Penn. Senate Race: Toomey Pulls Even with Specter

According to a recent poll, Pat Toomey has pulled even with Arlen Specter in the 2010 Senate race in Pennsylvania. But conservatives should not get their hopes up about Toomey's candidacy in a purple (at best) state where no Republican presidential candidate has won since 1988.

According to a recent poll, Pat Toomey has pulled even with Arlen Specter in the 2010 Senate race in Pennsylvania. With spiking unemployment, Specter's role in passing the increasingly unpopular stimulus package, and hostile crowds meeting Specter as he returns home to push Obamacare, conservative hopes for taking this seat from Specter -- the former RINO -- are on the rise. According to the well-trod conservative theory, all it took in Pennsylvania was a real conservative like Toomey to make his case, and the power of conservative ideas would prevail.  Those who assumed that Club for Growth orthodoxy had claimed another Republican seat when Toomey's conservative challenge provoked Specter's defection, advocated compromise where none was necessary. Conservatives should not get too far ahead of themselves in assuming the vitality of the Toomey candidacy in a purple (at best) state where no Republican presidential candidate has won since 1988. While Specter is no doubt vulnerable, this is a state where two-time incumbent Rick Santorum, member of the Republican leadership and fundraising titan, was recently crushed by 17 points. If Toomey is to prevail, he will need to do more than represent the 'Republican wing of the Republican party.' Toomey is not going to reinvent himself as a moderate.  Yet, he is fortunate to have in Arlen Specter the perfect foil for an insurgent populist candidacy.  As if his split-the-difference stimulus vote did not provide adequate evidence, Specter's essential character has emerged with great clarity since becoming a Democrat.  In short, Specter's voting record has highlighted the deeply cynical careerism that is the guiding principle of his Senate career.  Nate Silver's "Specterometer" has demonstrated the Senator's deep commitment to the virtue of his own reelection.  Prior to becoming a Democrat, Specter broke with the GOP to vote with the Democrats on contentious votes 44% of the time. After his party switch, but before the threat of Congressman Sestak's primary challenge, he voted with the Democrats on key votes 69% of the time.  But since the Sestak challenge, he has been voting with Democrats 97% of the time. Driven to save his own skin, in a few short months "Specter" has morphed from Arlen Specter, into Ben Nelson, before finally settling in with Al Franken. Pat Toomey would be wise to attack Specter and this record not simply as a conservative but as a populist.  The problem with Arlen Specter is not  simply that he has become a doctrinaire liberal and enabler of Nancy Pelosi's agenda.  Rather, he has demonstrated that he is an unserious person in quite serious times, willing to trade his support for a massive new entitlement that threatens the nation's future economic growth, in return for President Obama's efforts to clear the Democratic field in Pennsylvania and raise money for his reelection. As I speak with my conservative friends outside of Washington, I am always struck at a populist streak in their analysis that is generally absent inside the Beltway.  These conservatives have next to no faith that their representatives (even those in the GOP) -- constantly working toward their own reelection -- will make the hard choices necessary to secure our fiscal future and national well-being. And as his two-step to the left has demonstrated, few individuals represent this despised Washington careerism better than Arlen Specter. Pat Toomey will run as a conservative, and if 2010 proves a conservative year, he may prevail.  But ultimately, if he seeks a fate different than Rick Santorum's, he would be wise to promote explicitly populist policies that attack the Washington career track in the name of conservative reform.  Rick Santorum won in 1994, as the GOP nationalized the mid-terms with a populist attack on the careerism of Congress.  He won reelection during a presidential year with massive turnout.  But along the way, Santorum and the Republicans had stopped being anti-establishment.  They had become the establishment.  Santorum moved his family to the D.C. area.  He became associated with the "K Street Project." And as a traditional social and economic conservative, he eventually met his match in Bob Casey and was trounced. Whether Toomey is able to beat Specter is almost beside the point.  With a lousy economy and terrible unemployment numbers, a conservative Toomey might be able to eke out a victory over Specter.  But he will have done nothing to create a lasting Republican majority or to drag Pennsylvania closer toward the Republican column. As indicated by the weekend's near riot in Philadelphia -- as Senator Specter attempted to explain that he did not need to read legislation because in the interest of acting quickly, staff read the legislation instead -- the grafting of a populist agenda onto the Toomey candidacy might point the way toward the new and lasting majority Republicans have sought since the Nixon administration. More on that agenda later.