I am in Pittsburgh right now, sitting in a coffeeship after the Pennsylvania State Democratic Committee meeting. Since I was elected to the committee in 2006, I have been to several of these meetings, and this is the first time there were multiple media outlets in attendance. The reason, of course, is Arlen Specter.
Full report from today's festivities in the extended entry.
Specter spoke at the assembly of the full committee, after earlier speaking at a rally for the Employee Free choice Act. He received a much, much warmer welcome at the committee meeting than at the rally. Check out the cool, sometimes hostile response he received at the rally:
Part One
Part Two
Audience members start going after him toward the end of the second video, saying things like "you want my vote? Then I want yours [on EFCA]." In response, Specter says something to the effect of "it's a free country, and you can vote for someone else." Another one of my favorite parts is when Specter takes credit for the stimulus package, even though he helped reduce it in size by more than $100 billion. Funny how he never mentions that detail, at least when speaking to crowds of Demcorats.
On EFCA, Specter emphasized today that he could support two aspects of the Employee Free choice act, "meaningful arbitration" and faster elections. The vehement response from the AFL-CIO leader who introduced Specter at the committee meeting was, and I'm not kidding, "please, please, please consider the card check portions." Given that, as recently as 2007, Specter actually supported the card check portions in a Senate vote, my guess is that he has "considered" it. His consideration was clearly that, once the bill actually had a chance of passing, he didn't actually support it. But perhaps that he considered it will be enough for Pennsylvania labor to support him.
By comparison to the rally, where applause for Specter was muted and anger toward Specter was bubbling below the surface, the state committee gave him multiple standing ovations. In that speech, Specter said that he stayed a Republican for so long in order to provide "a moderate, even liberal" voice to the Republican Party. He uttered the word "liberal" as though he was telling everyone that he was gay.
Ironically, to reassure the adoring state committee crowd of his Democratic credentials, Specter emphasized that he had once been a Democrat, but had switched to the Republican Party forty years ago. Specter said that his parents loved FDR, emphasized the word "Kennedy" when discussing his work on the Warren commission, told everyone he was once a Democratic committeeperson in Philadelphia, and also that he was still a registered Democrat when he ran for Philadelphia District Attorney in 1967 (even though he was, of course, on the Republican ticket). Personally, it was unclear to me how telling Specter telling Democrats that he once bolted both his heritage and the Democratic Party to run for office as a Republican was supposed to actually convince anyone of the sincerity of his latest conversion. However, I have often been on the minority during my time on the committee, so I have grown used to such moments of befuddlement.
It is also worth remembering that when Specter became a Republican in the late 1960's, their political fortunes were clearly ascendant. Back then, white southern and white working class backlash against civil rights movements was tearing the New Deal coalition apart at the seams. Now, forty years later, the Nixonian backlash coalition forged right around the time of Specter's first switch has been trounced out of power by a combination of demographic change and bad governance. Magically, Specter is a Democrat once again. I am sure that both of these moves were based entirely on his self-proclaimed liberal principles.
Ah, good times, but now I must return to Philly. Pittsburgh really looks like a cool town, and I can't wait for Netroots Nation to take place here. I have a feeling we might be seeing Arlen Specter's primary opponent, or opponents, speaking before rooms of Democrats then.
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