Specter, Sestak And Toomey
Digg 
Stumble Upon 
Newsvine 
Slashdot 
Mixx 
Diigo 
Delicious 
Reddit 
Facebook
Reihan concludes an otherwise good argument with this odd paragraph:
With Specter running in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary in 2010, Republicans have a perfect test case. There’s an excellent chance that a primary candidate from the Democratic left will give Specter a serious fight, opening him up to a vigorous challenge from a Republican reformer. That challenge will probably come from Pat Toomey, who, as head of the Club for Growth, has emphasized tax cuts above all else. But as a Senate candidate, Toomey will have to connect with voters in a state hard hit by industrial decline. To have even the remotest chance of winning the seat, he’ll need to offer effective solutions on health care, energy and transportation. This might not come naturally to Toomey. But if he can pull it off, and if he can claim Specter’s scalp, he’ll become the face of a revitalized GOP.
I understand why progressives would be eager to see a primary challenge against Specter, because there are several candidates, chief among them Joe Sestak, who could in all likelihood wipe the floor with Specter if they wanted. Specter has some advantages of incumbency, it’s true, but he doesn’t have the loyalty of the Democratic primary electorate, and a Sestak challenge would be difficult to overcome. (For starters, Sestak has good relations with organized labor, which Specter has lately been opposing on EFCA.) What I don’t understand is why Reihan, or anyone interested in Pat Toomey’s success, believes that Toomey has a better chance against a freshly-minted Democratic nominee such as Sestak than he would against the old, shabby, unprincipled Specter. Specter may still be broadly popular in the state, but his party-switching could be used effectively against him. Long-time Democratic pols have no such liabilities.
Running against Specter, Toomey could run a character campaign–the default option whenever a candidate knows his policies are not well-received by the electorate–and criticize Specter’s defection as proof that he is untrustworthy and unreliable. By contrast, he could then stress his blue-collar background and shared values, and set himself up as the new outsider trying to oust the time-serving establishment hack. “You may not always agree with me, but I’ll keep my promises and you’ll know where I stand”–that sort of thing. Against Sestak, who could probably topple Specter if he ran, Toomey has no chance, and there is no obvious line of attack against Sestak, except, I suppose, to try to make the election a referendum on Obama’s policies, which seems like an automatic loser in a state Obama carried by a wide margin.
Not only would Sestak have an advantage in enthusiasm and turnout, neither of which Specter could count on, but he would also head off any third party challenge from the left that might come about if the general election pitted two pro-war candidates in a heavily antiwar state, as it would if Specter were the Democratic nominee. Sestak has impeccable credentials on national security–he is a retired rear admiral who served as part of the operations in Afghanistan–and he opposed the Iraq war. Even though Pennsylvanians are likely to be much more concerned about domestic matters, a stark contrast between an antiwar former military officer and a pro-war political activist does not work to the Republicans’ advantage. A Sestak-Toomey match-up would be a possibly more lopsided replay of the 2006 results. This is why Toomey’s challenge never made much sense, even if Specter had not flipped to the other side, because in a general election that isn’t against Specter I don’t see how Toomey possibly wins*. His chances are considerably worse against a real Democrat. That being the case, perhaps forcing Specter to jump ship before the primary is all part of a cunning grand strategy to make the Democrats run a badly flawed candidate in a race they would otherwise almost be sure to win. If so, such a strategy would require the Democratic electorate to roll over and accept Specter without much protest, and this is apparently not going to happen.
* The desperate national Republican moves to recruit Tom Ridge or some other Specter-like replacement makes Toomey’s nomination all the more likely, as it was heavy-handed national Republican interference on behalf of Specter five years ago that thwarted Toomey’s run then and enraged conservative activists. Having lost Specter, they cannot now stop Toomey.
Filed under: politics
“This is why Toomey’s challenge never made much sense”
Primary challenges against RINOs should be run based on principle alone. Conservative ideas may not be widely popular at the moment, but you surely cannot win if you do not try. You can’t advance them if you don’t have someone advocating them. (Not that Toomey is an ideal advocate.) As Howard Phillips say, “To achieve victory first you must seek it.” No one is going to hand it to you.
Yes, one should try to seek victory, but it doesn’t make a headlong assault against a well-defended position any wiser by saying, “If you don’t try to take the position, you’ll never take it.” The men who charged into the guns at Balaclava were theoretically seeking victory. They did not achieve it.
Explain to me what Toomey is hoping to accomplish. To prove a point? To register a protest? If so, that’s fine as far as it goes. I have no problem with protest candidacies and protest voting. However, if we judge these things by the likelihood of success at the polls, it just doesn’t make sense.
I want to give Toomey enough credit that he decided to run for Senate not just to get even with Specter, but because he thought he had some chance at winning in the general election. If that is what he believed going in, I’m afraid I just don’t see it. Now maybe Toomey can prove me wrong, run an excellent campaign and beat whoever comes up against him. Everything I have seen happen in Pennsylvania politics over the last three years tells me this cannot happen.
