Former Republican Arlen Specter Hits a Few Bumps in His Shift Across the Aisle

Such a scene still takes getting used to: Arlen Specter, the erstwhile Republican in his natty suit, working a crowd of 800 boisterous Democrats who are washing down cheese steaks with beer in the hiring hall of the local Sheet Metal Workers union in Philadelphia.

Specter and his wife, Joan, could barely wriggle through the throng Monday evening, such was the clamor for pictures, the lingering handshakes, the extended greetings. He hadn't been to a fundraiser of the Democratic City Committee since about 1964, a couple of years before he switched parties the first time, from Democrat to Republican. He didn't know what to expect. What he got was love -- albeit somewhat conditional love.

"I voted for you as a Republican, and now I'll vote for you as a Democrat," Rocco Casciato, a salesman for a municipal contractor, said to the senator, who grinned and gave thanks.

But when Specter reached Charlie Branch, the retired member of Laborers Local 332 pointed to the check mark on his baseball cap, a reference to a pro-union bill that Specter has not yet endorsed. "You see that up there on my hat? You gonna remember that?" asked Branch. Specter was noncommittal.

"Darn!" Branch said after the senator had moved on. "I didn't get a picture with him!" And in spite of himself, the wary union man went chasing after the new Democratic star.

The atmosphere around the 79-year-old Specter remains thick with ambiguity and ambivalence. Two weeks after he shook Washington and stunned Pennsylvania with his sudden change of political stripes, everyone's still finding a place in the new choreography.

Specter himself occasionally struggles to stay in character as a Democrat, flubbing his lines. When he wants to say "my party," he catches himself to make sure he's referring to the correct party.

"I've been on a lot of issues which are right in line with the Democratic Party," he said to some reporters who cornered him in the union hall. "A woman's right to choose. Had a split with my own party -- with the Republican Party -- on embryonic stem cell research. . . . Had a split with my party, with the Republican Party -- on the nuclear test ban treaty."

He insists he's still the same public servant as ever, and he sits at the same polished wooden desk on the Senate floor -- only now it's across the aisle. The desk that used to place him next to Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) has been rebolted to make him neighbors of Democratic Sens. Robert C. Byrd (W.Va.) and Patrick Leahy (Vt.), the Judiciary Committee chairman with whom Specter previously jousted as ranking Republican on the panel.

He experiences small double takes, like when directing his steps toward the Mansfield Room in the Capitol for Tuesday caucus lunches with the Democrats -- the same large room where for years he lunched with the Republicans, until the Democrats recently took it over and the Republicans got a smaller room, because now there are so many Democrats, with Specter making one more.

"When I walked into the Mansfield Room . . . I saw a lot of good friends. I saw [Tom] Harkin and Leahy and Dianne Feinstein, whom I've worked with closely, and I saw Ben Cardin and Sheldon Whitehouse and Evan Bayh. . . . It's hard to find a Republican co-sponsor, so I've worked with them a lot."

But in the tumultuous past two weeks, he has learned to talk about all this with care, for the reflexes of a former Republican can get a Democrat in trouble. "I'm choosing my words very carefully, more than I did with Coleman," he says in an interview, ruefully recalling the recent gaffe when he touted his old friend Norm Coleman of Minnesota in the Senate recount, then had to retract in favor of his new friend, Al Franken.