Arlen Specter has a new memoir out. It might be interesting to get his impressions of the first two years of the Obama administration but it’s hard for me to feel sorry for him when he complains that the president and vice-president abandoned him in his primary election against Joe Sestak. I don’t think they abandoned him until the polling data made it clear that Specter was going to lose. It’s not like it was a particularly close election; Joe Sestak won by eight points. I also have to roll my eyes a little when he claims that Harry Reid went back on a promise to respect his seniority. Specter was enough of a veteran of the Senate to know that Reid couldn’t force Democratic members to cede their seniority. And Specter is simply delusional if he thinks he would have done appreciably better with the Democratic electorate if he could have claimed the gavel of some subcommittee. It seems like he had terminal senator’s disease, and that’s the biggest reason that he lost. Of course, it was never going to be easy for 30-year Republican senator to win a closed Democratic primary. Everything considered, he didn’t do too badly.
The biggest scoop in the book?
[Bob] Dole, who served as Senate Republican leader from 1985 to 1996, was initially angry with Specter but then told him he made the right decision.
Specter recounted a long conversation at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center 18 months after the switch.
“Dole told me I had done the right thing, that I had done a terrific job as a senator, been involved in a lot of projects, been very active, and hadn’t gotten credit for a lot of the stuff I had done,” he wrote.
“I said, ‘Bob, I think that it’s very meaningful when you say that I did the right thing, in the party change.’
“He said, ‘Well,’ and then paused and thought for a few seconds. Then he said, ‘I probably would have done the same thing.’ ”
I assume that Bob Dole will deny this ever happened and call Arlen Specter a liar. Or, maybe he’ll claim he was just trying to be polite. I don’t think we’ll ever know the truth.
