(Photoillo by Scott Dvorin)

The blue-collar success stories piled up so fast at the Republican Convention in Tampa that one would have been forgiven for assuming that the party was made up entirely of the sons and daughters of garage mechanics, fruit pickers and removers of rotting animal carcasses from the nation’s highways.

Over and over again, speakers informed us of how they came from families of hard-working strivers, with parents who fought their way up from nothing. Such tales were almost de rigueur, especially if they involved “starting a small business.”

Before telling us how little girls now approach her with reverence and awe, Susana Martinez, the runaway egomaniac who is the governor of New Mexico, informed us that her mother and father started their security guard business by handing her—then an 18-year-old girl—a “Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum,” and posting her in the parking lot of a church during bingo games. There are those who might assume that this accounts for Ms. Martinez’s decision, as a prosecutor, to specialize in child abuse, but never mind.

Rick Santorum told us that he was a first-generation American and the grandson of a coal miner. (He didn’t mention that he was also the son of a clinical psychologist and an administrative nurse.) John Boehner told us he was “a regular guy with a big job,” whose father and uncles had first put him to work “mopping floors, waiting tables” at the bar they owned. Paul Ryan assured us that when he “was waiting tables, washing dishes or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life.” No doubt, that optimism was at least partly inspired by the trust fund he would inherit, thanks to his family’s enormously successful construction company (founded in 1884), and confirmed by his marriage to his millionaire wife, a Washington lobbyist and scion of a family of wealthy trial lawyers—not exactly the social familiar of your average dishwasher or lawn boy.

By the time Marco Rubio told us on the last night of the convention that his father “stood behind a bar in the back of the room all those years, so one day I could stand behind a podium in the front of a room,” this trope had reached the level of self-parody.

What could be next? “My father played piano in a whorehouse, so I could play on the stage at Carnegie Hall?” “My mother scraped gum off the sidewalk, so one day I could scrape the Iranian mullahs’ fingers off their nuclear-enrichment cyclotrons?”

Tim Pawlenty made sure to tell us that he was the only one of the five kids in his family to go to college, about the sweetest personal anecdote told by a Republican since the days when Supreme Court aspirant Clarence Thomas used to go around the country regaling audiences with tales of what a lazy no-account his sister was.

All this poor-mouthing of origins, family finances and siblings served a dual purpose, as both a reaffirmation of rugged, Republican individualism, and to support the convention talking point that the press and the Democrats must stop seeking to “demonize success” in general, and that great “businessman,” Mitt Romney, in particular ... with their demands that he release his tax returns.

Before the convention was over, Mr. Romney had been transformed—in his own words—into the son of a Mexican immigrant, whose family were “war refugees” from the Mexican Revolution of 1910-17, and who “never made it through college and apprenticed as a lath and plaster carpenter,” before becoming the head of a great automobile company and governor of Michigan.

In fact, Mr. Romney’s family had fled to Mexico from the territorial U.S. to avoid federal prosecution of the Mormon practice of polygamy. (The Mormon “Mexico colonies,” as they were called, were uprooted following the overthrow of dictator Porfirio Diaz by local rebels who had bought their weapons in the U.S.) George Romney was indeed a remarkable man, almost a great one, but he was already an affluent auto executive by the time Mitt was born—able to provide his newborn son with “a few thousand dollars” in birthday gifts, according to Mitt’s wife, Ann.

This money was in turn invested by George in American Motors stock, which, under his dynamic leadership and that old-timey liberal prosperity thing, increased exponentially in value. Earlier in the convention, Ann had described her early married years with Mitt as a time when they ate “tuna fish and pasta” off an ironing board pressed into service as a table, and had to walk to graduate school classes. (The horror. The horror.) But if you believe her earlier accounts of the nest egg George had hatched for his son, they were scraping by on at least several hundred thousand 1969 dollars-worth of investment windfall.

Even by the standards of political bio exaggeration, all this comes off as a rather nervy piece of family revisionism, but never mind. The bigger issue here is that nobody in the Republican party seems to remember what a good job or a true businessman is anymore.

