Specter's First Defection

How they cursed Arlen Specter! By switching parties, they claimed, he had put his own political fortunes ahead of loyalty and principle. He was “Benedict Arlen,” “Specter the Defector.” It all sounds quite familiar, but the year was 1965 and the Specter-cursers were Democrats enraged that he had abandoned them to run on the Republican ticket in the Philadelphia district attorney’s race.

To understand the significance of Senator Specter’s recent decision to return to the Democratic Party fold, it’s illuminating to revisit his earlier defection. In 1965, Arlen Specter was thirty-four years old, a lifelong Democrat, and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Yale Law School, who had won a reputation as a vigorous but fair assistant district attorney in Philadelphia. Specter’s turn away from the Democratic Party began when the city’s Democratic chieftain, Francis Smith, nixed his bid to become the party nominee for the district attorney’s position. So, without even waiting to change his party registration, Specter became the Republican Party’s challenger to the incumbent district attorney James Crumlish, who happened to be Specter’s boss.

It would be foolish to deny that Specter’s personal ambitions were responsible for his party jump, but it would be equally foolish to deny that his real personal convictions also played a role. The Philadelphia Democratic machine – known locally as “the Octopus of Walnut Street” – was deeply corrupt. Its tentacular stranglehold meant expensive, inefficient, and ineffective city government at a time of worsening crime and urban decay. Specter was repulsed by this state of affairs and attracted to the Republican good-government tradition.

Several senior Republican leaders, particularly Pennsylvania governor William Scranton and Senator Hugh Scott, personally convinced Specter that he could be the octopus-slayer the city needed. Both prominent moderates, Scranton and Scott were able to convince more conservative Republicans to accept a defecting Democrat and an overall moderate campaign geared to win over Democratic voters. They argued that this was a practical necessity in the City of Brotherly Love, where Democrats held a nearly two-to-one registration advantage, conservative Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater had lost by 441,000 votes in 1964, and the GOP had not won a municipal office in a dozen years.

Specter ran as a reformer and problem-solver, a man of integrity with no ties to any political machine. Modeling his campaign along the lines of liberal Republican John Lindsay’s run at the New York City mayoralty, Specter presented a series of well thought-out position papers on Philadelphia’s social and economic problems. He also presented himself as the more youthful, harder-working candidate, putting in twenty-hour days fueled by a diet of raw meat and megavitamins.

Specter proved difficult to fit into the received political categories. Democratic boss Smith sent thousands of letters to the city’s Republican employees charging that Specter was the “puppet” of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, which was supporting Specter over his Democratic opponent. While many Republican regulars worked hard on Specter’s behalf, many also questioned whether he was a Republican in a meaningful sense. When Specter won the election by 36,000 votes, a reporter overheard one of his Republican campaign workers mock-exult, “Hooray, we’ve elected a Democrat.”

Specter himself believed that “the Republican Party must win over Democrats if the Republican Party is to become the dominant party,” but that the GOP could do so in a constructive way while remaining true to the example of Theodore Roosevelt, who “first protected the average citizen from the trusts and abuses of big business.” Specter also put himself forward as the more fiscally conservative candidate, and attacked Democratic mayor James Tate’s ill-timed mid-campaign proposal to boost taxes.

Specter invoked the Republican heritage of civil rights and succeeded in garnering the support of a sizable fraction of Philadelphia’s growing minority population. This was of particular significance in a racially-tense city that had experienced a major riot the year before, resulting in no deaths but hundreds of injured (including 66 policemen) and hundreds of stores looted and burned. Specter opposed the heavy-handed tactics of Democratic police commissioner (and later mayor) Frank Rizzo, proposing instead to elevate the lot of Philadelphia’s African-Americans through a program of jobs, educational improvements, and cracking open the city’s racist construction unions.

At the same time, Specter presented himself as a hardliner on crime, with one of his television commercials famously presenting a white woman fleeing down a dark street pursued by the heavier footfalls of a shadowy rapist. The result was that Specter received the votes both of racial liberals and of backlash voters, particularly in areas where blacks were moving into previously Jewish neighborhoods such as Mount Airy and Germantown.

From the time of his first election, then, Specter has always represented independence, personal ambition, political savvy, and liberal and conservative elements mixed up in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. (He has also been consistently abrasive, referring in 1965 to Philadelphia’s James Tate as the “dumbest mayor ever in a big city.”) It has been a mixture that over time has proved quite successful in a state whose demographics do not tend to favor Republicans. However, what has changed for Specter has been the willingness of Republican leaders and party faithful to tolerate his independence and his deviations, and their apparent preference for defeat over compromise. The result is that the GOP has now lost one of its most prominent and long-serving senators at a time when it can ill afford such losses.

Today’s Republicans might want to consider the counsel offered by a conservative member of the House in 1984, at a time when Specter was the party’s leading dissident, voting against the party line far more frequently than he has in recent years. “There’s still a place [in the GOP] for moderates, liberals, and progressives,” this conservative observed. “I don’t want to drum anybody out of the party. One of the Democrats’ greatest strengths is their ability to encompass a broad range of views within the party. We can’t become the majority party by trying to read people out.” Who was that voice of conservative tolerance? It was Congressman Richard Cheney. Now Cheney’s heirs have driven Arlen Specter back into the Democratic Party he left four decades ago.