Pennsylvania's Family Feud
Republican moderate Arlen Specter is running for his political life
MEADVILLE, PA.--The Assembly Hall at the Meadville Medical Center is a basement-level affair with blue and brown carpet and folding chairs and tables. The atmosphere this rainy Friday afternoon is damp and a little dark, but it's not just the weather. It is also partly the tough questions for U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter.
Specter, a moderate Republican, is seeking his fifth term in the Senate, and this is a chance for him to talk to doctors about medical liability insurance. "I practice very defensive medicine," says one doctor, describing his fear of being sued and the spirals in his malpractice insurance. "I do a lot of CAT scans; I put a lot of people in the hospital."
The White House and the GOP leadership in Congress want to cap liability damage awards at $250,000, but Specter--as he often does--is bucking the party line. He generally supports the caps but believes allowances must be made for the most egregious cases. "It is very uncertain how all of this is going to work out," he says.
Specter may as well have been describing his own re-election prospects. Specter's almost 24 years in the Senate is as long as any Pennsylvania senator's in history, but at 74, he finds himself in the political dogfight of his life, just for the nomination of his own party. It is a battle with implications beyond the simple calculus of his own race; indeed, the Keystone State primary has become a proxy fight over whether there is still a role for moderates in the increasingly conservative GOP.
The contentious April 27 primary is playing out in a crucial presidential battleground. The contest pits Specter, a sometimes contrarian, pro-choice Republican from Philadelphia, against Pat Toomey, a doggedly conservative three-term congressman from Allentown, who accuses Specter of not really being a Republican. The winner will face Democratic Rep. Joseph Hoeffel in November.
A tough fight. Specter has always had a difficult relationship with his party's conservatives. He does not share President Bush's zeal for endless tax cuts; he is pro-choice, and he opposed the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork, a watershed moment that infuriated the right. The well-funded Toomey presents Specter with his first real primary test; Specter has won every previous primary with more than 65 percent of the vote. "I don't think a lot of the frustration with Specter has ever been channeled," Toomey says. And Specter doesn't seem to disagree. "I've got a tough primary fight," he acknowledges to a gathering of Crawford County Republicans. "I make no bones about it."
The outcome may ultimately hinge on a larger question: Is there room in the Republican Party for members who less enthusiastically subscribe to the reigning conservative agenda on God, guns, and the primacy of tax cuts? "There is going to have to be room because if there isn't room, they won't have a party," says Specter. "When I came to the Senate, there were a lot more of us," he adds, invoking defeated or departed moderate Republican senators like Connecticut's Lowell Weicker, Missouri's John Danforth, and Oregon's Mark Hatfield.
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