AIG subsidiary rebrands itself ‘VALIC’.
Late Update: TPM Reader FL responds: “Valic was Valic long before it was taken over by AIG. It was a reliable and honorable retirement fund serving non-profit employees and academicians.”
I’m not sure this requires much commentary.
The pivot, where Obama’s popularity begins to rise again, is right about April 1st.
Arlen Specter reintroduces himself to Pennsylvania voters as a Democrat. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
Last night Rachel Maddow had some of the video of the failed 1986 confirmation hearing of then-judge wannabe Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III — now Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) — including his sorta kinda reluctant admission that he might have called the NAACP a “commie” organization (at the 1:40 mark).
Last week Arlen Specter’s election as a Democrat in 2010 seemed more or less a given. The big man in Pennsylvania politics (Ed Rendell) and the big man in US politics (Barack Obama) both put down their finger and said they were behind him.
But the certainty of that outcome now seems genuinely in doubt. He’s got an ambitious (and there’s nothing wrong with that) and aggressive potential opponent in Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA). And even more important than that he’s got a critical constituency, organized labor, visibly warming to opposing him in next year’s Democratic primary. (Remember a couple key points: Labor is a big deal in Pennsylvania and Specter’s in the past always relied on strong labor backing.)
What’s most striking about this whole turn of events though is that if Specter is in any real trouble it is a predicament entirely of his own making, an unforced error of almost galactic proportions.
As we’ve discussed a few times over the last week, there was some political logic to Specter not moving too quickly or fulsomely to embrace Democratic positions, especially since he’d spent the last few months tacking hard to the right. But what we’ve seen over the last week goes way, way beyond anything like that. He’s dug in his heels opposing EFCA, said he’d oppose a key Obama DOJ appointee, staked out a surprisingly right-leaning (for him) position on health care reform and gone way past the first day bromides in signaling he won’t have any partisan attachment at all to his new political party. His line about not being a ‘loyal’ Democrat, after he apparently said just the opposite to President Obama, seems like a high profile diss of the president.
All of which is fine of course. He’s free to do whatever he wants. But he doesn’t seem to have grasped that his position wasn’t actually that strong. Republicans are certainly not taking Arlen back at this point. I haven’t looked deeply into the numbers. But it’s hard for me to see how the national GOP is going to knock Pat Toomey out of the running with some quasi-moderate ringer. If that’s right, Toomey’s the Republican nominee. Which would mean the Republicans are fielding an exceptional weak general election candidate.
So why do the Dems need Arlen, if probably any solid Democrat can beat Pat Toomey?
There’s another angle here too. Labor is really licking its wounds over what appears to be the very steep climb EFCA faces in this Congress. And the Democratic establishment in Washington moved very quickly to crown Specter as the Democratic nominee. It would not surprise me if labor and affiliated organizations might not mind engaging in a amicable Specter-Sestak proxy battle with President Obama and the lords of the senate to make the point that as much as everything’s great and everyone’s pals, they’ve got their own independent bases of power and political muscle.
Before we get too far down this path let me grant you a lot of dominos have to fall into place before Specter finds himself out of a job. The Democratic senators and the president have giving their full backing and that means quite a lot. That and a lot else. But why and how exactly did Specter get himself into this position? After watching the last week I get the sense he’s just too cocky for his own good.
Norm Coleman has a new prime advocate in his effort to keep challenging his reelection loss forever: Hans von Spakovsky, voting suppression guru and luminary from the US attorney firing scandal.
TPM Reader BL checks in …
One thing to add to your analysis. Before challenging Specter, Sestak should see if Tom Ridge is running as reported today in the Post. If Ridge Runs, Sestak should not challenge Specter. I do think he would have a good chance to beat Specter in a primary, but I doubt he could beat Ridge. It is a question as to whether Ridge would beat Toomey, but he probably would. Specter’s name recognition and status with the center of the PA electorate would make him competitive with Ridge.
This really is the key question. And I’m very curious to hear from those who know more about Pennsylvania politics and right-wing politics to get their read on this. If Ridge is the Republican nominee that does change the calculus substantially. But can Ridge get the nomination?
If Pat Toomey were a character from the Iliad he’d carry the sobriquet ‘Specterslayer’. And I think the issue for Republicans is that a non-trivial number of Toomey’s supporters think he was a character in the Iliad. He’s the darling of the right. Pennsylvania is a closed primary. And as we noted last week, Pennsylvania’s primary electorate has gotten much more conservative in the last two years. After Toomey put in the work to get Specter to bolt, are registered Pennsylvania Republicans going to push him aside from the relatively moderate Ridge? And if they will, will Ridge have to move hard to the right to get the nomination, thus weakening himself in the general?
These aren’t rhetorical questions. I’m curious to hear your views. I guess a lot of it depends on Toomey, whether he was serious about wanting to be in the senate or whether this was only about Specter. But speaking as an outsider, it just seems like national Republicans would have a difficult time prying this out of Toomey’s hands.
Your thoughts?
TPMDC’s Brian Beutler talked to Sestak yesterday evening. And he really raised the temperature on Specter. Take a look.
We’re going to do our best to bring you interviews with what are shaping up as the key players in this — the key union leaders, the candidates obviously, party committees and others.
On a related topic, we’re getting a lot of good emails this morning in response to these posts asking for your input. And we’ve heard from a lot of Democratic party regulars down at the county level. And while I would not expect those folks to be bastions of Arlen support, folks who’ve done their own informal straw polls seem to put support for Specter around zero. So if he keeps bucking the party consensus position on stuff like EFCA and health care, it seems like there’s a lot of dry kindling there for a tough challenge.
Late Update: Meanwhile, Greg Sargent notes that a series of polls cast real doubt on whether Specter is even a strong candidate against Ridge, should he be able to get past Toomey.