A Challenger Haunts Specter
Why is the Bush administration opposing a conservative in Pennsylvania?
by Stephen F. Hayes
Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
Lewisburg, Pa.
THERE IS LITTLE DOUBT that if President Bush could handpick the next senator from Pennsylvania, he would choose Pat Toomey. A young, smart, and likable conservative, Toomey currently serves in the House of Representatives from Lehigh Valley. He lines up with the Bush administration on nearly all of its policies, foreign and domestic, and articulates them in a no-nonsense, common-sense manner. He would be a tremendous asset in the Senate in a second Bush term.
Not only is the White House political machine not supporting Toomey, however, but Karl Rove and the entire Republican establishment are working against him. That includes Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania's other senator and a solid conservative. Toomey is challenging Senator Arlen Specter, also a Republican, whose chief (some might say only) virtue is that he is the incumbent. And in Washington, D.C., that makes all the difference.
The White House initially took a hands-off approach to the primary challenge. Says Toomey, "Nobody from the White House or from Senator Santorum's office has ever approached me directly or indirectly or through intermediaries and suggested that I not do this," though he allows that they didn't encourage him to do it either. Rove and company have not generally been reluctant to intervene on behalf of their preferred candidates, so their inaction in Pennsylvania was something of a surprise.
But they are making up for their slow start. President Bush has already made one campaign appearance for Specter, and he has scheduled a second, potentially decisive visit for April 19, eight days before the April 27 primary.
Specter's lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union is 43 out of 100, well below even some of his Democratic colleagues'. In a race that is largely a battle for the support of Pennsylvania conservatives, the endorsements from Santorum and Bush are huge. So Specter touts them everywhere and often, including in ads he's running on conservative radio--both Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity--and on television.
It seems to be working. Toomey took questions after a speech earlier this month to Union County Republicans. The first questioner said he was concerned about supporting someone who doesn't have the backing of Santorum and the White House. Several voters raised the issue in interviews, and later that day a student from Bucknell University told Toomey: "I'm disgruntled when I hear my two favorite politicians--you're third until you're elected--supporting a guy like Specter." Each time, Toomey patiently explained that political politesse "constrains" both the White House and Santorum from backing him and ended with a crowd pleaser: "Remember, Howard Dean had a lot of endorsements, and all he got was Vermont."
But a recent Quinnipiac poll shows Specter with a 15-point lead. More troubling for Toomey, the two candidates are splitting the votes of self-identified conservatives roughly in half. If that happens on Election Day, Specter wins.
Toomey, however, says that his campaign's internal polling gives him a wide advantage among conservatives and shows that the contest is essentially a "toss up." His campaign calls it a surge. Specter supporters say the race was bound to tighten.
They're probably both right, so the race is getting nasty. Specter ads portray Toomey as a liar, a heartless politician, and, in at least one instance, an enabler of illegal behavior. I heard that last ad in early April on a mid-afternoon broadcast of the Rush Limbaugh show. Specter accuses Toomey, once part-owner of a bar, of owning an establishment where "drunks were served and drugs were sold."
I asked Toomey about that ad a little more than a week ago. He had just finished telling a gathering of Republicans that despite their many political differences he feels no "personal animosity" toward Specter. Toomey said he hadn't known about the ad.
"Well," he said, taking a long pause, "well, I'm trying to not to, ah, to allow personal animosity to become part of this--[another pause]--but it's getting hard. It's getting hard not to get frustrated with the dishonesty and the personal attacks."
Toomey summed up his candidacy that day in a soundbite: I am from the Republican wing of the Republican party, and Arlen Specter is from the Ted Kennedy wing. With conservatives in control of the White House and Congress, there is an opportunity to reduce the role of government in a meaningful way, something Arlen Specter has shown no interest in doing over his long career.
