Specter mired in Iraq's middle ground

INQUIRER WASHINGTON BUREAU

ALTOONA, Pa. - Midway through his town meeting at the Devorris Downtown Center in Altoona, Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.) was well into the question-and-answers when a man up front took a shot.

"Is Congress vacationing with the Iraqi parliament?" said the man, making eye contact with others in the auditorium to see if they got the joke.

"No," said Specter, smiling weakly, trying to play along, "and this isn't exactly a vacation, either."

Specter's gibe won him some laughs, but the man's remark, which seemed to demean the seriousness of the Iraq issue, had provoked him.

When he is irked, Specter's face becomes taut and he bares his teeth in a half-smile, half-grimace. To non-Specter watchers he may just look nonplussed, so they may not have expected his next answer.

After an 84-year-old World War II veteran launched into a rant about Congress, Specter fixed him with a glare and snapped, "Well, then, vote 'em out or run for office yourself."

"Oh, sure, at my age!" said the vet as he rose and exited the auditorium, having gotten an audience - however brief - with someone, anyone, from Washington. At 77, Specter is almost as old as the veteran.

As a Republican senator serving under an unpopular, lame-duck administration that is waging an unpopular war, he is now attempting to perform an impossible feat - to satisfy everyone, including his own party, on Iraq policy. He's a committed moderate, trying to bridge competing extremes - get out or stay the course - and he's running out of time to be cautious.

The calendar is against him; the day of reckoning, in the form of the report on the war in Iraq by commander Gen. David H. Petraeus, is fast approaching. And Specter sees no good choice. Yet he has to be clear about where he stands.

Still, like the blind men and the elephant, members of Congress will draw from the Petraeus report whatever they want. Specter is aware of this and the wiggle room it may provide. He may wiggle, but he can't hide.

For two weeks in August, in a ritual as old as his Senate career, Specter roamed through the state, his green Dodge Grand Caravan crossing Pennsylvania's blue highways (toll-free, so far) hitting 30 counties (mainly in Central and Western Pennsylvania) to meet the public. His stock line: "I'm taking the temperature of the population. And if boiling is 212 degrees Fahrenheit, then Iraq is about 250 degrees, and immigration is 235."

In January, Specter voted against the surge in troops. But though Pennsylvania has incurred the third-highest number of Iraq fatalities, after California and Texas, he has not joined the growing number of Senate Republicans - such as Olympia Snowe of Maine, Gordon Smith of Oregon, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Richard Lugar of Indiana, and Pete Domenici of New Mexico - in calling for immediate change in White House policy and even withdrawal.

Specter, who has already announced he is running for reelection, is a target for both the left and the right and is being pushed to be unequivocal. Instead, he is telling people the issue is too serious to rush to judgment, ultimately hoping to avoid being outflanked in a potential GOP primary by a conservative opponent painting him as weak on national security.

Specter is not counseling action; he counsels inaction.

A Republican lobby group called Freedom's Watch - funded in part by Philadelphia businessmen Ed Snider, Gary Erlbaum and Richard J. Fox - is spending $15 million on current TV ads to pressure members of Congress to back the war. Specter is a likely candidate.

At the same time, Specter is being importuned to vote for withdrawal by Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, a liberal advocacy group.

Specter is notoriously dismissive of political pressure groups. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Supreme Court nominations of failed candidate Harriet Miers and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Specter chastised conservatives for their rancorous campaign against Miers, calling it a "sad episode in the history of Washington."

Ever the political gamesman, Specter submitted a lengthy statement laying out his Iraq position for the Congressional Record on Aug. 1. It was a canny move; the statement, a kind of legal brief explaining his views in more than "a sound bite," was designed to blunt attacks from right and left. Specter wrote that he regretted the failure of compromise proposals offered during the recent Senate debate, and would have voted for a resolution that required President Bush to develop a contingency plan for withdrawal in the absence of progress, or risk losing congressional funding for the war.

Specter wrote that he was making this statement "to put the administration on notice of my reservations on supporting open-ended appropriations for the Iraq war in September."

On the road, as in Washington, Specter was well prepared and well attended to by as many as 10 aides. Most of the town meetings were held during the day, so many listeners were elderly, retired or unemployed. The halls were unadorned, and crowds eager to have at a guy they mostly liked, from a city they liked not so much.

On Day Six of an eight-day tour, his third meeting took Specter to New Bethlehem, a former coal-mining center whose main employer is now J.M. Smucker, maker of jams and peanut butter. Specter opened the session at the local fire hall by trying to explain that Iraq had no easy answers - only to be drowned out by a fire siren.

