The New York Observer » Arlen Specter

Bob Menendez, Into the Wind

On the topic of his party's chances in next year's elections, Robert Menendez is a study in resolute optimism.

Not that he has much choice. Mr. Menendez, New Jersey's junior senator, chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which recruits and provides financial and political support for the party's U.S. Senate candidates. Optimism is part of the Read More

Bob Menendez, Into the Wind

On the topic of his party's chances in next year's elections, Robert Menendez is a study in resolute optimism.

Obama’s Town Hall: No Screams, Real Issues

At Barack Obama’s town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Tuesday, an older man who identified himself as a Republican calmly expressed to the president his concern that a government-run “public option” might undermine private health insurers because, “Who can compete with the government?”

Obama acknowledged the validity of this concern and then Read More

With Friends Like These… Midwestern Democrats Fight Climate Policy

On August 6th, ten Midwestern Democratic Senators sent a letter to President Obama that began the hardball phase of creating climate policy as it moves from the House’s Waxman-Markey bill to Senate deliberations in the fall. In this letter, the Senators insist that climate change legislation must protect U.S. manufacturers from unfair foreign competition. They Read More

What Is Jeff Sessions’ Agenda?

It’s an absurd dance. Voters like hearing about “independence” and Read More

What Is Jeff Sessions’ Agenda?

How many candidates for Congress—Democratic and Republican—have you heard loudly insist that they don’t believe in party labels, just in doing the right thing? And how many of them, once elected, end up voting with their party pretty much all the time? It’s an absurd dance. Voters like hearing about “independence” and “bipartisanship,” so candidates Read More

Ask Not What Arlen Specter Can Do for Sonia Sotomayor

In the fall of 1991, the political right was gunning for Arlen Specter. Four years earlier, he’d infuriated them by lending a critical assist to the successful campaign to kill Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination and he’d done little in the intervening time to make peace with them. Now, with Specter facing reelection in Read More

Ask Not What Arlen Specter Can Do for Sonia Sotomayor

Call Specter a Traitor, But Don’t Call Him Unprincipled

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 Read More

Call Specter a Traitor, But Don’t Call Him Unprincipled

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 Read More

How Arlen Specter Was Supposed to Win as a Republican

A reader sends along this memo from Arlen Specter’s (brief) 1996 presidential campaign. In it, consultant Roger Stone outlines a strategy based on the notion that the "strength of the ‘Religious Right’ in Republican primaries is overestimated.”

How Arlen Specter Was Supposed to Win as a Republican

Lynn Yeakel Isn’t Angry Anymore

Back in 1992, there was no senator that Democrats—particularly female Democrats—were more eager to beat than Arlen Specter, who the previous fall had listened to Anita Hill's claims of sexual harassment and responded by accusing Hill of "flat-out perjury."

And they almost did beat him—with a candidate named Lynn Yeakel, a previously unknown fund-raiser Read More

Lynn Yeakel Isn’t Angry Anymore

Back in 1992, there was no senator that Democrats-particularly female Democrats-were more eager to beat than Arlen Specter, who the previous fall had listened to Anita Hill's claims of sexual harassment and responded by accusing Hill of "flat-out perjury." And they almost did beat him-with a candidate named Lynn Yeakel, a previously unknown fund-raiser for Read More

Specter’s a Democrat, But Now What?

Arlen Specter and the Democratic Party leadership cut a deal that makes plenty of sense on the surface: Specter is rescued from a doomed Republican primary campaign that would have ended his 30-year Senate career next year, while Democrats pick up what will be (after Al Franken is finally seated) their 60th vote in the Read More