You’d think I’d be more interested in the campaign of Joe Sestak to defeat Arlen Specter and win the Democratic nomination for one of Pennsylvania’s two senate seats. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to muster a whole lot of enthusiasm for the race. With the president, the governor, and key representatives of the black community like Chaka Fattah all supporting Specter, it doesn’t look like anything pleasant is going to come out of this contest. Progressives are going to be increasingly infuriated with the blind stupidity of our party leaders and so-called progressive representatives. The harder the Establishment puts their thumbs on the scale for Specter, the more disgusted and distraught and demoralized we will become.
I might be geared up for such a battle, if only I thought of Joe Sestak as a sincere progressive. But, I don’t. I can almost assure progressives that if he wins a stunning upset and becomes the next senator from Pennsylvania, we’ll wind up preferring Bob Casey on every issue that isn’t related to reproductive rights and stem-cell research.
I don’t want to do a hit piece on Sestak, and I won’t. He’ll be a much better senator than Arlen Specter for the country and over the long term. In the short-term, Pennsylvania would take a major hit. Specter was denied his seniority when he switched parties, but if he succeeds in winning reelection as a Democrat, his seniority will be restored. That would make him a cardinal on the Appropriations Committee, where he would steer untold amount of benefits to the people of Pennsylvania. It’s uncertain if Specter would win a chairmanship, but he’d have enough seniority to take over the Veteran’s Affairs, Aging, or Environment & Public Works committee. Sestak, by contrast, would take a seat behind Al Franken.
Because I put the county’s needs above any parochial concerns, I will unhesitatingly vote for Joe Sestak over Arlen Specter. He’d definitely fits into the more and better Democrat framework. But, not by enough to make me want to take part in a blood-feud pitting true progressives against fake ones, and the netroots against the Establishment.
My guess is that Specter and his enablers will infuriate me enough in short order to get me engaged in this race in opposition to them. But I’ve watched Sestak closely since he was elected. I don’t think he’s a progressive, and I think he’ll prove that if he wins.
I hope I’m wrong, because the Netroots is going into this with the petal to the metal, and they’re going to be telling you that Sestak is twice the progressive that Ned Lamont ever was.
Not from Penn., but as I see it Sestak is not Opportunist Arlen.
This is not a hit on Sestak, but we have other Democrats who are pretty conservative like Reps. Altmire, Carney, and Murtha, who also would be not-opportunist Specter. It’s not clear that any of them would compile a better voting record than Specter, though.
With Sestak, I don’t doubt that he’ll be better than Specter. But it’s a matter of degree.
And there is one other factor that I didn’t mention, but that is important. Think about how valuable Lieberman was to Bush so long as he remained a Democrat. Even in losing, Lamont took a weapon away from the Republicans. Specter’s mere existence as a turncoat gives the Democrats certain intangible benefits. He’s a signpost to where the GOP went wrong. The sign says “moderates not wanted.”
Losing a cardinal on appropriations and an important symbol are not negligible downsides, nor is the cost of a vicious intraparty death-battle that even splits the progressive community.
If we’re giving up so much, it would be better to have a champion that I can truly believe in. In this case, my support is very lukewarm. The upside simply isn’t sufficient to get me excited.
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Chris Bowers will be working for the campaign
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I wish Chris well. He deserves this opportunity. I wouldn’t have taken it, but I don’t think Chris shares my skepticism about Sestak.
Chris is to the left of me on economic issues, but that’s precisely where I’m worried about Sestak. I don’t think I’ll like Sestak’s foreign policies, either.
It’s not that I’m against long-shots. I tried and failed to get the Netroots interested in going up against Casey, but Casey was too strong. Now they want to take Specter when he’s got everyone on his side and a 73% approval rating among Democrats.
I can’t complain about their courage, and it would be a sweet, sweet victory. But not sweet enough to make me pretend I trust Sestak as a progressive. I can make the case for why Specter needs to go, though. And I will.
he doesn’t have quite everything on his side. casey, at least, was a lifelong democrat and the son of a fondly remembered former governor. specter is a long time republican who everyone knows switched parties because he was going to lose.
specter does have a lot going for him, but don’t discount the potential vulnerability specter has of being portraryed as an opportunist. i’m not sure of sestak is up to exploiting that weakness, but it is a real potential weakness.
Your probably correct Sestak will be just like Sen. McCaskill–who refuses to vote for the Dream Act–not to offend conservative rural voters.
I think he will be a Blue Dog. We sure as hell don’t need anymore of THOSE.
I may be wrong. Just a feeling I have and I am not sure if that would be better than Specter. I think we are in the mode of any democrat is better than a rethug. As we see from the healthare debacle, Dogs are pretty much as bad as rethugs.
even with the party establishment lining up behind specter, a strong primary challenge by sestak will improve specter. just the possibility of a sestak challenge already got him to vote better. if sestak’s campaign fizzles early, specter will immediately start voting to the right of lieberman, as he was before.
with health care on the line, that alone is good enough reason to support sestak. it will at least keep arlen honest for the next year.
Yeah, those are upsides I should have mentioned. And then there is the size of the task:
No kidding. I have a number of friends in Pennsylvania who view Specter very favorably, a couple of whom are people whose judgment I respect in other areas. To be fair, most of them seem to be thinking along the lines that Specter is good for Pennsylvania, and that is arguably the intended function of a senator. I’d certainly prefer to see a senator who was good for PA and good for the whole US, but as you note, the field of potential candidates who could be both is not very deep.
