Specter Skates

I was surfing the cable news channels, where the swine flu outbreak was being treated as possibly the next bubonic plague, displacing the news of President Obama's 99th day in office, when word broke that Arlen Specter was switching parties.

The political bombshell reverberated across the screen for hours, until the networks ditched the Pennsylvania senator for a low-speed police chase of a stolen rig with a man clinging to the back. I was waiting in front of a camera at that moment to talk about the feverish flu coverage on Headline News, and never did make it on the air.

News seems more ephemeral than ever in this age of TiVo and tossed-off tweets. But it's worth hitting the pause button to examine how media organizations chronicled the Specter saga.

The political elements, naturally, were front and center -- Specter's fear of losing a GOP primary next year, and his moving the Democrats within one Al Franken victory dance of a filibuster-proof majority. But in the straight-news reports, little attention was devoted to this question: Was this a betrayal of the voters who elected Specter?

Most journalists assumed the role of handicappers, accepting as a given that this is the way the game is played. So what if Specter had promised to serve six years as a Republican? So what if Specter had told Newsweek less than three weeks earlier that "I'm a Republican and I'm going to run in the Republican primary and on the Republican ticket"? He was acting to save his skin; no further explanation necessary.

This value-neutral reporting was reflected in the headlines: "Specter Switches Parties; More Heft for Democrats" (New York Times). "Specter Gives Dems a Boost in Stifling Dissent" (USA Today). "Specter Leaves GOP, Shifting Senate Balance" (Washington Post). Not a hint that he had done anything untoward.

There were some exceptions among mainstream journalists. Doyle McManus wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Specter was "cheerfully open about the cynicism of his move." Time's Michael Grunwald said the move highlighted his "desperate opportunism." The question surfaced only briefly on two Sunday shows: CBS's Bob Schieffer asked Specter about Republicans who voted for him and whether "you let them down," while NBC's David Gregory asked about David Broder's criticism, in The Washington Post, of the senator's "willingness to do whatever will best protect and advance the career of Arlen Specter."

Correspondent Carl Cannon, on AOL's new Politics Daily site, says conservatives are right in complaining that much of the media have "a double standard regarding party-switchers . . . When Republicans morph into Democrats, we tend to act like they finally saw the light, and quote them ad nauseam about how the Republican Party has gotten too narrow, etc., etc." But when a Democrat joins the GOP, "we concentrate on the tactical advantage to the party switcher."

When it comes to commentators, their analysis often turns on the direction of the defection. In 1994, when Democratic Sen. Richard Shelby switched parties days after the Republicans won control of Congress, a New York Times editorial said: "Talk about slipping out of the hills to bayonet the wounded! . . . His desertion to the victorious Republicans this week was hardly a huge surprise." But when Jim Jeffords flipped control of the Senate to the Democrats by leaving the GOP in 2001, the Times said approvingly that the Vermont lawmaker had given George W. Bush "an embarrassing lesson" for having pulled a "conservative bait-and-switch" on the country.

Specter's move also gave rise to plenty of prognostication about the struggling Republican Party. To be sure, a party that has been virtually wiped out in the Northeast and controls nothing in Washington is in poor health. But it's worth recalling how quickly the diagnosis can change.

Days after Bush was reelected in 2004, the New York Times reported that "the Democratic Party emerged from this week's election struggling over what it stood for, anxious about its political future, and bewildered about how to compete with a Republican Party that some Democrats say may be headed for a period of electoral dominance." Another piece said there were "signs" of "a Democratic party seemingly trapped in second place," with Democrats asking: "What will it take to break the pattern -- an act of God?"

The Los Angeles Times said the '04 outcome "threatens to leave Democrats at a long-term disadvantage in future races for the White House and battles for Congress." Another story had "insiders" concluding that "the blue-state party needs a face from a red state if it is going to expand beyond its base on the two coasts and preserve its hold on the Upper Midwest." Funny, then, that a Midwestern nominee carried such states as North Carolina and Virginia.