Think it Through

With Arlen Specter a Democrat again (he started out as one in the ’60s) and Al Franken on the verge of breaking former Senator Coleman’s four corner stall in Minnesota, the Washington conventional wisdom says the Democrats will finally have the filibuster-proof majority of 60 votes that they have been missing. Right? Not so fast.

There is no reason to believe the addition of the comedian and the chameleon to the Democratic caucus meetings will give the Senate Democrats a filibuster-proof voting block. All it does is move the swing votes in the Senate from Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe to the likes of Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, and Tom Carper.

It further marginalizes the Republicans – no more need to hang on every word and nuanced sentence of Collins and Snowe – but it does not assure the President a cooperative Senate. Without Specter or Franken the Democrats already had 58 members in the Senate. The lack of a working majority is not about numbers but leadership. One orthopedic surgeon would do more than two new Democrats. The leadership needs a stronger backbone. Democrats have been unwilling to let the Republicans filibuster, and have two parties debate whether the American people want to follow the new set of policies presented by the Obama Administration or not.

Just last week we had an example that gave credence to my belief that two more Democrats will not be much help to the President. The Senate voted on April 29th to kill the president’s bankruptcy reform measure, which would have given bankruptcy judges in mortgage foreclosure cases to authority to weigh the facts and allow people to stay in their homes if the circumstances warranted. It was a simple case of consumers (and the White House ) versus the banks, which wanted no flexibility in foreclosures. Twelve Democrats, including Senators Max Baucus of Montana, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Tom Carper of Delaware, and newly Democratic Arlen Specter went along with all the Republicans to vote with the banks to kill the bill.

Some people are screaming about the possibility of the federal government owning the banks, while they should be concerned that the banks own the United States Senate.

If we cannot rely on two more Democrats in the Senate to make real change happen, we go back to leadership, which raises some questions:

• First, will Majority Leader Harry Reid do what Tom Daschle should have done – that is step down from his leadership position to return to Nevada to campaign more often to protect his Senate seat that is up in 2010?

• Second, if Reid does step down , will his lieutenant Dick Durbin of Illinois break free from his role of the last six years – that of the loyal deputy who traced the missteps of his leader, such as watching helplessly as Senate Democrats enabled President Bush to break the Constitution by legalizing warrantless wiretapping, passing the Military Commissions Act,and enacting the Patriot Act, as well as making a mess of the Roland Burris appointment ?

• Finally, could Senator Durbin as a majority leader revert back to being the intelligent fighter for progressive causes that he was before he became a member of the Reid leadership team whose game plan has been to avoid controversy at all cost?

The answers to these questions are worth more than two more Democrats in the Senate.

Senator Arlen Specter, the former headline-chasing prosecutor from Philadelphia turned United States Senator from Pennsylvania is known as a loner in a club that values camaraderie above all else. But now Senator Specter has joined the largest political movement in the country in the last 12 months, the exodus from the Republican Party. According to all the recent national polls, from April 2008 to April 2009 over 17 million Americans left the Republican party. Specter makes it 17 million plus one.

How many have joined the Democrats? There has been no net increase in those calling themselves Democrats, according to most of the national surveys. Democratic identification, depending on which poll you use, has either remained the same or even decreased slightly since last April.

Instead, the shrinking of the Republican party has coincided with the largest number of Americans identifying as independents – between 85 and 88 million Americans (38 to 40%), depending on the poll – in a generation. Republican identification stands at 20 to 21% (about 42 million Americans) and Democratic i.d. is at 35% in most polls (about 75 million Americans).

from Washington Post/ABC News data

Where has the exodus been most robust? A look at some of our surveys at Belden Russonello & Stewart from April 2008 to April 2009 yields some surprises: men under age 50, college graduates, and single people have been the most likely groups to bolt from the Republican party in the last 12 months.

For now, these Republican defectors are calling themselves independents – a group in which a majority approve of the way President Obama is handling his job.

When Senator Specter voted for the President’s stimulus bill, we should have known what was coming. By voting yes, Specter tore at the fabric of current Republican doctrine and joined the millions of Americans who have placed their faith in the country’s new President and his new leadership. An important part of that leadership includes a willingness to expand the role of government to repair the economy.

Specter’s vote for the stimulus bill and his decision to leave the GOP is all the more meaningful when you consider the fact that he holds the seat of former Senator Richard Schweiker, a liberal Republican from Pennsylvania who served in the Senate from 1968 to 1980. Schweiker achieved national prominence in 1976 when Ronald Reagan, in his first unsuccessful race for President, announced his intention to name Schweiker as his vice presidential running mate at the Republican convention. Conservatives were outraged. President Ford edged out Reagan for the nomination, and that was the end of Schweiker’s dance with national office. After becoming President, Reagan named Schweiker Secretary of Health and Human Services in 1981.

That was when the Republican party lived in a considerably larger tent, when it was ideological but not inflexible, national rather than regional. It was a time when Mr. Conservative Ronald Reagan saw value in choosing Mr. Liberal Richard Schweiker as a running mate on the Republican ticket.

Today, seventy percent of Republicans call themselves conservative and over four in ten live in the South, according to BRS surveys. Today, Schweiker, like Specter, would be part of that 17 million person movement that is growing in America.