Arlen Specter
The trouble with you, Senator Specter, or anyway one of the troubles with you, is that your political allegiance keeps changing.
Sometimes you’re a Democrat, as in some of your early runs for office, and sometimes (more often, actually) you’re a Republican, as in your five terms (so far) in the Senate, and sometimes when you were a Republican you were of the most despicable variety; as when you unleashed your pit-bull brutality on poor Anita Hill at the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearings. If there is one person other than slippery Justice Thomas himself who is responsible for elevating him that far beyond his due, you have to take the blame for that. But then you stood up against the ranked Republican leadership in voting “Not Proven” for President Clinton in the impeachment hearings, so what are we to make of all that?
What I make of it is that you don’t feel that you have changed, but that the Republican Party has — changed to something which is basically a confederation of single-issue voters (anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-marijuana, anti-etc.) which has pretty well taken over Republican primary voting and thus would be likely to vote you out of a job next November. That makes sense. I’ll be interested to see if others who are that contradiction in terms, the liberal Republicans, will follow your example.
All the same it wouldn’t hurt you to apologize to Anita Hill while you’re at it.
