Former Sen. Arlen Specter deserted his party and lost his job, Sen. Olympia Snowe just announced plans to resign, and now only one RINO, or Republican In Name Only, that was part of Specter’s “Mod Squad,” is left: Maine Sen. Susan Collins.
Specter, the Republican turned Democrat, reveals in his new book out Tuesday that the moderate trio would meet Wednesdays for lunch where he dubbed them the “Mod Squad,” after the 1970s TV show. It featured one female and two male undercover cops.
Specter, who lost in a 2010 primary, wrote in “Life Among the Cannibals”: “With the rise of the intolerant right and the incompetent left, centrists became an endangered species, especially in the GOP. The moderate Republican Wednesday Lunch Club, once nearly two dozen strong, shrank over the years to ‘the gals from Maine’–Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins–and me. Our lunches moved to my small Capitol hide-away office and we became know as the ‘Mod Squad,’ a takeoff on the Vietnam-era counterculture TV series.”