Toomey's two-part message is focused: Rein in activist judges and cut government spending to return money to taxpayers. He makes a solid if unspectacular case--at turns philosophical and practical--for limited government, and he has gotten a significant boost from the Club for Growth, a group whose members pool their resources in an attempt to elect fiscal conservatives, often in place of liberal Republicans.
On the day I spend with the campaign, fiscal conservatism and judicial restraint do not seem to invigorate Union County Republicans or, later, Bucknell University conservatives. Those in attendance are strong Toomey supporters and say they are happy to have a conservative alternative to Specter. But the reaction to the speech is tempered. Toomey tends to lapse into high-school-civics-class mode, and he rarely raises his voice or mentions his opponent. "I don't know," says Francis Fallon, a veteran and a retired carpenter. "He doesn't seem too excited."
Toomey makes his strongest case against Specter not at either of his public appearances that day but in an interview between them. And it comes on a subject not at the center of the campaign thus far: foreign policy.
The challenger's critique of Specter is both substantive and harsh. The War on Terror is "as big as the Cold War or World War II," Toomey says, and Specter's "liberal multilateralist" foreign policy--like Senator John Kerry's--fails to recognize the importance of that effort.
Twice Toomey accuses Specter of appeasing terrorists, and as he ticks off the incumbent's transgressions, his voice grows stronger and he assumes a can-you-believe-this mien:
And now we have Arlen Specter announcing that he thinks it would be a good idea for a congressional delegation to go visit the mullahs in Iran, because they've been so helpful in this war on terrorism. Iran! State sponsor of terrorism, a country that is actively--actively!--undermining everything we're trying to accomplish on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, a country that we may discover is very much in league with the uprising that's occurring right now in Iraq, a country where the mullahs are undermining the movement for democratic reform--which is a real movement with real hope--in Iran. . . . So here you have a regime that's hostile to everything that's important to us and here you have Arlen Specter saying, "We should reward them and acknowledge how helpful they've been, and let's send a congressional delegation to Iran and to meet with the mullahs."
It's precisely the kind of invigorating performance that the crowds this day didn't see. Specter has given Toomey plenty to work with. In a January 29, 2004, USA Today article, Specter declared that Iran has "helped us in the fight against al Qaeda and in the Afghanistan situation" and actually scolded the U.S. government for failing to appreciate these efforts. "I don't think we have given them sufficient credit. They deserve credit."
In a face-to-face debate in early April, Toomey criticized Specter for his relationship with the ruling Assad family in Syria. Toomey dilated on this in our interview:
The Pennsylvania primary voters understand that we shouldn't be cozying up to dictatorships in the Middle East--I think especially those that are number one on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism. And that would describe Syria. Here you have a Baathist regime that uses similar tactics to the tactics that Saddam Hussein used in Iraq. It has a brutal history--a regime that continues to illegally occupy Lebanon, a regime that supports terrorist organizations that are actively attacking innocent civilians, especially in Israel, and yet Arlen Specter decides he was very friendly with the Assad family. And so he visited many times and I imagine he enjoys being escorted around the palace in Damascus. When the Syria Accountability Act was introduced in Congress there were something like 77 senators that cosponsored the bill. Arlen Specter not only refused to cosponsor it but he criticized the bill, and said it might embarrass the Assad family. There are some people who deserve embarrassment, you know!
Toomey indicated that he may focus more on Specter's foreign policy positions as the election approaches. Late last week, his campaign was running hard-hitting ads on radio and television criticizing Specter for his Kerry-like approach to international relations.
Is Specter in trouble? That's hard to say. Most public polls still show him with a double-digit lead, but Toomey campaign sources take comfort from their internal polls. What is clear is that Specter's lead is narrowing, despite his staggering campaign expenditures. In the three months since January, Specter has spent some $7 million, much of it on the personal attack ads his campaign is airing now.
Although Specter's campaign likes to talk about the inevitability of a primary victory, his panicked finish suggests that Pennsylvania will be worth watching on April 27.
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