Postworthy

One day shy of the 100-day anniversary of the inauguration of Barack
Obama, Republican Senator Arlen Specter realigned, again, his
allegiance with the Democratic Party, and declared that he would run as
a Democrat in the 2010 election. This surprise announcement came 41
days after Specter emphatically stated, "To eliminate any doubt, I am a Republican, and I am running for reelection in 2010 as a Republican on the Republican ticket."His
apostasy caused surprise, dismay, and confusion within the ranks of his
longtime supporters. He gave a politician’s promise, after all. Specter
had a one-on-one meeting with Obama shortly before the votes were cast
in the Senate regarding the $787 billion stimulus package, for which
the Democrats needed three Republican defectors to pass. It would be
amazingly naive to believe that Specter did not commit to switching
parties either during that meeting or shortly thereafter. Amalgamate
the possible promise of support from Obama and Harry Reid to bolster
and give sustainability to his rapidly deteriorating political career,
 the ever-increasing probability of his being eliminated in the 2010
Republican primaries, and a historical penchant for jumping ship from
sinking political parties, and you have described the quintessential
character of Arlen Specter.

Specter’s disjointed odyssey of self-serving political affiliations
began in 1965 when he ran for the position of District Attorney in
Philadelphia. At the time, Specter worked under Democrat Jim Crumlish,
and was a registered Democrat. After being relegated to the sidelines,
and adjourned to political limbo waiting for Crumlish to move on,
Specter ran for District Attorney as a Democrat on the Republican
ticket. Specter subsequently changed his party affiliation to
Republican after winning the election. After his second term in office,
Specter ran for the Senate in 1976, but was defeated in the primary.
Specter, who has a law degree from Yale, settled into private practice
for four years before making a successful bid for a Senate seat as a
Republican in 1980.

There are a number of interesting parallels between Specter’s two
changes of political affiliation.  For example, in 1964 Lyndon Baines
Johnson was elected president in a landslide victory. The wave of the
Democratic Party was high, and Specter was rode the crest. Johnson
promised us the "Great Society": he was going to eliminate
poverty–with taxpayer money– and classify poverty as an artifact of
an outdated Republican Party. To be affiliated with the Democratic
Party was to be a political magnate, with no end in sight to the glory
days of liberalism. However, the year 1966 brought with it the painful
realization that payment was due for the fanatical spending programs of
every Democratic president since FDR, including, but not limited to,
Johnson’s "Great Society", and feverish, pathological spending by
Congress. The recompense for the "Great Society," and other forms of
wealth redistribution, amounted to higher taxes and greater inflation
rates. In 1966, according to the IRS, only 19% of tax returns paid no
taxes; in 2004, that number was 32.4%; and under the Obama scheme, it
will likely approach 50%. Consider 2009 vis-a-vis 1966: a
significantly larger percentage of the population paid into the income
tax system in the earlier time period. This caused a grassroots revolt
that was manifested in the 1966 mid-term elections after it became
tortuously clear who was going to pay for the Democrats’ grandiose
spending programs. The 1966 mid-term elections produced 47 House seats
for the Republicans, eight new Republican governors, and 557 Republican
seats in state legislatures. Specter, an archetypal politician with
nomadic principles, packed his hastily reincarnated principles, and
jumped ship at the height of this political metamorphosis to the party
of majority.

44 years later, Specter has switched parties again, and coincidently
he finds himself a member of the party that has so recently gained a
commanding majority. In spite of his vindicating bleats of
self-acquittal, and unconvincing attempts at transferring the onus of
his actions to the Republican Party, history and ignorance of the facts
are Specter’s nemesis. Specter’s primary grievance with the GOP is that
the party has moved too far to the right, thus making his ideas more
compatible with the Democratic Party’s current ideology. He stated that
his defection should serve as a "wake-up call" for the GOP. But
Specter’s deprecating babble regarding the state of the GOP and his
abandonment, says far more about Specter himself, as a man and a
politician, than it does about the GOP. In actuality, the current GOP
operates significantly more to the left of center than the GOP about
which Specter reminisces so fondly about. Conversely, beginning with
Obama’s inauguration, the Democratic Party has shifted hard left,
moving so far beyond Socialism that it is now fast-tracking a Fascist
economic and social agenda, and demonstrating a Fascist affinity for
quelling opposition. With this in mind, it is obvious that Specter’s
accusation that the GOP is moving to the right is deficient in logic,
common sense, and evidence. It is for more likely that Specter cut a
Faustian deal with the Democrats before voting for the stimulus package
in order to align himself with the party in power and preserve his
Senate career. This is especially likely when one considers that in his
last primary election, Specter won by the narrowest of margins against
Pat Toomey, while Obama won the state of Pennsylvania handily.

Arlen Specter would have you believe, and perhaps he believes that
he is a Republican cut from a moderate cloth: however, unfortunately
for Specter, Jack Kemp has set the standard for the moderate
Republican. In contrast to Specter, Jack Kemp, whose recent death
Specter blamed on the Republican Party, had a static set of standards
and principles-Specter, not so much.

As if to further validate the axiom that, "there is no honor among thieves,"
less than a week after his defection, Specter has been relegated to the
bottom rung of seniority in the five committees in which he serves,
despite Harry Reid’s promise that Specter would retain his seniority
status. This twisted turn of events negates any alchemic fantasy
Specter may have harbored of regaining any semblance of significance in
the wake of his self-serving defection.

As when Mephistopheles lets the recently blinded Faust believe that
his life’s work is in the final stages of completion, while actually
preparing his grave, perhaps a similar fate awaits Specter. Perhaps
Specter has always been a radical leftist and, as with the Democrats’
systematic suicidal spending of the mid 1960’s, when the time comes
again for American taxpayers to pay for the recent wave of
unprecedented Democrat spending, perhaps Specter’s political grave will
have been dug while he is blinded by political greed.