Almost all work is noble, of course, but not all of it is ennobling, and not all of it brings any multiplying or lasting value to an economy, a society or a family. The ambitions of Susana Martinez’s hardworking parents are nothing to mock, but hiring a teenaged girl to tote a .357 Magnum around the parking lot of a bingo game reflects the increasing desperation of the American working class, more than it does the traditional American dream. So is shoveling liquor into drunks, then making your kid clean up around the place. One does what one has to in this world, but the reality that those of us who don’t have that trust fund or “a few thousand” shares of prime stock awaiting their maturity are indeed more and more likely to be stuck mopping floors and waiting tables seems lost on this party. For Republicans, manual labor has become a weird sort of fetish, like Marie Antoinette’s fake pastoral village at Versailles, where she could play at running a working farm before returning to her glittering palace.

For that matter, Mitt Romney himself was hardly a “businessman” in the tradition of his father. He was, at best, a “venture capitalist,” at worst a “leveraged buyout artist”—and it’s not clear that, in a career of endlessly chopping up and restitching existing companies, he really created any net jobs at all, much less invented, produced or marketed anything. In the incredibly lazy, outdated hack job that is his campaign biography, No Apologies, Mitt makes his greatest success story—backing the expansion of Staples—as momentous as Andrew Carnegie developing a process for the mass production of steel.

Sorry, but putting some of your vast inherited wealth behind a company that has found a way to distribute office supplies more cheaply is not the same thing as, say, running Chrysler. Republicans are trying to make the case that Mr. Romney’s vaunted business experience will save the country. Unfortunately, what he has told us of his plans seems all too likely to reflect that experience. That is, taking apart and selling off the majestic constructions of our past.

Kevin Baker is covering the conventions and the election for harpers.org.

The problem, of course, is that Mr. Santorum is a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. That makes him a legitimate subject of scorn and ridicule, despite his unfortunate intellectual shortcomings.

Mr. Santorum recently announced that the hallowed American idea of separating church and state makes him want to “throw up.” Luckily there is medication available for that particular ailment. More worrisome than Mr. Santorum’s delicate digestive system is his thought process. He criticized John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 speech to Baptist ministers in Houston, a speech in which JFK declared that there must be no religious test for public office in the United States. There was a time—oh, about a month or so ago —when Kennedy’s argument was considered an accepted fact. No longer, or at least not in Mr. Santorum’s odd little world.

Mr. Santorum is entitled to his religious beliefs. The problem is that he wishes to impose those beliefs on all of us. He does not believe in contraception; therefore, in his America, there will be no contraception. How long before he announces that he will restrict his Cabinet to those who share his religious beliefs? (Somebody ought to ask him that question.)

It is a sad commentary on the state of the Republican Party that Mr. Santorum has emerged as a legitimate candidate for its highest honor. It is equally sad that New York Republicans have been silent while Mr. Santorum demands that we tear down the wall separating church and state. New York, more than most places, understands the importance of tolerance. Mr. Santorum may be the most intolerant voice in American politics today. It’s time for other Republicans to call him out.

Sadly, no. Indeed, nothing about Sunday night’s perfunctory display of statue-bestowing carried the faintest whiff of daring or surprise, let alone wit or aesthetic ambition. At a seeming loss to explain why viewers should take an interest, producers of the show were reduced to airing infomercial-style testimonials to the idea of movie-watching, wherein Tom Cruise announced the terrifying news that the film industry had awakened his young imagination, and some star or another cited the transcendent message of The Outlaw Josie Wales. And since labored French pantomime seemed to be the evening’s winning ticket, Team Oscar also trotted out some members of Cirque du Soleil, who delivered their own interpretation of the charms of moviegoing, which seemed mainly to involve a lot of frenzied bolting out of your seat and into the air, apparently to secure the quickest possible exit. It was arguably the evening’s most stirring moment.

Played out as they were, Sunday's Oscar proceedings supply a curious parallel to this week's big-ticket media event in the political world—the next installment in the far more cash-intensive and self-important spectacle of the GOP primary season. Voters in Michigan and Arizona will cast ballots Tuesday in the grinding two-way race between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum (inconveniently just as the print version of this column goes to bed). And much as the Oscar broadcast homed in on the formal, therapeutic virtues of movie-watching over and above any compelling screen characters, conflicts, or plotlines, so has this political melodrama—fed by unprecedented heaps of Super PAC cash and ferociously negative ad buys—failed to deliver a storyline that justifies all the self-promotional din.