What is the end result going to be? Unless Toomey pulls out a win in the general election, which I would have to rate as a major upset, all that will have been accomplished is to serve up one more case for meliorists everywhere to cite as proof that whatever part of Toomey’s message they want to discredit is political poison. Pro-choicers and welfarists will take his defeat as vindication, because their opponents made the mistake of putting up a candidate in a state where any conservative Republican is going to have an incredibly difficult time winning.
The latest polling strongly suggests that Toomey isn’t inevitable:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/05/poll-ridge-leads-toomey-in-2010-pennsylvania-senate-primary—-by-a-landslide.php
I also think you missed the truly odd part of that paragraph by Reihan. It’s a classic “…and a pony” argument.
Sure,Toomey would stand a much better chance if he stopped his “tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts” chant long enough to offer reasonable suggestions on health care, energy, and transportation. He’d also stand a much better chance if he cured cancer, reconciled Israel and Palestine, and gave every Pennsylvanian a shiny new pony. Reihan fails to mention how such an unlikely sequence of events can or should happen, though.
“A specter is haunting Pennsylvania . . . .”
I was a little gob-smacked to read Specter’s gratuitous comments regarding the Norm Coleman comedy today. Talk about an unforced error. If he wants to guarantee a primary fight, that’s the way to do it.
There have been grumblings in the Democratic left about some deal between Reid and Specter that basically guaranteed that Specter would not have a primary challenge. I’ll see if I can find a link.
I highly doubt that a primary challenge to Specter would turn out the way that some Democrats hope it will. Should Specter have to defend his left flank in the primary and then his right in the general, I think the inevitable flip-flopping will be easily exploitable by even a moderately well-run campaign. Even if Sestak beats out Specter in a primary, there’s no guarantee that Obama’s coattails will be long enough in a year that Sestak can just ride them in.
Party professionals know that Specter is at least nominally a Democrat now, and is a ranking member of high-profile committees, including the one that initially goes over Supreme Court nominations. If the Democrats succeed in challenging Specter, they lose that, and the party leaders know that.
[...] and the party leaders know that.
Pretend I didn’t write that last phrase. It’s superfluous, and I don’t know what I was thinking.
Blargh, guess I was wrong.
I must have confused Reid’s (non-existant) no-primary-challenge deal with Reid’s (very real) no-loss-of-committee-seniority deal.
You said: That being the case, perhaps forcing Specter to jump ship before the primary is all part of a cunning grand strategy to make the Democrats run a badly flawed candidate in a race they would otherwise almost be sure to win.
I personally thing there is a long term “grand strategy” but it’s not the Republicans, it from the Democrats.
I think the real play is for the ladies of the north, Collins and Snowe.
I think that grabbing Specter was a precursor to those two doing the same thing, and jumping ship, and saying they are forced out as the party turns harder right, and purges the moderates (which will have more than a grain of truth to it). Remember, they have TREMENDOUS popularity in their state, and don’t need to switch in the face of primary challenges.
So getting them to switch (and I think they’d go as a pair) would give a huge boost to the administration. It’ll take awhile, but look for it.
The Democrats took this bet (bringing him aboard) and now have the chance to portray Specter as the irascible old uncle, and prove to everyone out there that see, the Democratic party can handle internal dissent, and accept it, while the Republicans simply purges moderates and call them traitors.
That gives the super majority and then some to the Democrats, reinforces the irrelevance of Republicans, and in 2010 they go up a seat or more.
Then the arguments are between moderate Dems and the progressive wing of the Democratic party… with the Republicans waving their hands and going to tea-parties, and shouting socialism, or fascism, or communism or whatever.
So Specter could be a huge game changer, IMHO.
And cherchez les femmes.
In the first place, what good does it do Democrats to have Specter call himself a Democrat if he continues to vote Republican? What do the Democrats really have to lose by challenging Specter in the primary, and probably defeating him? Yes, Specter’s a sure thing if he doesn’t get beaten up in the primaries, but it’s a sure thing for Specter, not the Democrats. The guy is clearly out for himself, and doesn’t give a damn about the Democratic agenda, so why should Democrats coddle him? It’s more in the Democrats interest to beat Specter in the primaries, which I think should be pretty easy, in that he’s clearly an opportunistic turncoat who Democrats have no loyalty to, and because Sestak is a strong candidate in his own right. Can Sestak beat Toomey in the general? In all likelihood, hell yes. So the best outcome for Democrats is to back Sestak, beat Specter, and win the general. At least then there’d by a real Democrat in the Senate, not some phony like Specter who won’t vote Democratic anyway. If Toomey wins, at least it’ll be because Pennsylvanians really want a far right senator. I don’t see that happening, but if it does, it probably means huge changes have occurred in the country that overshadow this race. Pennsylvania is not hard for Democrats to win in. It’s a blue state and already rejected Rick Santorum for having policies similar to Toomey. Unless theirs some kind of major conservative backlash in 2010, which if the economy recovers as it seems to be doing is probably impossible, this seat is going Democratic. In that case, the worst outcome that seems genuinely possible is to have Specter be that Democrat.