National: Arlen Specter

It's easy to brand Arlen Specter's decision to leave the Republican Party-a move directly precipitated by his realization that his career would end with next year's Pennsylvania Senate primary unless he left the G.O.P.-a nakedly unprincipled act of political survival. And that's just what Specter's critics, on the right, on the left, and in the middle, have been doing this week. "Self-preservation in the first order" and "a cold, crass political calculation" is how G.O.P. chairman...

In return for providing one of only three Republican votes for the stimulus bill, Senator Arlen Specter was able to secure a 34 percent increase in the National Institutes of Health’s budget.

Election victories have never come easily to Arlen Specter, who launched his political career by switching his registration from Democratic, the dominant affiliation in his home city, to Republican so that he could run against his boss for district attorney in Philadelphia in 1965.

That deal with the devil helped him in the short term - he won two terms as D.A. - but it also sentenced Specter to a lifetime of treacherous political balancing: His moderate profile - pro-choice on abortion, generally liberal on cultural issues, and hardly a doctrinaire conservative on taxes - makes him exactly the sort of Republican who can actually win a general election in Pennsylvania, just as it renders him eternally vulnerable in Republican primaries.  read more »