Certainly the conventional horse-race reportage provides scant narrative interest. At press time, Mr. Romney seemed poised to eke out a victory in Michigan after trailing Santorum in the polls for the past several weeks. But a too-close Romney win wouldn’t seem likely to deliver the plodding frontrunner the turnaround his campaign so desperately craves—Michigan, after all, was supposed to be something of a sure thing for Team Mitt, since his father had been governor of the state, and since Romney fils had locked it down with comparative ease in the 2008 cycle. What’s more, the most recent polling in the next major battleground state of Ohio has Mr. Santorum still enjoying a comfortable 7-point lead. With apologies to hardcore mavens of popcult themes in the nation’s politics, such as Maureen Dowd or Frank Rich, one might even assign signature best-picture mascots to each campaign: Santorum’s mad dash to shore up his limited base-appeal amid the big-money ad buys of Team Romney calls to mind the machinations of small-market baseball general manager Billy Bean (Brad Pitt) in Moneyball (minus, of course, the plot point of Bean’s divorce); while Romney’s campaign of frenzied self-reinvention in a psychological vacuum evokes the equine protagonist of War Horse, who weaves willy-nilly across the battle-lines of World War I—though Mr. Romney can only wish he could demonstrate a bit of the thoroughbred’s hard-earned valor.

And as it strains to gin up some reliable audience engagement, the nation’s political press is picking up some of Billy Crystal’s manic and mannered vacuity. The Los Angeles Times’s Paul West, for example, professes to find in Mr. Santorum’s kitchen-sink culture crusading on the Michigan hustings the stuff of an “all-out class war” in today’s GOP. The evidence, such as it is, is heavy on the cheap symbolism, and distinctly light on the policy specifics. Mr. Santorum took time out from the Michigan battle royale, Mr. West notes, to attend the opening race of the new NASCAR season in Daytona and allude to Mr. Romney’s privileged upbringing—while also muffing a Sunday appearance on ABC’s “This Week” to defend recent remarks that depicted expanded federal support for post-secondary education as an Obama-led conspiracy to brainwash the nation’s youth. (Santorum’s anti-college shtick bears quoting at length, since it wildly mischaracterizes both Obama’s plan—which would supplement high-school curricula with vocational study for workers who aren’t college bound—and since it is so richly steeped in paranoid looniness: “President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob. There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his own image.”)

But for such clownish posturing to qualify as modest-scale class revolt—let alone as “all-out class war”—some troops would have to be massing somewhere. Instead, debate appearances and ads at the height of the Santorum-Romney showdown turn typically on small-bore issues such as who is the more authentically conservative of the candidates, or which personality in the race is more gauzily “American” or “successful.” Mr. Santorum dare not make too much in Michigan of Mr. Romney’s opposition to the Obama administration’s successful 2009 bailout of the auto industry, since Mr. Santorum, too, attacked the measure. Likewise, Mr. Romney dare not depict Mr. Santorum as a wild-eyed extremist in the Kulturkampf for the simple reason that evangelical voters bulk large among the exact blue-collar base that remains so stubbornly disenchanted with the specter of Mr. Romney as the nation’s next Equity-Fund-Manager-in-Chief.

Mr. Romney’s paralysis here is all the more striking since Mr. Santorum is all but begging for such attacks with outbursts such as his recent admission in a Michigan stem-winder that an entirely anodyne 1960 JFK speech on church-state separation “made me want to throw up”—and his later explanation, during his red-meat interview on This Week, that he viewed JFK as a dangerous “absolutist” when it came to evicting religious believers from the public square. (For diehard pundits determined to tease out class confrontation from culture-war fluff, it also bears repeating that mocking Mitt Romney’s high-corporate pedigree is just what any smart opponent of Mitt Romney does—just ask Newt Gingrich, or the no-less well-born shade of Ted Kennedy.)

All this palpable longing for the base-versus-establishment plotlines of the high-Reagan era GOP calls to mind the inert nostalgia of this Oscar season, from the precious highbrow reveries of Midnight in Paris to the formal jouissance of The Artist. Still, our political prognosticator-class doesn’t have to succumb to despair just yet. There’s still time to bring in the players from Cirque du Soleil; after all, Santorum likes to boast of his own pedigree as a second-generation immigrant, and Mitt Romney did his mission work in France.

Frankly, this critique is hardly new, as far as it goes. But Mr. Santorum actually goes further in his assaults on modern life. He has attacked the very idea of birth control, an issue that many Americans probably regard as having been settled 50 years ago.

