There’s no noble principle behind Arlen Specter’s departure from the GOP. It’s political survival, pure and simple. With Pat Toomey ahead in the Pennsylvania polls by 21%, this is the only way Specter clings to the few crumbs left to him. I won’t waste perfectly good electrons discussing him any further.
I will waste a few electrons on Olympia Snowe and Lindsay Graham, however. These two nitwits blame Specter’s departure not on his own coarse self-interest, but on those nasty conservatives who actually believe that Republicans should stand for something other than Democrat-lite. From The Politico:
Two leading Republicans say Sen. Arlen Specter’s decision to become a Democrat highlights the hostility moderates feel from an increasingly conservative GOP.
“You haven’t certainly heard warm encouraging words about how [the GOP] views moderates,” said Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, one of the few remaining moderate Republicans in the Senate.
Snowe said the party’s message has been, “Either you’re with us or you’re against us.”
Her frustration was shared by Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), who slammed right-wing interest groups for pushing moderates out of the party. . . .
“I don’t want to be a member of the Club for Growth,” said Graham. “I want to be a member of a vibrant national Republican party that can attract people from all corners of the country — and we can govern the country from a center-right perspective.”
“As Republicans, we got a problem,” he said.
Gee, Lindsay, it must suck to be you. So fragile and easily threatened by all those nasty ‘right wing interest groups’. But it was Olympia Snowe who saved the choicest abuse for all of us non-RINOs. She lectured the party on what it takes to win a ‘blue collar state’.
Snowe criticized party leadership for failing to change its tone after Republicans lost six Senate seats in the 2006 election.
“I happened to win with 74 percent of the vote in a blue-collar state, but no one asked me, ‘How did you do it?’” she said. “Seems to me that would have been the first question that would have come from the Republican Party to find out so we could avoid further losses.”
“Ultimately, we’re heading to having the smallest political tent in history, the way things are unfolding,” Snowe said.
Sorry, Sen. Snowe, not true. Maine is not a ‘blue-collar’ state. It’s four southern counties dominated by leftists who have the numbers to overwhelm the rest of the state.
Prediction: Sen. Snowe will be the next RINO to exit the party – trailing great clouds of nobility as she betrays the people like me who’ve both campaigned and voted for her since 1994, when she defeated a serious leftist named Tom Andrews to become senator.
Senator, as I campaigned for you door-to-door in Portland in 1994, I visited with a Ukrainian family recently arrived from Odessa. They assured me that they would be voting Republican, because – and I quote – ‘there were too many Democrats in the old Soviet Union’.
Think about that statement as you contemplate your future.
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