A turncoat's baggage
Another incumbent politician bites the dust
A turncoat's baggage
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
Once again, the voters have signaled that 2010 is likely to be a bad year for incumbents - especially for those who are perceived as turncoats.
Last night, in Alabama, congressman Parker Griffith got the Arlen Specter treatment. In other words, he was fired by an electorate that didn't buy his recent party switch and instead decided that he was just a rank opportunist trying to keep his job.
Griffith was actually Specter's mirror image; last December, he split from the Democrats and donned the GOP label, figuring that he had a better chance to win re-election as a Deep South Republican. He gave himself five months to convince Republican primary voters that he was one of them. But last night he managed to convince only 33 percent. The majority chose a county commissioner, Mo Brooks, who insisted that he was the true Republican in the race. Brooks fatally tagged Griffith as a "flip-flopper," and drew strong support from the tea-party crowd.
The broad parallels to the Specter saga are striking. Just as the Democratic establishment had rallied to Specter in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, the Republican establishment quickly embraced Griffith when he switched parties. House GOP leader John Boehner headlined a Griffith fundraiser, and various Boehner colleagues opened their checkbooks for Griffith, who vastly outspent Brooks and a third candidate. The party establishment assumed that Griffith would be welcomed, especially since previous Alabama Democrats had seamlessly switched to the GOP (for instance, Senator Richard Shelby) without suffering any local voter backlash.
Also last winter, GOP chairman Michael Steele hailed Griffith as a guy whose "principles and values" were "right for America" - which was actually quite hilarious, given the fact that, in the 2008 House campaign, the Republican establishment had assailed Griffith as soft on terrorists and therefore "wrong for Alabama," and in TV ads it had slimed his medical credentials (he's an oncologist) by claiming that he had been "under-dosing" his cancer patients.
Yet, all of a sudden, in the spring GOP primary, here was the GOP establishment touting Griffith as a certified Republican loyalist. The problem was, too many Alabama Republican voters still remembered how the GOP leaders had beaten up on Griffith a mere 19 months ago. So last night the voters dismissed the leaders' revisionism as a phony exercise - just as Pennsylvania's Democratic voters spurned their party establishment's strategic embrace of former foe Specter.
Clearly, the leaders of both parties are on notice: Voters this year have little tolerance for political insiders who appear to be practicing politics as usual. And party-switchers who seek only to maximize their re-election prospects are seen as the worst offenders.
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The sole proprietor of this blog is on the road for the month of June. Virtually all June posts will be briefer than the norm, except on those rare occasions when posts won't show up at all. Apologies in advance for this disturbance in the force. The standard verbosity will return on Monday, June 28.
I voted for Specter, numerous times in general elections. They call it ticket switching. Voted for Sestak because I saw polling that he'd do better against Toomey. Nothing to do with incumbancy for me. Specter always got a nice share of votes in heavily Democratic Philly in general elections. Based on his margin of loss, independents wouldn't have saved Specter, had they been permitted to vote.— Rabe56
MikeP do you think the people who borrowed money that they couldn't pay back had anything to do with it?- Mike, please inform us how many millions of dollars we are spending to keep Fannie and Freddie afloat, who together now own or guarantee 46% of residential mortgages. What do you think the "toxic/troubled" assets were that were bundled in those derivatives, AAA bonds?— pj katauskas
- I should have said "Billions" of dollars.— pj katauskas
- And Ds are fighting regulating or winding down Freddie and Fannie because "it's too complex" a problem. How lame is that!! They didn't think health care reform was too complex even though it affects 1/6th of our economy. You can't make this stuff up.— pj katauskas
- Complexity and size are two different issues. Health care reform would have been very simple if they replaced the insurance based system with a government run system - single payer. Insurance company based rationing and denial of service not to mention millions of uninsured would be replaced with systems similar to those that are working in other industrialized countries.— Rabe56
Comment removed.- bryane do you have anything to bring besides name calling?
- Mike P---don't try and talk sense to these people. For a couple of years, I have piped in on how Fannie and Freddie were not permitted to make the kind of non-conforming loans that were the bulk of the "wholesaled" loans that caused the collapse. Fannie and Freddie's downfall was investing in mortgage backed securities....along with virtually every bank and investment house holding our pensions. We all went along with the national Ponzi scheme led by Goldman Sachs, S&P/Moody's and AIG. Fannie and Freddie were victims in this, not participants, and while you can fault their management for investing poorly (along with a lot of other people), this crisis had nothing to do with Barney Frank and the Democrats. It's just infuriating reading the same old crappola lifted straight from Limbaugh and Beck, for whom the next truthful statement will be the first.— Palestra Jon
- Palestra, but in fact Freddie and Fannie DID make or guarantee non-conforming, under-collateralized or under-downpayed mortage loans ANYWAY! Sometimes more than half their inventory were made up of those. That's part of the problem.— pj katauskas
- still_independent, an open primary is also known as a general election. I don't like the manipulation and deal brokering, results of most primaries but if you open it up to everyone, you may as well do away with the whole thing. Everybody should just throw their hat in the ring once and let the electorate decide. If it's a tie of two or three- have a run-off.— JimR
- By October, you'll see Sestak's and Pelosi's picture together so often you'll think they're married. I commend Toomey for the non-negative ad. This election should be an easy choice because the candidates are so different.— Rabe56
- Mike P, Fannie and Freddie underwrite half of all mortgages in America and 3/4ths of all subprime. I did not see how many of the foreclosed mortgages were FannieFreddie, but I would be willing to bet it's most of them.— tr88
- Oh, and btw, Palestra, I don't watch Beck, Limbaugh or Fox.— pj katauskas
- Comment removed.
Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns.
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