Ordinarily, Mr. Santorum’s views could be dismissed as those of a crank. The problem is, it’s becoming clear that his growing numbers of supporters apparently agree with his implicit contention that contraception should be outlawed—in the name of Christianity.

Mr. Santorum, to his credit, hasn’t tried to hide this knuckle-dragging world view. “Many of the Christian faith have said … contraception is O.K.,” the former senator said last fall. “It’s not O.K. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” With some pride, Mr. Santorum noted that “no president has talked about” the evils of birth control. Well, he’s right about that.

What started as a debate over abortion rights a generation ago—a debate in which principled people can and do have reasonable differences—has deteriorated into the spectacle confronting us now, when a major presidential candidate can argue not simply that abortion is wrong, but that birth control is “not O.K.”  If a candidate made such a declaration even a decade ago, he or she would have been dismissed as a laughing stock. But the intolerance of the religious right has become only more stringent in this, the second decade of the 21^st century. It is fair to argue, as many liberals and Democrats should, that the religious right is determined to criminalize contraception. Yes, they’re coming after your birth control.

At long last, has it really come to this? It is one thing for a religious organization to demand an exemption to health-care insurance mandates regarding abortion services or access to contraception. But when a presidential contender argues that birth control is “not O.K.,” it’s time to check the calendar to make sure that it really is 2012.

This debate has no place in presidential politics. How horrifying that it is actually taking place.

Mr. Romney moments after glitter impact

A glitter-wielding activist fell afoul of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's new Secret Service protection detail in Denver on Tuesday. As the former Massachusetts governor worked the crowds after a speech, someone attempted to throw glitter on Mr. Romney, but he was quickly hustled aside by Secret Service agents. The glitter-throwing activist was removed from the event.

The Huffington Post notes that all current Republican candidates have been targeted for festive protest in the past.

Glitter bombers, according to Yahoo! News, are often motivated by a target's opposition to core progressive issues such as gay marriage. Heather Cronk, managing director for Get Equal, a gay rights advocacy group, told Yahoo! that part of the motivation behind the action is "to cut through the white washing of these folks' records."

The glitter attack was perhaps the cap on a bad night for Mr. Romney, who lost primary votes in both Missouri and Minnesota to challenger Rick Santorum.

Secret Service Apprehend Man At Romney Event - YouTube.

Rick Santorum

Former Pennsylvania Senator and current Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has canceled press appearances and Florida campaign stops to be with his 3-year-old daughter, Bella. Bella Santorum was born with a genetic disorder, Trisomy 18, that can lead to surgeries and hospitalizations. She is in Children's Hospital in Philadelphia with pneumonia in both lungs and Mr. Santorum and his wife have been at her side most of the weekend. Mr. Santorum's daughter Elizabeth continued campaigning on his behalf Sunday with a rally in Punta Gorda, Florida, which featured the Duggar family, of reality TV fame.

[WaPo]

Beyonce wearing Babyonce. (Getty)

How can you tell 2012 has begun with a bang? Just log onto Twitter: the hot topics since Jan. 1 are a Venn diagram of American life—from pop culture to politics, to sports and even race relations. It’s beginning to feel an awful lot like looking into a microcosm not too dissimilar to those sea monkey kits we cried enough about to have Mom and Dad buy one, only to have it sitting in garage next to whatever Santa had brought us the year before. In fact, Twitter has morphed into This American Life. Well, again, for sea monkeys. At least there’s a community spirit in the barrage of 140-character thought bubblettes: it’s one of the few times that you’ll find New Yorkers venturing outside their insular world and joining in the national dialogue ­… even if it’s only online and it turns out that our sea monkeys are just brine shrimp with great marketing.

So here was your week on Twitter.

Sunday night (New Year’s Day), 60 percent of your social network updates were composed of armchair commentary on the Giants-Cowboys game, while the remaining 40 percent debated whether Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich would win the Iowa caucus. (Here’s a scary fact: Tim Tebow had the second most tweets per second about his 80-yard overtime touchdown pass, with 9,420 messages going up almost simultaneously.) Then whatever percentage of people who didn’t care about football or politics traded gossip about whether or not Beyoncé had secretly given birth already.

Monday evening was a 50-50 split between up-to-the-nanosecond reactions to the Iowa polls and equally fervent up-to-the-nanosecond reactions to The Bachelor.

