The GOP's Family Feud
President Bush, left, appears with Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), after arriving in Harrisburg, Pa., April 19, 2004. © Larry Downing/Reuters/Corbis hide caption
What do Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush have in common? More than just being president, they were presidents who were defeated in their bid for another term. And what contributed mightily to their defeats? Intra-party challenges. Ford had to fend off Ronald Reagan in 1976, Carter worked hard to beat back Ted Kennedy four years later, with both battles going all the way to their respective conventions. While Pat Buchanan's challenge in 1992 never put the senior Bush's renomination in doubt, the issues he raised (as well as those of independent Ross Perot in the fall) constantly put Bush on the defensive, and ultimately helped usher in Bill Clinton in November.
Republicans this year seem to have understood this dynamic. Having sailed through the primary season with no real challenge to renomination, President George W. Bush has dodged one bullet that helped sink three of his predecessors. If any Republican were going to fall victim to the ideological fissures that have sunk others in the party, it would have been Arlen Specter. But it didn't happen.
The Pennsylvania Republican has been in the Senate for 24 years, raised a ton of money, and had the strong backing of both the president and fellow Keystone Sen. Rick Santorum, a favorite of the right. But Specter has spent much of his four terms frustrating conservatives in his party on a number of issues, so he found himself in a near-death experience in last week's primary. In the end he won, but only by the barest of margins. His opponent, Rep. Pat Toomey, was a complete unknown in statewide politics at the start of the campaign. But conservatives knew Arlen Specter. And that was almost enough to sink him.
While Specter vs. Toomey may not have been in the same league as other classic moderate-conservative clashes -- such as Eisenhower vs. Taft in 1952, or Rockefeller vs. Goldwater in 1964 -- it did touch a nerve, for Arlen Specter has never really won over the hearts or affection of Pennsylvania Republicans. When he first ran for the Senate, in 1976, he opposed Congressman John Heinz in the GOP primary and lost. Two years later, when he ran for governor, he took on Dick Thornburgh in the primary and lost again. In 1980, when he was first elected to the Senate, he won the GOP nomination despite the active opposition of both Thornburgh and Heinz.
Since then, Specter has had a number of high profile defections from the party line. In 1987, he voted against President Reagan's choice of Robert Bork for the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1999, he bizarrely cited Scottish law in refusing to vote to convict President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky impeachment saga. (His official vote: "not proved.") He supports abortion rights, despite representing a largely Catholic state that gave us the parental consent law and the 24-hour waiting period. He is lukewarm about the Bush tax cuts but not about the big-ticket spending programs that got him the active opposition of Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group that backed Toomey. Perhaps, if this were another era, Specter wouldn't have survived. But he did, getting 51 percent of the vote, a margin of just 17,000 votes.
And what about November? Will Toomey voters sit home, letting Specter fall to Democratic Rep. Joe Hoeffel? Probably not. Toomey has come on board, warmly endorsing Specter on primary night. So has the Club for Growth, which said that despite its differences with the senator, he is still preferable to Hoeffel. Sen. Santorum is expected to push as hard for Specter in the general as he did in the primary. Ideological purity is nice, but many conservatives would rather be in the majority with Specter in office than in the minority without him.
This pragmatism is a far cry from earlier Republican primaries in which a liberal incumbent was ousted with nary a second thought. In 1978, four-term Sen. Clifford Case of New Jersey was unseated in the primary by conservative Jeffrey Bell, and Republicans haven't won a Senate race there since. In 1980, Jacob Javits of New York, another four-term incumbent, was knocked out by conservative Alfonse D'Amato, and the only reason the GOP kept the seat that year was that two lefties (Javits and Democrat Elizabeth Holtzman) ran against D'Amato in November and split the liberal vote.
Specter's primary victory doesn't mean that Republican incumbents who consistently leave the reservation are home free. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, an appointee to the Senate who supports abortion rights, still has problems in the August primary. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert of upstate New York faces the same conservative who almost knocked him off in the primary two years ago. But for the most part, the issues that continue to divide Republicans -- taxes, abortion, spending -- may be somewhat muted in the GOP's desire to continue its control of Congress. Of course, divisions suppressed do not go away. And if the cause is lost -- if the Republicans lose the Senate in November -- don't be surprised to see a post-election intra-party bloodbath.