Election victories have never come easily to Arlen Specter, who launched his political career by switching his registration from Democratic, the dominant affiliation in his home city, to Republican so that he could run against his boss for district attorney in Philadelphia in 1965.
That deal with the devil helped him in the short term – he won two terms as D.A. – but it also sentenced Specter to a lifetime of treacherous political balancing: His moderate profile – pro-choice on abortion, generally liberal on cultural issues, and hardly a doctrinaire conservative on taxes – makes him exactly the sort of Republican who can actually win a general election in Pennsylvania, just as it renders him eternally vulnerable in Republican primaries.
Twice in the 1970s, Specter lost campaigns for statewide G.O.P. nominations – for the Senate in 1976 and the governorship in 1978. Finally, in 1980 he broke through, claiming the Senate seat he still holds today.
That Specter is now the longest-tenured senator in Pennsylvania history is testament to his knack for picking his spots wisely. He’ll use one high-profile controversy to cater to his general election audience by warring with his own party; then he’ll use the next one to carry the G.O.P. banner, proving to just enough conservatives that, while hardly their best friend, he’s not their enemy, either. It’s all added up to one narrow escape after another.
2010, though, is shaping up as his ultimate test. Pennsylvania is growing bluer by the day. John McCain’s desperate and woefully unsuccessful effort to win the state last fall may well mark the last serious Pennsylvania push by a G.O.P. national ticket for the foreseeable future. Against that backdrop, Specter, who will turn 79 in a month, figures to open the fall campaign as the most vulnerable Republican incumbent in the country – assuming he even survives the G.O.P. primary.
The balancing game has never been trickier. Specter’s party label (and his entrenchment) has made it more vital than ever that he reach out to Pennsylvania’s Republican-weary majority. But the right, which came within two points of taking him out in the last G.O.P. primary, smells blood. Specter is standing with the unions on the Employee Free Choice Act, an act of betrayal to conservatives. Pat Toomey, the former congressman (and current Club for Growth president) who challenged Specter in that primary, is making noise about running again next year. And if he doesn’t go, someone else will.
So now it’s time for Specter to shower some attention on his first imperative, surviving the inevitable primary challenge. He’s settled on an inviting target: Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s nominee for attorney general.
Holder is going to be confirmed, this much is obvious. But his connection to the notorious Marc Rich pardon – Holder was a deputy attorney general under Bill Clinton and helped facilitate negotiations before the fugitive tax cheat received his clemency in January 2001 – makes him a lightning rod for criticism from the right. So Specter, the chief Republican on the Judiciary Committee, which is reviewing Holder’s nomination, has taken it on himself to create some camera-friendly drama.
In the weeks before Holder’s confirmation hearing, Specter made the media rounds, solemnly detailing his various reservations about the nominee’s fitness. (He threw in some extra red meat for the right by also attaching Holder to the campaign finance scandal of Clinton’s second term.) Then, when the hearing began on Thursday, Specter, doing his best to channel the prosecutor he once as the national cable news channels carried the proceedings live, relentlessly grilled Holder about the Rich matter. And when his time was up, he promised there’d be more to come.
It was the exact kind of theater that has bailed Specter out with skeptical conservatives before. Most memorably, Specter resorted to the same trick in October 1991, when Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination was brought before the Judiciary Committee.
Then, as now, the right was irate with Specter; just four years earlier, he had helped scotch the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork, a conservative icon offered up by Ronald Reagan as the vehicle for extending his "revolution" to the highest court in the land. Purely on ideological grounds, Bork was defeated by the Democratic-dominated Senate – and Specter was the lone Republican to vote no.
That transgression produced what, in the fall of ’91, looked like a serious primary challenge. Stephen Freind, a conservative state representative who had authored a newly-enacted anti-abortion law (which became the basis for the Supreme Court’s reaffirmation of Roe vs. Wade in the summer of 1992), was running against Specter in the April ’92 primary. In the previous G.O.P. primary in 1986, Specter’s challenger was an unknown and unfunded man who claimed God had told him to run – and who nonetheless won nearly 30 percent of the vote, a sign of the right’s deep distrust of Specter. But that was before Bork. Plus, Freind was far more credible, and would have some money, too. As the Thomas hearings opened, Specter seemed to be in serious trouble.
When Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment against Thomas became public, the hearing was transformed into an international media spectacle. Specter recognized the perfect opportunity for atonement, and volunteered to serve as the G.O.P.’s chief interrogator of Hill when she testified. With even the broadcast networks carrying the proceedings, Specter accused Hill of committing perjury and spent nearly an hour hammering away at her charges. Ultimately, Thomas cleared the Senate on a barebones 52-48 vote.
Women’s groups railed against Specter and vowed retaliation. But conservatives rallied around him, and Freind’s challenge was killed on the spot. Specter ended up winning the primary, 65 to 35 percent. His ploy had worked.
Except there was a complication. The threats of those women’s groups weren’t empty, as it turned out. Outraged by Hill’s treatment by the Senate, a record number of women candidates emerged in 1992. One of them was Lynn Yeakel, a Main Line millionaire who raised money for women’s charities. Unknown a month before the April ’92 Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, she poured $250,000 into a television ad that showed Specter interrogating Hill – after which Yeakel appeared on screen to ask, "Did this make you as angry as it made me?" In four weeks, she went from one percent in the polls to a thumping primary victory over Lieutenant Governor Mark Singel. A month after the primary, polls showed her leading Specter by 16 points.
Specter’s play for the right seemed to be backfiring, with moderates revolting against him. Ultimately, Pennsylvania’s long general election campaign saved him. Yeakel ran a listless, unfocused and mistake-prone campaign, and Specter eked out a miraculous 49 to 47 percent victory.
The good news for Specter is that his Holder tactic won’t come back to haunt him like his posture with Hill did. Unlike that fiasco, most Pennsylvanians don’t even know the Holder hearings are going on. But the conservatives who vote in Republican primaries do. And when they start asking Specter tough questions next year, he’ll be more than happy to remind them that he led the fight against the man who helped Marc Rich get a pardon.