Wednesday saw Twittersphere explode with the triple-whammy of dark-horse Rick Santorum tying for first place in Iowa and two celebrities activating (or in one case, reactivating) their accounts. Kanye West, who quit the social networking service several months back, hopped back on to give the world the gift of whatever crazy thing popped into his head. For example, iPhones! “Instead of kicking kids out of schools for using there iPhones … why not promote it? Allow kids to use search engines to do test … like the real WORLD!!! Give kids the amount of test they would have in a year in one day but they have to get everything perfect …” Steve Jobs in iHeaven, are you listening?

Joy to the world’s satirists, who now have that much more material to work with. Also joining Twitter on humpday was media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who quickly amassed 100,000 followers in one day (but chose to follow only six people himself, one of whom was The Observer’s editor, who was promptly unfollowed the following day—possibly because Mr. Murdoch didn’t like being direct messaged questions by curious journalists). Currently his list counts him following four of his own publications, former Village Voice intern Esther Zuckerman, Mark Pincus, Radiolab’s Jad Aumrad, economist Nouriel Roubini, Peggy Noonan, Eric Cantor, Jack Dorsey, a director of MOBY as well as the accounts for AllThingsD and the conservative group Ricochet. Sea monkeys, all around. But maybe Mr. Murdoch is just in a shopping mood and looking to buy a possibly overvalued social networking platform. Again. (Remember MySpace? Barely? Us, neither.)

Thursday Nick Cannon tweeted that his kidneys were shutting down and he was going to the hospital. Jon Huntsman tried to win voters Obama-style by using “new media,’ creating a user account and hashtags for #jonhuntsman, but he really needs to update his social media strategists, since his use of the service could actually be considered spam in the eyes of the all-mighty Twitter. (That’s the beauty of the Twitter policy: it doesn’t matter if you’re selling a free iPad or four years in office. If you’re bothering account members while they’re trying to discuss Downtown Abbey’s latest episode, you’re out of there.)

Saturday, of course, was officially Beyoncé Baby Day, when, for several hours, we all believed the child’s name to be Ivy Blue Carter. Thankfully, Gwyneth Paltrow took to Twitter and corrected us: It was Blue Ivy, Twitter. Phew, thanks for clearing that up! Then Alec Baldwin pulled a Kanye and returned to his 140-character fan base just in time to promote the 30 Rock premiere this week.
And then it was Sunday again, a clean slate where we can look forward to a whole new week of Bachelor commentary, Tim Tebow touchdowns, outrage over Rick Santorum’s latest round of homophobic statements and hashtags for #stuffgirlssay.

God bless America, the Internet and sea monkeys.

Mr. J. Reilly.

Talking Points Memo reporter-blogger-videographer Ryan J. Reilly believes he caught former Pennsylvania senator and liberal whipping boy Rick Santorum in an incendiary gaffe during the GOP debate Monday night. "Rick Santorum Explains How GOP Can Attract ‘Illegal Vote — I Mean Latino — Voters’ (VIDEO)," screams the headline on the story, which was picked up by the Huffington Post and repeatedly promoted on Twitter by Mr. Reilly, TPM publisher Josh Marshall, and on the blog's official feed.

But upon a casual listen, Mr. Santorum's quote is ambiguous at best. In fact, it sounds like Mr. Santorum merely stumbled over his words and said, nonsensically, "the legal voters," then immediately corrected himself to say "Latino voters."

After criticism from the peanut gallery, TPM appended an editor's note: "Some viewers contend that Santorum said 'the legal' and not 'illegal'"--but didn't change the headline on the post, which was retweeted more than 100 times and appreciated on Facebook almost 600 times.

One TPM reader, an NYU linguistics Ph.D candidate, mapped the sound waves of Mr. Santorum saying "illegal" earlier in the debate versus the disputed quote in the clip, and calls it a "slam dunk" for the more charitable interpretation. Mr. Santorum's pronunciation of "illegal" is shorter than the quote in question, the student, Simon Charlow, wrote in an email to The Observer. He also noted that the quote in question is marked by a drop in amplitude at the beginning consistent with the word "the," and goes on:

"Altogether, it's overwhelmingly likely that Santorum said 'the legal' and not 'illegal,'" he said.

The Observer is no expert on phonetics, but we'd hedge Mr. Reilly isn't either.