On the bright side, you could be here in TN, where our senators are bad for the state and bad for the country at the same time.
Um, here in Kentucky our “good” senator is Mitch McConnell…
Not for long.
um yeaaah.
of course, it’s also well known that a sizable majority of PA demcrats want specter to face a primaruy.
And while the establishment may have their mouths full of arlen’s wrinkley crinkley bag of skin, among the voters, his approval ratings are in the shitter:
I’m no fan of sestak either, but I’d rather a real democrat than a decrepit republican who’s gonna die in office.
and then we have things like this, which will make great ads:
I’m not about to be fooled into thinking Sestak’s a progressive, but then again, I’m not too impressed with the progressives right now anyway.
Good point.
I lost my country.
On that day Torture Is Now Law of the Land.
What Specter said that day: “What this bill would do is take our civilization back 900 years,” to before the adoption of the writ of habeus corpus in medieval England.”
Having said what he said, Specter voted Yea on
Number:S. 3930 (Military Commissions Act of 2006 )
Measure Title: A bill to authorize trial by military commission for violations of the law of war, and for other purposes.
Specter contributed to legalizing torture. He needs to go.
Indeed. That’s the bulk of the reason I’ve gone from thinking about emigrating to actually planning for it. There are other contributing factors, but that reason alone is both necessary and sufficient.
What a load of bullshit.
Which do you want: the old corporate-owned conservative Democrat or the new corporate-owned conservative Democrat. Booman will vote for whoever has a ‘D’ next to it’s name because that’s what spineless do-nothing couch potato interweb pwoggies do. He doesn’t care. So which do you want? Shit flavor or Turd flavor.
Okay then, what’s your plan? Got anything other than criticism to share, or are you just full of hot air and namecalling?
Just like a pwogwessive. “Whut are we gonna do? Whut are we gonna do? Please someone tell me what I should doooooo!”
How about this, pwog – just let Booman do your thinking for you and ram another fistful of Cheetos into your face.
There. Happy?
A little snippy tonight.
I was wondering if Sestak and The Specter are battling it out on the right if there’s a middle-of-the-road or better candidate who could run from the left.
Or we could send you DiFi from Cali.
Just a thought.
No there isn’t. They won’t attract the funding necessary to make it a race. If Sestak is going to win the primary, he’s gonna tack to the left. Anyway, Specter has all the establishment support, yet Sestak is raising a lot of cash. Anyone know where it is coming from? Just wondering. Is Sestak a Bernie Sanders or Paul Wellstone? No. But we don’t have that choice right now(unless BooMan or Atrios is going to run). Do you want another Lieberman/Ben Nelson in the Senate representing you, or someone better, if even only marginally?
Yeah, well, I just found out my party has been designated a terrorist group as far back as ’05, so, no, I’m not terribly fucking happy with the “two party” pwoggie/freeper system right at the moment.
So I take it this means you have no actual ideas to propose and your only useful skill is namecalling and insults? Awesome. Perhaps there’s room for you as an insult comic somewhere off-strip in Vegas. (But for the record, don’t quit your day job – “pwogwessive” is the kind of namecalling that first graders find hilarious and second graders would discard as “babyish”. But the Cheetos thing – hilarious and totally original. A put down that no one has ever done before. Make that one the center of your act.).
Plz expand on ur thesis & provide footnotes & bibliography. Kthnxbye.
Hey, clown-car, they both have D’s at the end of their name.
BooMan, I disagree with you on this one. I live in Sestak’s district. Though I’ve been disappointed in one or two of his votes, on balance I think he is a somewhat progressive guy who moderates somewhat to try to match up with his very middle-of-the-road district. I suspect that he would be a solid Democratic senator — no Russ Feingold, but definitely no Mary Landrieu either. And frankly, that would accurately reflect the political temperament of our state.
I think you have also overlooked a potential benefit of having him in the Senate: his national security credentials. That looks really nice for the ‘Mommy’ party, particularly in times like these.
In addition, I am truly impressed by the fact that he is taking on this primary run, given the magnitude of the task. His seat in the House was pretty well assured, and he could’ve hung out there for a decade or more, in all likelihood. Doing this shows some serious guts, which is in short supply on our side.
Plus, while Specter would have seniority and could direct pork back to PA, I cannot imagine he will serve more than one more term anyway. Then we get someone new with no seniority at that point. So even from the narrow parochial perspective I don’t think that’s a good reason to so much as half-heartedly accept Specter.
Sestak would be so overwhelmingly better than Specter that it’s not even funny.
your last sentence doesn’t follow logically from your argument, but I agree with the gist of what you’re saying.
Maybe it doesn’t follow logically for you because you have a somewhat higher opinion of Specter (albeit still pretty low) than I do.
I view him as only trivially better than a nominal Republican. So having a moderately good Democratic would be an overwhelming improvement.
To make it more concrete, on a progressive scale of 100 (Bernie Sanders) to 1 (Jim Inhofe), I would rate Specter at about a 45. My guess (I admit that nobody knows for sure) is that a Senator Sestak would be about a 70 or 75.
I would consider that a huge benefit. And it is rare to have the possibility of reaping such a huge benefit from a primary challenge.