"I have a very extensive statement in the Congressional Record on what we should do in Iraq, and it's on my Web site and I commend it to you," he said. "The essence of my thinking is, when we get the report from Gen. Petraeus in September, unless we see some light at the end of the tunnel, we're going to need to reevaluate our policy.

"I do not think we can leave our troops in Baghdad at the center of a civil war; at the same time, we do not want to withdraw precipitously" - he had to raise his voice over the siren - "we may have to be on the perimeter for training purposes and stabilization, but we will not really be able to make a decision with any precision until we see the report in September."

A middle-aged man with blond hair and a football player's physique stood up.

"Why in the world would the Iraqis want to become a democracy like us when they don't trust us because we bombed them and then took them over?" asked Norb Baschnagel, a health and physical education teacher at Clarion University of Pennsylvania.

"Our efforts to put a democracy in place there is part of our long-range goal," Specter replied. "I believe that self-government is possible, but it takes a lot of background and a lot of education. So far, there have been such bitter disputes among the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds that they won't come together on anything. The Iraqi prime minister has tried to bring the warring factions together, and he knows he is on the spot in September. We've laid a line in the sand there, not only for Petraeus and President Bush, but also for the Iraqis."

With a handheld microphone, wading into the crowd, Specter can seem like a game-show host, but he gives nothing away. He admits to enjoying the parry-and-thrust of the sessions, but he abhors speechifying from the public and cut off a few folks with a curt, "And your question is?"

The next day, at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, as 140 people filed into the business school's bland auditorium, Specter spoke about the comments he was getting.

"Mostly, they just want to vent," he said. He knows he serves as a steam valve, and he allows it - up to a point.

Several questioners asked him to forecast what will happen in Iraq.

"If they could ever get together, they have great oil wealth to distribute which might bring about some lessening of strife," he said.

Following the Q-and-A, Specter was approached by a man who said he had three sons in the military.

"This has been an ongoing fight with Islamic fascism-type things," the man said. "So we need to be careful in our dealings with it. I'm sure you know that."

"I do," Specter said. "And that's why I want to wait and see exactly how it looks in September."

Several listeners asked to be photographed with the senator. He jokes about his once-curly hair growing back straight after chemotherapy, which invariably elicits compliments.

Occasionally, an audience is less awestruck and the results are less predictable. Later, in the Altoona auditorium, the crowd was feisty. They groused about immigration and health care and applauded barbed remarks, especially those by the 84-year-old vet who strafed Congress. Specter kept his aides busy receiving handwritten pleadings and names and numbers for follow-up.

Robert Houseman, a retired teacher, asked pointedly whether Specter would commit to voting the troops home if the Petraeus report showed insufficient progress. The senator referred him to his Web statement.

Outside the hall, Houseman, a sixth-generation Altoonan, was miffed.

"I think Specter has been too loyal to the Bush administration on this Iraq situation," he said. "He's a moderate Republican, and I admire him for being moderate many times, but I think he needs to join ranks with Sen. Smith of his own party, Sen. Snowe of his own party, and try to do more to bring our soldiers home and end that morass over there.

"I'm not sure whether Specter thinks it should be later rather than sooner," Houseman added.

Specter visited Iraq in 1989 and 1990 but only once, in December 2005, during the hostilities.

For most of his swing, much of it in the central, more conservative part of the state, Specter heard about issues that seemed more personal to voters than the war: immigration, health care, veterans' benefits.

Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.), who made his first trip to Iraq in early August and then toured the state, said he, too, had been struck by the "infrequency" of questions about Iraq.

"Frankly, at times I thought it would be more," Casey said in an interview. "One reason for this is that this war is being fought by about 1 percent of the American people, the smallest percentage in history of the country. There are a lot of people that can walk through their neighborhood and not know anyone personally who is fighting there."

Casey was asked whether Specter was being too deliberative.

"I wouldn't presume to give him advice," Casey said. "He's trying to be thoughtful. We don't reach the same conclusion."

Specter's last stop on Day Seven was an oasis of calm after the ferment of Altoona: St. Francis University in Loretto, the oldest Franciscan institution of higher education in the United States. Addressing some 70 people at the John F. Kennedy Student Center, Specter struck a reflective tone.

"We live in a very turbulent time, with problems all over the world," he said. "My own view is we need to undertake more collaboration and diplomacy with other nations. If we could get more cooperation with countries in the Mideast, we could better deal with the problem of Iraq."

Then it was off to a hotel in Pittsburgh, a restorative martini, and a 9 a.m. news conference the following day.

Last week, when U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales resigned, Specter was on firm ground. In a conference call from Poland, he spoke about the departure, speculated on the next attorney general, and good-naturedly deflected questions about himself in that role.

It was remarkably definite, a contrast to his balancing act on Iraq. The ground on the war was treacherous, and Specter was stepping ever so carefully.