Why Specter Lost
As is true for millions of Pennsylvanians, I grew up with Arlen Specter. Other politicians have come and gone, but the one constant has been Arlen Specter, who has been in politics throughout my entire voting life and that of so many others. From his days on the Warren Commission where he helped craft the oft-maligned “single-bullet theory” of the Kennedy assassination to his days of chairing some of the most prestigious of the Senate’s committees, Specter has been a political force to be reckoned with. Some members of Congress spend many undistinguished and indistinguishable years in office. Specter was often in the limelight and just as often controversial.
Specter is the longest-serving politician in the history of the Pennsylvania, having served five terms in the Senate as well as having been Philadelphia’s District Attorney for two terms prior to running for Congress. On Election Day, Specter suffered his first–but final–electoral defeat in a 53-47 loss to Congressman Joe Sestak.
Monday morning quarter-backing, especially in Philadelphia, is easy. Why did Specter lose? The reasons aren’t difficult to enumerate: He was an incumbent in a virulently anti-incumbent season, he switched parties just a year prior to the primary and he was old.
That last is perhaps the least fair reason Specter lost the primary bid to retain his Senate seat. At 80, having survived cancer and a brain tumor and working out daily at the gym, Specter could readily run rings around most potential opponents in the literal sense of the term and campaigned harder and longer than Sestak.
But in politics, perception is everything. Compared to Sestak, who at 59 looks younger than he is, Specter looked (and with his expansive way of speaking often sounded) like an old man, which only served to underscore Sestak’s message that it was time for a new generation of leadership.
It was the politics, however, that got Specter in the end. Sestak has been a virtual unknown in the state, has one of the worst attendance records in the Congress, served a lackluster three years in the House after spending more than 30 as a career naval officer before being forced to resign in 2005. In no other season would this record win the primary over an incumbent with Specter’s credentials.
But Sestak didn’t run on his record or even on what he intended to do as a senator. There’s not a single advertisement in which Sestak says what he has done for the Commonwealth or what he plans to do in the future. What Sestak did–and did extremely well–was to run his campaign on not being Specter.
In ad after ad, Specter outlined what he had done in his many years as a senator and also what he intended to do in the future. President Obama stood behind Specter in ads and daily emails to supporters, as did the rest of the Democratic leadership in the state and in Philadelphia.
Their support wasn’t enough.
Since Specter changed parties in April 2009, he has had a stalwart liberal record, voting with Obama 97 percent of the time. He should have looked like the Democrat to choose. But he just couldn’t manage to project that image.
Specter wasn’t running against Sestak so much as he was attempting to draw a line through the parts of his career that a Democratic electorate might balk at. All Sestak had to do was repeatedly underscore who Specter used to be: a Republican. Or who he still was: a career politician.
Sestak painted a picture not of himself (that portrait is still vague and now will be painted by Republican opponent Pat Toomey who is already taking a page from Sestak’s book and portraying Sestak as the incumbent to beat) but of Specter as a political opportunist with no concern for anyone but himself.
Sestak tested the anti-incumbency mood of the populace and presented himself–someone who has spent more years as a Washington insider than even Specter–as a centrist version of a Tea Partier. In his acceptance speech, Sestak lauded his own victory as one “for democracy”–a victory against “the Establishment and even against Washington.”
That would be the same Establishment and Washington for whom Sestak has worked since he was 23, but this wasn’t a primary battle waged on facts, but on suspicion. Even with his new glowing record as a progressive handmaiden to President Obama (Specter is credited as having been one of the main stumpers for Obama’s health care reform plan and for the public option that many life-long Democrats denounced), Specter was viewed with suspicion and derision. Attacked by members of his former party and smeared by members of his new party, Specter could not maintain his early lead in the polls. Anti-incumbency fever was fueled by the party switch. Republicans already viewed Specter, who was always pro-choice, pro-gay rights and pro-stem cell research among other stances that kept him out of the Republican mainstream, as a traitor. They wanted him lose, viewing Sestak as an easy opponent to beat in November.
Democrats also viewed Specter with suspicion. It was difficult for many to believe that Specter’s party switch–despite his declaration that his former party had left him–was sincere. His voting record should have been the proof, but for those who saw Specter as a political opportunist, the fear that he would turn on the Democrats as he had on the Republicans remained strong.
Specter, along with Arkansas’ Sen. Blanche Lincoln, was the second Democratic Senate incumbent to lose a primary battle in the 2010 elections. The last time as many incumbents fell in a primary was 1980–the same year Specter won his first term to the Senate.
In the end, it was his own long and largely impressive tenure as Pennsylvania’s longest serving Senator that did Specter in. Specter was never one to shirk either duty or controversy. But it was his past as a good soldier for the Republicans, not his recent role as water bearer for Obama that 53 percent of Democrats saw when they went to the polls in the torrential rain on election day. Only 22 percent of Pennsylvania voters actually cast ballots May 18. Not enough to save the career of Pennsylvania’s political lion.
As time passes, the good Specter did for Pennsylvania and the consistency with which he voted on key progressive issues like choice will be remembered more than his seeming opportunism. But for now it looks like Specter, a man never at a loss for words, goes out with a whimper rather than the forceful bang he envisioned but which the electorate just would not give him.–VAB
