Specter Losing: Not Surprising
It’s always fun when dirty hippy bloggers are more than a few steps in front of the conventional wisdom. I’m writing, of course, of the predictable collapse of Arlen Specter: while both of our big dailies endorsed the senior Senator, one of the only worthwhile writers on their staff got it right. Take it away, Will Bunch:
Arlen Specter just popped. You never know in politics, but based on my experience in watching polling trends, only a mid-May blizzard or some other freak phenominon of nature can at this point prevent the five-term senator from losing the Democratic primary to Rep. Joe Sestak of Delaware County, one week from tomorrow. Over the next week, you will see some remarkably nasty attack ads from Team Specter and intensive campaigng from his erstwhile East Falls neighbor Ed Rendell and maybe even from Barack Obama, although if anyone on the Democratic side has any common sense (heh) they will allow the president to save face by announcing that he’s busy dealing with some crisis in D.C., since there are so many to choose from. None of this will work. Specter has already thrown the dirty-ad kitchen sink at Sestak.
It just hasn’t worked.
What amazes me is that the pundits didn’t see this coming a year ago. Everyone is acting all stunned by the Sestak ad showing Specter’s endorsement from a Will Ferrell-esque George W. Bush and his political flirtations with Sarah Palin, when it was obvious a year ago that such an ad was coming and that it would destroy Specter and that he would melt faster than the Wicked Witch of the West the second that it hit the airwaves. Do the talking heads even know who votes in an off-year Democratic primary? If not, hop into my Prius and I’ll drive you down to the Whole Foods and show you — they are NOT voting for an ex-Bush “ally”…ever.
Will’s talking about the ad below, made with footage easily found on youtube (and in fact used here a few times):
And it wasn’t just the big dailies that got it (predictably) wrong: our entire state Democratic Establishment got it wrong too, running out to embrace Specter, making themselves look like the unprincipled opportunist bastards they are (birds of a feather I guess). First, TJ Rooney, head of the state Democratic Party, tried to cancel the state’s primary. Then Ed Rendell jumped into the act. next Senator Bob Casey, he of very little brain, endorsed the guy who’s looking more like a loser every day. The cherry on top was when President Hopeful McChange decided that he preferred the status quo too.
Talk about being tone deaf politically. Like Bunch, I fully expect President McChange to show up and campaign for the status quo (just like he did for Blanche Lincoln, who’s a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wal-Mart).
The thing that most of these people and media sources have forgotten about themselves is that THEY are elites, and the voters largely ARE NOT. I’m email friends with a number of people at the Daily News, and despite the turmoil at the paper, they’ve told me that salaries for mainstream media union journalists are quite good: one editor told me the salary drawn by a twice-a-week columnist at the Daily News “would make your head spin”. In addition, a number of political journalists are, well, close friends with the people they cover (that’s putting it nicely) and the same is true here in Pennsylvania. So you end up with a feedback loop that’s out-of-sync with reality.
Chris Bowers and Mike Lux of Open Left give a better picture than most. Bowers:
[L]et me get on a rant to the pundits talking about primary “purges”: stop pretending that the incumbent Democrats who have found themselves in trouble primaries are principled “moderates” in any way. Could it be more glaringly obvious at this point that Arlen Specter is an opportunist who seeks mainly to save his own job? Can you please try and remember that Blanche Lincoln systematically lied to virtually every Democratic constituency (see here for women, labor and health care advocates, then see here for African-Americans) before those groups started recruiting a primary challenger? And can you recall that Joe Lieberman flip-flopped on perhaps the biggest progressive grassroots advocacy campaign of the past decade just to beat progressives for the sake of it?
Lux:
Incumbents in both parties are in trouble for one simple reason: the jobs aren’t coming back and the perception among voters is that the incumbents aren’t doing anything about it. While there are some encouraging signs on the economy, the official unemployment rate went up to 9.9% last week, and if you add in everything that you should (including farm and self-employed workers, those too discouraged to look for jobs, those who are part-time by necessity not choice) the real unemployment rate is 18.9% and went up by .2% last month. As long as the jobs picture is that weak, the economy overall is very weak too. Very few people are feeling the effects of the GDP growth that has elites proclaiming an improving economy…
Most working families in this country are still hurting, and are still scared there are more economic problems yet to come. They don’t think either party cares about them or is fighting for them. As long as that is the case, incumbents of both parties are going to keep getting into political trouble.
Lux includes a neat little video:
Gee, I wonder where they’d get THAT idea, when the Democrats acquiesced to GOP cuts that resulted in a stimulus too small to have a lasting impact (including, hey-o, $1.6 billion that would have gone to PA had it not been for Senator Specter) or threw the public option, the only really great thing about health care insurance reform out the window at the behest of their corporate donors from the insurance industry? Hooda thunk it??
And let me just reiterate: I’m not a big fan of Joe Sestak, and can actually see some value in returning Specter to DC (I wrote about it last week). But in a nutshell, the wealthy elites that “represent” us in Washington don’t realize the recession isn’t over, and why would they? THEY’RE RICH AND DON’T FEEL THE EFFECTS. On the other side of the coin, journalists are too busy spinning “he-said-she-said-narratives” about the people they’re supposed to be REPORTING OBJECTIVELY on to notice that the actual zeitgeist of despair and fear.
It’s no surprise to me that Specter’s losing: any run-of-the-mill asshole could tell you he’s not popular, that Democrats don’t want to vote for him, that telling voters “sorry no choice for you this year” is a recipe for rebellion, and that the economy for real-life people is a fucking mess. It’s almost stunning that the press and the politicians so thoroughly misjudged the mood of the electorate (and it’s going on in Utah, Indiana, Kentucky, and Arizona as well, just as it did in Massachusetts).
What we’re dealing with is a complete and utter breakdown of the institutions that are supposed to represent our interests. Everyone, from the President to the press, has tried to play a game of Bullshit on the people they represent, and appears to have lost. Badly.
So barring a miracle, it’s gonna be “Goodbye Arlen Specter”, and “Hello Joe Sestak”. And speaking as neither a politician nor a journalist, I predict in a few months you’ll hate Joe just as much as the guy he replaced.