"I listened to it several times and believe he says 'illegal' based both on his previous pronunciation of the word 'illegal' and the context of the statement," Mr. Reilly wrote in an email. "Saying Perry is giving benefits to 'illegal' immigrants to attract 'legal' voters simply doesn't make sense. As we noted, some readers disagreed. And it was for that reason that we added an editor's note to that effect and encouraged people to listen for themselves. We stand by the story."

Here's the tape:

But it's entirely possible that neither Specter nor the Democrats will get what they expect.

Start with Specter, who argued in a Tuesday afternoon press conference that he didn't want a verdict on his entire career rendered only by next year's Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate, a group that figures to be smaller and more conservative than ever, thanks to a flood of defections from moderates this decade.

"I am not prepared to be judged by that jury," Specter said, adding: "But I am prepared to take on all comers in the general election."

Fair enough. But he forgot a step in there: to get to the 2010 general election, he'll first have to win the Democratic primary.

Specter's oversight is understandable: the party's top leaders—including Harry Reid, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Ed Rendell—have all apparently offered full-throated support for Specter and will use their weight to try to clear the primary field for him. At his press conference, Specter said that Obama had even committed to campaign for him and that Rendell had proposed an event in D.C. on Wednesday at which all of the party's big-name leaders would offer endorsements of Specter.

This will all be helpful to Specter, but it won't necessarily be enough, for two reasons: (1) at least one other potentially formidable candidate, Representative Joe Sestak, remains interested in seeking the '10 Democratic nomination; and (2) Specter has already begun handing Sestak (or any credible primary foe) the ingredients with which to sow resentment among the Democratic base.

In fact, it's almost hard to imagine Sestak not taking a chance on a challenge to Specter. He's 57 years old and, with 49-year-old Bob Casey presumably in Pennsylvania's other Senate seat for years to come, this may be the last real opening for Sestak to move up. Plus, he's already sitting on a war chest of $3.3 million and had been positioning to run in 2010 before Specter's party switch.

On MSNBC on Tuesday, Sestak portrayed Specter's move as an act of pure self-interest and refused to offer his support. He also pointed out that national Democratic leaders had tried to keep him from running for Congress in 2006—and that he'd ignored them and won. So why shouldn't he now?

Certainly, Specter said little on Tuesday that might dissuade Sestak from thinking there's room for a primary campaign.

At his press conference, Specter declared that "the extremists of both parties are taking over"—a claim that most Democrats, who see only the G.O.P. as a bastion of crazed irrationality, would bristle at. To prove his point, Specter cited—twice!—the example of Joe Lieberman. This is the same Joe Lieberman who spent last year making devious insinuations about Obama while campaigning for John McCain. This is not the best way to introduce yourself to your new party mates.

And Specter didn't stop there. He also reaffirmed his opposition to the "card check" bill that organized labor has long championed, and to Obama's nomination of Dawn Johnsen to head the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department.

In an odd aside, Specter also lamented the role that conservative activists—the same activists who just forced him from the G.O.P.—had played in nominating unelectable candidates in a host of close Senate and House races in recent years and noted that with just one extra Senate vote in 2007, "we" (meaning the G.O.P.) could have pushed through 34 of George W. Bush's federal court nominees, all of whom were blocked by the Democrats. But wait—the "far right" that Specter is so fed up with were the ones who wanted those nominees on the bench. Shouldn't Arlen Specter, the new Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, be rejoicing that a bunch of right-wing lunatics were kept off the bench?

By the end of Specter's press conference, it wasn't hard at all to imagine Sestak mounting a strong primary challenge to him next year—no matter how much arm-twisting Obama, Reid, Biden and Rendell do on Specter's behalf.

Specter's press conference should also give Senate Democrats and the White House pause. Their glee at attaining 60 votes is understandable—but that number may have little more than symbolic value.

"I will not be an automatic 60^th vote," Specter insisted—twice—at his press conference, and there's reason to believe him.

Card check, which would allow workers to bypass the secret balloting process in organizing unions, is one example. The legislation stalled in the Senate earlier this year when Democrats failed to muster the 60 votes needed to beat a Republican filibuster. Specter, who was intensely lobbied by labor, ended up voting with the G.O.P. When word of his switch spread today, labor momentarily rejoiced: Now that Specter didn't have to worry about a G.O.P. primary, surely he'd come on board.

"I would illustrate [my independence] by my position on Employee Free Choice, the so-called card check. I think it's a bad deal," Specter said on Tuesday.

And on health care?

