{"id":3881,"date":"2009-04-28T18:40:18","date_gmt":"2009-04-29T01:40:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=3881"},"modified":"2009-04-28T18:40:18","modified_gmt":"2009-04-29T01:40:18","slug":"arlen-specter-decided-he-wanted-another-term","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2009\/04\/28\/arlen-specter-decided-he-wanted-another-term\/","title":{"rendered":"Arlen Specter decided he wanted another term"},"content":{"rendered":"

I flip past the talk radio circuit to hear the big word on today’s events in the Big Donkey — Elephant Game.\u00c2\u00a0 They accuse Arlen Specter of political expedency.\u00c2\u00a0 Arlen Specter said as much in his press conference today:
\n“I found that the prospects for winning the Republican primary were bleak. I am not prepared to have my 29-year record in the United States Senate decided by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate. Not prepared to have that record decided by that jury.”<\/em><\/p>\n

It was hard not to marvel at Arlen Specter’s precarious situation, which I did here<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Since then, things became worse for the man electorally.\u00c2\u00a0 Over the weekend, he looked at his poll numbers and saw that\u00c2\u00a0the amazingly shrunk Republican Party of Pennsylvania had polled him to a 21 point defeat against Pat Toomey — a real victory for the guy\u00c2\u00a0that start\u00c2\u00a0the bottom row of this item.<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0 Grover Norquist has flexed his muscles.\u00c2\u00a0 Why has the Republican Party of Pennsylvania shrunk?, you may ask.\u00c2\u00a0 Look at the comments section at the various news-sites, and you will see some hilarious explanations<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

“Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats.”
\nCould he really be this stupid not to have heard of Operation Chaos??
\n<\/em>http:\/\/www.thepittsburghchannel.com\/politics\/15960382\/detail.html<\/em><\/a>
\n“By some estimates, hundreds of Republicans switched parties to keep the feud going between Clinton and Obama.”
\nhttp:\/\/www1.phillyburbs.com\/pb-dyn\/news\/113-04232008-1523358.html
\nPosted by: truthmattersfa | April 28, 2009 12:17 PM<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Perhaps I’m as Irony-Deficit as the Conservative believers in Stephen Colbert<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0(Note: this study requires you to create a flow-chat), but if not I have to point out the math problem of the explanation.\u00c2\u00a0 “More than 200,000” is, technically, “hundreds”, but by this point you tend to explain the number in terms of hundreds of thousands.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a joke, right?<\/p>\n

Okay.\u00c2\u00a0 Two more thoughts from the commenters of big time news entities.\u00c2\u00a0 The first one<\/span><\/span>:<\/p>\n

Does this really mattter? The two parties are are two wings of the same bird, pushing the same agenda \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 destruction of our rights and enslavement of the American people. Politics is nothing but the slight of hand a magician uses to distract you while a trick is executed.<\/em><\/p>\n

Run of the mill comment, that.\u00c2\u00a0 And then there’s this assessment:<\/p>\n

\n

WOOOOO! DEMOCRATS ARE INVINCIBLE!
\n— Thomas Coppola<\/em><\/p>\n

Huh.<\/p>\n

Okay.\u00c2\u00a0 Some historical perspective on party switiching is due.\u00c2\u00a0 Wikipedia has a list of party switchers, and for the sake of finding a perspective it is best to take a gander at the cases where a Democra switched to the Republican<\/a>.<\/div>\n

You will recognize a great deal of the names\u00c2\u00a0of the last half of the twentieth century, as the Solid South opened up, split against the the national Democratic Party.\u00c2\u00a0 People like Ronald Reagan, This wikipedia list serves as a history of the partisan transformation of the South, and then the regionalization of the Republican Party.\u00c2\u00a0 Too bad the Democrats didn’t follow the advice of Zell Miller <\/a>in heading this off , eh?\u00c2\u00a0 More impressively, is the flood of Louisianans and Texans and South Carolinans switching after the Republican landslides of 1980, 1984, and 1994.\u00c2\u00a0 They kept their jobs and didn’t miss a beat.<\/span><\/p>\n

Whither the two parties from here?\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00c2\u00a0 Didn’t you see that comment about all this being a sham?\u00c2\u00a0 Like it or not, Obama’s full fledged support assures that Specter is going to be re-elected Senator — meaning all you liberals have to hope his EFCA change of heart was a sham in pursuit of beating Toomey and his statements today are just a means of not embarrassing himself.\u00c2\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I flip past the talk radio circuit to hear the big word on today’s events in the Big Donkey — Elephant Game.\u00c2\u00a0 They accuse Arlen Specter of political expedency.\u00c2\u00a0 Arlen Specter said as much in his press conference today: “I found that the prospects for winning the Republican primary were bleak. I am not prepared […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3881"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3885,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3881\/revisions\/3885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}