Specter's Gambit

Might not survive the 2010 backlash after all.

Update:

A lot of this can still get ironed out before election time. Maybe it's Specter's arrogance (or "cockiness") which has put him in a hole... but it also represents an opportunity for labor to get back in the game.

There's another angle here too. Labor is really licking its wounds over what appears to be the very steep climb EFCA faces in this Congress. And the Democratic establishment in Washington moved very quickly to crown Specter as the Democratic nominee. It would not surprise me if labor and affiliated organizations might not mind engaging in a amicable Specter-Sestak proxy battle with President Obama and the lords of the senate to make the point that as much as everything's great and everyone's pals, they've got their own independent bases of power and political muscle.

In the political script yet to be written, Obama and the Dems are due to lose political momentum in 2010 precisely because they have been too kind to the banks and too dismissive of labor. 2010 is going to be a populist backlash election. The Dems still have the option of capturing some of the anger for their own party's cause. This requires primarily two things in my opinion. 1) Breaking free of the death grip of the finance lobby. (Not likely to happen) and/or 2) Passing EFCA... which wasn't likely to happen before this opportunity arose. Exploiting a pressure point like Specter is a good way for labor to try to get back on the President's agenda... and offer him an opportunity to rescue himself.

Specter

On the one hand, I'm tempted to say that this means he's pretty much toast politically.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. What has happened here is Arlen Specter has been forced out by a calcifying, radicalizing GOP. He was about to become a sacrifice to that radicalization and clearly didn't have anywhere else to go. Conventional wisdom at this point in time will claim this as a portent of Republican weakness in 2010. I have other ideas but it's still a bit too early to tell. Either way, I'll be very interested to see what a Toomey vs Specter general election looks like.

Update: Josh Marshall has some preliminary thoughts:

Democratic registrations swelled in Pennsylvania last year at the expense of Republicans. A lot of that was moderate Republicans who wanted to vote for Obama in the primary or the general. Or for that matter, moderate Republicans who wanted to vote for Hillary. Whatever your interpretation of why they were switching, that left the Republican primary electorate much more conservative than it was in the past, certainly much more than it was when he ran against Toomey the first time in 2004.

The question is just how "moderate" will those "moderate Republicans" who crossed over in 2008 remain?