Appearing on MSNBC on Tuesday afternoon, Ed Schultz, one of the network's liberal talk show hosts, seemed gleeful as he discussed Specter's switch. "In the big picture, what does it mean?" Schultz asked. "Health care."

But wait a minute: Does anyone remember the last great health care debate in Washington, when Bill and Hillary Clinton drafted and campaigned for a universal plan in 1993 and 1994? The Republicans, then every bit the minority party they now are, dug their heels in and offered unified opposition.

Specter was among them. He created a massive (and massively misleading, the Clintons insisted) flow chart that made the Clinton plan look like a bureaucratic nightmare. In his televised response to Bill Clinton's 1994 State of the Union speech, then Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole trotted out Specter's chart, which quickly became one of the foremost symbols of the successful opposition to "Hillary Care."

With Specter (and Franken), all that Democrats will have is the theoretical numbers to shut off G.O.P. filibusters. But that theoretical power is meaningless unless every Democrat stands together on every single major vote; a single defection to the G.O.P. will hand the minority the ability to kill just about anything.

The last word here should go to former senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who offered the following backhanded response to Specter's switch: "I can only hope that Arlen will be as independent as a Democrat as he has been as a Republican."

“I deliver that message and hope for the best,” Black told the crowd, eating vegetables and wearing pro-life buttons in the atrium of the Hilton Garden Inn. “He always puts his country first."

In keeping with the Republicans' decision to scale back their activities and political rhetoric, Black kept his public remarks focused on the Gulf states and led a prayer asking for the protection of the people who live there. He also said, in the prayer, that he would “take this opportunity” to mention the McCains and the Palins, “that you might smile on them.”

Sarah Palin appears to need all the help she can get.

McCain officials said Palin, the vice-presidential nominee, had no public schedule Monday because she was working on her convention speech, but it didn't keep her out of the public eye.

Her statement about her teenage daughter’s pregnancy and media reports about an inquiry surrounding the dismissal of the Department of Public Safety commissioner who was Palin’s former brother-in-law intensified coverage of the newly minted running mate in the hours after Republican officials opened the convention.

As he left the event, Black addressed the question many Republicans have been asking themselves. Was she sufficiently vetted?

“Yes, we knew about it,” said Black, as he exited the hotel. Asked again whether she had been sufficiently vetted, he told me, “Absolutely, absolutely. Same as anyone else got.”

Back in the atrium, former senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania said that the news about Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy was a net positive.

“The fact that it is front page news means that the mainstream media thinks it is going to hurt Sarah Palin--it’s going to hurt with social conservatives--and the bottom line is just the opposite. It’s going to help. Social conservatives are not puritanical. They are not people who think people don’t sin, that we don’t do things wrong, that the kids don’t make mistakes. But the question is, what do you do when that happens? And what she did, was she stayed true to her values. She loved her daughter. She loved her granddaughter or grandson, and she embraced it and brought in her future son-in-law. And she did exactly what we would hope we would all do in that situation and I wonder if it might even galvanize social conservatives further around here because this is a woman under another difficult circumstance who stood up for her values and was consistent with them and that is a beautiful thing.”

Told that Barack Obama had reprimanded the press for following the story, and that he reminded reporters his own mother was 18 when he was born, Santorum was unimpressed.

“It sounds like a politician who doesn’t want to say anything--that’s what it sounds like to me,” he said. “Look, people’s families are off-limits, yeah, people’s families are off-limits--they should be off-limits--but as we all know, they haven’t been off-limits for a long time. And that’s unfortunate, but they haven’t been.”

“If he says families are off-limits then I would encourage that the Daily Kos doesn’t come out there and say that their three-and-a-half-months-old baby is not hers. So if you say people’s families are off-limits then you don’t have your minions out there spreading rumors that are false about the families.”

He went on. “It’s disturbing to see. Just watch what happens with the liberal blogs, with the liberal media and how they go after Sarah Palin for everything she’s ever done in her life, just like they went after, you know, other candidates for everything they’ve ever done in their life. So the fact that it is off-limits--I wish it were off-limits. But he is saying something he knows isn’t true.”

A few feet away, conservative leader Gary Bauer agreed that the Palin pregnancy could benefit the Republican ticket.

“I don’t think it’s a downside at all,” he said. “This family has embraced their daughter and their daughter has embraced the sanctity of life.” He argued that this was a normal family wrestling with a normal problem. “In its own way,” he said, “I think it’s kind of endearing, actually.”