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Pretzel Logic
With Specter gone, who’s going to keep the GOP from veering even farther right?
If you ever wanted to know how far off-kilter the Republican party has fallen, consider this.
Bob Dole is probably the most moderate of the candidates still in the race for the ’96 GOP presidential nomination.
This chilling tidbit was the first thing to hit me upon reading the news that Arlen Specter was pulling out of the race.
After months of speculation, following the initial skepticism that he could make it to San Diego, Specter finally admitted that, without money or any tangible interest in his campaign on the part of his party’s true moderates, there was no point in going on.
John Glenn, the Ohio space cadet who ran for president himself, not too long ago reminded Specter of the perils of owing millions in campaign debt. Apparently, Specter heeded Glenn’s warning, getting out before the debt started building up.
It’s a true loss for this country.
Not that I think Arlen Specter was a nice guy or a particularly warm human being. What is really sad about Specter’s departure from the race is that, with his exit, the Republican party loses its last voice of sanity on social issues.
More than being merely a social moderate who was the lone GOP advocate for reproductive rights, Specter was the only candidate to stand up to the lunatic rantings of the Christian Right.
Not only did Specter ignore the pressure tactics applied by Randall Terry and the other arbiters of American morality, he actually took them on, staking his entire campaign on the premise that not all Republicans are ultra-conservative crackpots who will do anything they can to impose their vision of biblical purity on the American public.
There was a lot riding on that bet, and it says a lot about the state of the Republican party that Specter lost the wager so completely, so early.
Specter’s pitiful showing, in polls and, most importantly, at the feeding trough of campaign financing, says to me that front-running Bob Dole will have no choice now but to bend to the whims of Ralph Terry and the Tweedledum-Tweedledee pair of presidential hopefuls Pat Buchanan and Phil Gramm, whose main goals politically consist of thumping their chests to prove who is the true conservative.
Without Specter, there is no more yin to that yang.
Without Specter at least siphoning off money and support from Dole, there is no reason the Senator from Kansas, who grew up in the same home town as Specter, will listen to anyone in his party who thinks that the Christian Right’s crackpot agenda is a dangerous thing.
There are many reasons why Specter failed.
The first is that he is Arlen Specter, he of the magic bullet and the grilling of Anita Hill.
Second, he is Arlen Specter, who is so devoid of charm that any attempt to smile comes off as a sneer.
The Specter people will tell you that Colin Powell “sucked the oxygen” out of the moderate wing of the party during his flirtation with running.
And there are no shortage of people who will tell you that this country is just not ready for a Jewish president.
But all that is just a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking and whining and excuse-making.
For whatever reason, the promise of support for Specter from GOP moderates like Ann Stone of Republicans For Choice never materialized. Stone said there would be money aplenty for a GOP pro-choice candidate. A look at Specter’s balance sheet will tell you that no such funding ever found its way into his coffers. And because of that, the party will wind up with a Bob Dole atop the ticket who has not been pushed to the center, but yanked to the far right.
That is a tremendous failure.
What reason, for instance, does Dole now have for not supporting the current party plank opposing abortion?
Look what it got Specter.
What reason does Dole have for opposing prayer in schools or the complete trashing of environmental regulations or the complete slashing of programs to help the poor?
Not that Bob Dole has exactly been a champion of moderate social policy.
But Specter’s miserable campaign — which saw him hovering in the low single digits in the polls — put absolutely no pressure on Dole to even compromise on any of these issues.
And without the pretense of a true social moderate in the campaign, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, along with their soulmate Bob Dornan, will have an even greater say in the future of the Republican party.
There is some good news in all this.
With the demise of Specter’s campaign, the GOP has officially abdicated political center, the place where most Americans reside.
The 1996 GOP presidential primary and convention look to be a bloodbath, with candidates tripping over each other to smack lips on the keisters of the Christian Right.
Most of America, thank the dieties, is not the Christian Right, no more than it is the ultra-liberal left.
By so completely ignoring Specter, the GOP has given up any chance it had of taking the White House away from Bill Clinton, who, as president, has danced a meandering jig all over centrist politics.
Bill Clinton may be the waffle king, whose idea of governance is to stick his finger in the wind of opinion polls and proceed according to which way the political wind is blowing. But at least he realizes that the wind does not blow as far to the right as ultra-conservatives would have us believe.
And speaking of political winds, Arlen Specter thought he could make a difference by tilting at conservative windmills.
Too bad for him that the conservatives ate him for breakfast.
But a good thing for the country, really, that the Specterless herd of GOP presidential hopefuls will sink in a quagmire of right-wing lunacy.
