IF there were ever a senator a party would want to show the door, it's Arlen Specter. Personally disagreeable, philosophically unmoored and fundamentally self-interested, he represents the worst of the US Senate.
So the collective cry of good riddance on the right that greeted his departure from the GOP is understandable. Specter joined the Republican Party in the '60s for opportunistic reasons, and he left it last week for opportunistic reasons -- a primary challenge from the talented conservative Pat Toomey he probably wouldn't have been able to overcome.
A better politician wouldn't have so lost the affection and loyalty of his own party -- and Specter didn't stake his career on any great matter of principle, as Joe Lieberman did on the Iraq War. Specter was reliably unreliable. He dissented from his former party not just on social issues, but on everything else.
The danger to the GOP is making good riddance an ongoing rallying cry. South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint pronounced on Specter's departure, "I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don't have a set of beliefs."
This is a bracing statement of suicidal purity. If Republicans had just 30 senators, it wouldn't matter if they scored 100 percent on the Ayn Rand score card -- they'd be an irrelevant rump watching the Democrats pass something like the New Deal and Great Society rolled into one.
Lowry makes a good point, but all you need to do is look at the great state of Ohio to see what the Voinovich/Taft GOP legacy did for the state. It ruined it to the point that we may never get it back and now we're on the fast track to Michigan South.
The way I see it with republicans like Taft and Specter, who needs republicans. We already have democrats.
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