.

"We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation . . .

"As a candidate, Cheney would have doubtless been as disciplined and ideologically consistent as McCain was feckless. In debates with Barack Obama, he would have been as cuttingly effective as he was in his encounters with Joe Lieberman and John Edwards in 2000 and 2004 respectively. And when he went down to a landslide loss, the conservative movement might -- might! -- have been jolted into the kind of rethinking that's necessary if it hopes to regain power."

R.I.P. Portfolio

Tina Brown, who has presided over one magazine burial, has some strong feelings about the demise of the business monthly Portfolio:

"This is terrible news. It's not just that the cratering ad market has claimed another victim. Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse had been admirably supportive of Portfolio for the last two years. The fact that he elected to close it, as suddenly as he folded Domino, Men's Vogue, and the men's fashion trade mag DNR suggests a worrying element of panic engulfing the steadfast publisher I worked for so comfortably for 17 years at Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker.

"You certainly can't say that media commentators encouraged Newhouse to give Portfolio more time. Press coverage of the two-year-old magazine was relentlessly snotty. No one eats their young (or themselves) more hungrily than journalists.

"It always baffled me why so many on the sidelines rooted so eagerly for Portfolio to fail. Its editor, Joanne Lipman, who was already a star at The Wall Street Journal, came out of the launch gate in April 2007 with a self-assured, smart competitor in the suit segment of boring business books . . .

"Some of the malice, no doubt, was spread from inside Condé Nast itself. The court of the Sun King is a rats' nest of competing favorites who jostle for the 81-year-old supremo's attention. Si Newhouse had a strong hand in the idea for Portfolio's inception and wanted it to succeed. It was to be expected that not all the other well-coiffed 800-pound gorillas at the publisher's upscale monthlies would be happy about Lipman's status as Si's new favorite."

A former Portfolio staffer, Paul Smalera, blames the editor in a piece on Gawker:

"If you have to say one thing about the failure of Lipman to create a successful magazine, it would be that dissent was not brooked by her. Not ever . . .

"When others at the magazine tried to inject their talents into the dialogue by questioning the wisdom of certain articles, certain cover choices, word choices, headlines, etc., Lipman was not interested in hearing from them if their ideas about those things differed from hers. Editorial meetings evolved from an initially respectful differing of opinions among equals into contentious, adversarial affairs."

Quote of the Day

David Brooks, accepting an opinion award from The Week magazine:

"I used to have all sorts of human drives, the need for food, for water, for sex. Now I have one drive: the need for column ideas."