I watched Arlen Specter’s appearances this morning on Face the Nation and Meet the Press. Especially during the Meet the Press interview, he made a serious effort to pitch himself as a reasonable choice for Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary electorate. He said his father was a World War One veteran who never got his promised veteran’s bonus. He said his father was ‘a little guy’ and that he had gone to Washington to stand up for ‘the little guy’. After I got done cleaning up the coffee I had spit all over my living room table, I started thinking about how pathetic and unconvincing Arlen Specter is as a serious Democrat.
This is a guy that said that the Military Detainees Act was “patently unconstitutional on its face” the day before he voted for it. I don’t know if he can win the primary or not. He has the support of the governor, the president, the DNC, and the DSCC. That’s a lot of institutional support. The Democratic electorate has hundreds of thousands of people that have voted for Specter in the past. But, looking at how ridiculous he sounds as he tries to articulate his case for himself as a Democrat, I think he’ll have a real challenge surviving any reasonably well-funded opposition from a real Democrat.
