What promises to be the ugliest primary contest of the year, pitting Sen. Arlen Specter and challenger Rep. Joe Sestak, will play out between now and Tuesday in Pennsylvania.
And no matter who wins, President Obama will lose.
When Obama made lavish promises of electoral assistance and retained seniority to get Specter to switch parties in April 2009, it was a coup.
Specter was in terrible political shape. Polls showed that he was all but unelectable in a Republican primary. President Bush had saved Specter in the 2004 primary. But there was no one to help him in his rematch with former Rep. Pat Toomey, then leading by 20 points.
While Specter was holding the line with Pennsylvania voters in general — he had a job approval rating of about 50 percent when he made the switch — Obama was rocking out at 65 percent in the commonwealth.
Like a lot of politicians then, Specter was interested in getting some of that Obama magic to rub off on him.
To Specter’s credit, and unlike the phony sermonizing of Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, he switched parties with about as much soul-searching as a man putting on a new necktie. He couldn’t win as a Republican, he explained, so he would run as a Democrat. What could be more logical?
For Obama there was nothing but upside.
Specter was a pathway to a 60-seat, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and Democrats were doing whatever he told them.
Obama had been convinced by his experience on the stimulus package in February that the way forward was not to seek bipartisanship but to force through his agenda on party-line votes.
If he couldn’t get more than three Republicans (including Specter) to vote for giving away a trillion borrowed dollars, how could he pass unpopular measures with only 59 members of the Democratic caucus?
With Specter on his team, Obama could force through his agenda quickly and then make the much-ballyhooed but never-realized “pivot” to jobs.
Specter did vote for a watered-down version of the president’s health plan. But Obama’s global-warming legislation and the rest of his agenda got burnt up in the political inferno Obama ignited with his smash-and-grab strategy.
It was so bad that in January, Obama lost the Senate supermajority he had obtained with Specter’s help. Massachusetts voters opted to replace the most liberal member of the Senate with a previously unknown Republican state legislator.
Scott Brown’s victory meant Obama had to endorse the use of a shady legislative tactic to pass the final version of his bill with 50 votes instead of 60.
Specter had outlived his political usefulness.
Soon after Specter’s switch, Sestak, a liberal from the Philadelphia suburbs, said he might take on the party switcher.
Sestak says the pressure from the White House to stay out of the race was intense. He claimed the administration criminally offered him a federal job in exchange for staying out of the primary.
For many months, it seemed that Specter would have little trouble because of Obama’s support. But in time, both Obama and Specter fell out of favor with Pennsylvanians. Obama’s job approval in the state fell below 50 percent and Specter’s slid down into the low 30s. Rather than Obama pulling Specter up, they pulled each other down.
Sestak found a foothold by challenging Obama to stick to his ideological beliefs instead of being a sellout like Specter. To a party faithful a bit demoralized by Obama’s militaristic foreign policy and corporatist domestic agenda, Sestak sounds pretty good.
Now, Specter finds him self in a dead heat.
It looked like Sestak might run away with the race until Specter went up with an ad devoted to Obama’s endorsement of him.
But there is little hope that the badly damaged Specter, who has had to run left against Sestak, can survive in a general election with Toomey. The same polls that show Specter losing in November show a tight race between Toomey and Sestak.
So, Obama’s party would be in better shape if Specter loses on Tuesday. But it would be a danger sign for Obama. If running against him, even in a Democratic primary, is the winning electoral strategy of 2010, that’s very bad news.
If the president had last year’s Specter negotiations to do over again, Obama might tell the senator that he didn’t need another friend in Pennsylvania.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of the Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
