HARRISBURG, Pa. – Arlen Specter, who spent much of his pugnacious 30-year career in the U.S. Senate warning of the dangers of political intolerance, lost a battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at a time when Congress is more politically polarized than anyone serving there — or living in America — can remember.
Specter, 82, who died Sunday, is remembered as one of Congress’ best-known moderates.
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He was a member of both major parties during his career, and even mounted a short-lived run for president in 1995 on a platform that warned his fellow Republicans of the “intolerant right.” Now, two years after he was voted out of office, his death coincides with a finding by political scientists that Congress is more polarized than at any point since Reconstruction.
ONE VOTE COST HIM HIS CAREER
Specter lost his job amid the very polarization that he had repeatedly attacked: He crossed political party lines to make the toughest vote he had ever cast in his career when, in 2009, he became one of three Republicans to vote for President Obama’s economic stimulus bill.
Republican fury drove Specter to the Democratic Party, where he lost the 2010 primary.
“When he cast a vote on the stimulus, I think he knew he had no future in the Republican Party,” said Ed Rendell, a former Pennsylvania governor who began his career in public service as a deputy district attorney under Specter in Philadelphia.
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, who served six terms in the U.S. House and as President George W. Bush’s first homeland security secretary, said he thinks a serious third party could emerge on the national stage in 2016 unless bipartisan agreement is reached on major issues, including the debt and immigration.
“I think the American public is fed up with the inability of both parties to find common ground,” Ridge said Sunday.
U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., who served four years with Specter and is seeking re-election as a moderate, said Sunday that he believes moderates can still bring people together.
“It’s not going to happen naturally or by accident,” Casey said. “Each individual member of Congress has to take on personal responsibility. … He has to keep the poison out of the water to avoid the kind of demonization that happens when people debate issues.”
Specter, Casey said, was one of those people who could disagree without demonizing.
The other two Republicans who supported President Obama’s stimulus are Maine’s two U.S. senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. The three negotiated with the West Wing to cut the price tag of the controversial stimulus to less than $800 billion in exchange for their critical support.
Snowe announced in February that she wasn’t seeking re-election. She said she was frustrated by “‘my way or the highway’ ideologies.”
On Sunday, Snowe recalled how she and Specter were part of a group of moderate Republicans who were “dedicated to bridging the partisan divide” and met regularly for lunch.
“Over Arlen’s remarkable career spanning three decades in the Senate, time and again he reached across the aisle to build consensus on vital legislation to advance his beloved Pennsylvania and the nation,” she said in a prepared statement.
“Serving as chairman of both the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Arlen was driven by a common-sense pragmatism that advocated for a revitalization and advancement of the political center,” Snowe said.
‘HE WAS A MASTER POLITICIAN’
In one study of congressional polarization, University of Georgia professor of political science Keith Poole mapped the political polarization of Congress by charting votes. He found that the parties are more divided than at any time since Reconstruction after drifting further apart in the last 40 years.
Poole said in an essay that there are no true moderates left in the House of Representatives, and just a handful remaining in the Senate, in contrast to the Reagan era, when about half of the members of Congress could be described as moderates.
For Specter, the benefit of crossing party lines wasn’t always about being true to his convictions. He also used it to benefit the causes he championed.
“He was a master politician,” Rendell said. “He was as smart as a whip.”
In his 2004 run for re-election, Specter was endorsed by both the AFL-CIO of Pennsylvania and the arch-conservative Rick Santorum, then Pennsylvania’s junior senator.
Santorum later said Specter had pledged to support then-President George W. Bush’s nominees to the Supreme Court, regardless of their views on abortion rights. Specter, who supported abortion rights, had said he never would make such a promise under any circumstance.
At a news conference the day after the 2004 general election, Specter called Roe v. Wade “inviolate.” That riled conservatives, and in order to become Judiciary Committee chairman, Specter was required to issue a statement of principles of how he would handle Supreme Court nominees.
In 2001, Specter voted for Bush’s package of tax cuts, but voted with Democrats to route $450 billion into education and debt reduction. He negotiated $10 billion for medical research when he agreed to vote for the stimulus.
In a prepared statement Sunday, Collins noted Specter’s advocacy for the National Institutes of Health, which led to increased research funding.
“Arlen Spector demonstrated courage through his service in the Senate, but his brave determination was especially evident when he faced many health challenges over the years,” she said. “Throughout these battles, Arlen continued to work hard for the people of Pennsylvania and our nation.”
SENATOR STUCK TO HIS PRINCIPLES
Specter, who grew up in Depression-era Kansas, justified his vote for the stimulus as the only way to keep America from sliding into another depression.
But Specter had barely won his 2004 Republican primary and decided that the stimulus vote had ensured that his political career would not survive another Republican primary. At the urging of good friends Vice President Joe Biden and Rendell, both Democrats, he switched parties.
Raised politically in an era when party bosses had real power, Specter believed that the endorsements of Obama, Biden and Rendell could clear the way for him to secure the Democratic nomination in 2010.
Still, many Democratic primary voters had never voted for Specter, and they weren’t about to start.
In the last hour before voters sent him packing, Specter invoked a favorite cartoon fighter to sum up why he never changed his style — even as he twice changed his party affiliation.
Just minutes before polls closed in the May 2010 Democratic primary, Specter told reporters, “Remember Popeye, who used to say, ‘I am what I am’? I don’t think anyone could dress me in different attire. I am what I am.”
— The Associated Press and The Washington Post contributed to this report.
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