Oh, man.  Okay, let’s say one more blog post on this Arlen Specter for the week.  Check this out — a rundown of primo Specter humiliations from the Washington Post:

• Specter pronounced that he would be keeping his seniority when he announced his party switch last week — maintaining that his ability to deliver for the state would not be diminished in any way shape or form by his move across the aisle. Except, that wasn’t exactly right. The Senate’s approval of Specter’s junior status on a series of committees led to a “he said, he said” between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) and the newest member of his caucus. Asked about the back and forth by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday, Reid stood his ground saying simply: “He is a person who’s been in the Senate since 1980. I think he should be able to handle himself.”

Now, that’s a caucus you want to join, eh!  “I want to thank you all for your hospitality and for welcoming me to your — hey!  Where’s my wallet?!”  Next:

• In a sitdown with the New York Times’ Deborah Solomon, Specter said he was hoping that the Minnesota courts would do “justice” and declare former Republican Sen. Norm Coleman the winner in the contested 2008 election. Whoops! Specter tried to walk the comment back [and] told Reid that he briefly “forgot what team I was on.”

Whoops!  Come again?  Here’s the actual report in the Times:

He voted against the Democrats in his first two big votes since the switch, opposing the Democratic budget and helping defeat a measure to allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages for troubled homeowners.

And on Tuesday night, he retracted a statement, made in an interview, in which he said the Minnesota courts should rule in favor of the Republican, Norm Coleman, in the state’s disputed Senate race.

Republican press releases snipe at his every misstep.

And the comment about Minnesota, where Democrats need Al Franken to become their crucial 60th vote in the Senate, prompted the majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, to confront Mr. Specter on the Senate floor.

“Arlen,” Mr. Reid said in his trademark low-volume growl, “What’s going on here?”

Mr. Specter replied that he had forgotten “what team” he was on. Later, he told a reporter: “I conclusively misspoke.”

Because it’s the team you’re on that tells you which side of a court case is in the right.  Did I ever mention to you he used to be a prosecutor?  The last one of the trifecta, from the Post story, is this:

• Specter has done little to back off his initial assertion that his decision to switch parties was based almost entirely on political calculations and had little to do with ideology. While most party switchers are almost certainly guided by personal political concerns (what politician isn’t?), most don’t come right out and say it because it is a turnoff for voters who want to believe that their politicians believe in, well, something.

It’s just that open and obvious.

Has it become pathetic?  It has.  In so many ways.

And I feel sorry for him, frankly.  I guess that’s why I’ll never be reliable politically.  I always find it pitiable to watch a man fall from grace, regardless of whether he brought it on himself, as Senator Specter surely did.  And no matter what else, and no matter how much he wishes he hadn’t done this — and I bet that now he actually does wish he hadn’t, because a man in the service of his ego alone cannot be enjoying this one bit — it can’t be undone.  Quite unlike Arlen Specter himself.

The Bipartisan Rules blog, relying — not surprisingly on this point — on support from David Frum, writes as follows:

The Republican Party should be a political vehicle, not an ideological movement, but its opinion makers have it completely backward.

Its policies have become secondary to this ideal that we must keep alive the flame of Reagan, years after the Gipper has passed on, and that any elected official with an (R) behind his name who dares step out of line has committed heresy. There is no room for ideological deviation.

Sen. Specter is a guy who has voted with the Republican Party a little less than half the time over his career. To be sure, he is no conservative. But he is a moderate, and he counted himself a member of the senatorial Republican caucus.

Republicans in 2009 have adopted the same attitude that Democrats took in 2006 when Joe Lieberman was up for re-election. . . .

While Lieberman still caucuses with the Democrats, the Democrats effectively lost a seat, burned virtually all goodwill with one of the most senior and influential members of the Senate, and whatever control over Lieberman they might have had is now lost.  It was a collective huge error in judgment.

Furthermore, the Lieberman/Lamont fiasco was an enormous black eye for the party, as it branded them a party whose policies were dictated by the extremists on the far left.

But that’s exactly the path the Republican Party was on with respect to Arlen Specter.

I understand this point.   And I have written repeatedly about what I regard as an unhappy tendency toward, not ideological extremism — which I am not so inclined to call, how you say?, a vice — but a very regrettable coarsening of the tone of discussion and activism.  It’s not pretty, and there are plenty of reasons to worry about it.

But I think these thoughts about Specter are wrong, wrong, wrong. Here’s the key wrong paragraph:

Sen. Specter is a guy who has voted with the Republican Party a little less than half the time over his career. To be sure, he is no conservative. But he is a moderate, and he counted himself a member of the senatorial Republican caucus.

Voting Republican “less than half the time” is not enough.   This is not a matter of ideological purity:  He has been a net loss for the GOP measured by votes alone.

And we do not measure by votes alone.  Specter siphoned off Republican fundraising to a career spent voting with the Democrats “a little more than” half the time.  He retarded the development of a bona fide conservative Republican base and cadre of potential leaders in Pennsylvania.  And by virtue of “count[ing] himself a member of the senatorial Republican caucus” he was a source of embarrassment while voting as a member of the Democratic caucus, how could it be argued that he benefitted the former?

The comparison to Lieberman is not apt, because Lieberman was and is, in fact, a completely dependable knee-jerk liberal except as to one issue:  His support of the Iraq war.  Indeed the left-wing campaign to punish him for departing from this orthodoxy was self-destructive, but utterly unavoidable, for liberals do not accept divergence from the only true moral position on issues, as we know.

In contrast, Specter is not only more likely to vote with Democrats than Republicans, he has, as demonstrated above, had an overall negative impact on the Republican future in Pennsylvania.  In short, he has harmed the Republican Party as “a political vehicle.”

And here is the kicker.

Joe Lieberman risked his reelection by standing on principle — for he would have ridden to easy victory had he merely followed the prevailing political winds and, like all the other Democrats in Congress who voted for the war, now “confessed” his foolish past ways, like a good Stalinist should, and joined the inquisition.  Read the rest of this entry »