Settling scores

Arlen Specter, who turns 82 on Feb. 12, played a significant role in the American politics of a past generation, and he doesn't want us to forget.

That, essentially, is the purpose of the former U.S. senator's new memoir - that and decrying "intolerance and political correctness" in Washington, dallying a bit in gossip (he recounts hearing a penis joke or two), and settling a few old scores.

He recalls every triumph and every slight, particularly a snub from President Obama during his failed 2010 effort to win nomination for a sixth term. "I'd be less than candid, and less than conscious," he writes, "if I didn't say that it hurt."

Specter thrived for 30 years in the Washington piranha tank and held more sway in the Senate than any Pennsylvanian since fellow Philadelphian Hugh Scott, Republican leader in the 1960s and '70s.

Onetime chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Specter had a contrarian's knack - call it independence and grit, or arrogant self-importance, as some did - for positioning himself as the sought-after man in the middle when the Senate was gridlocked.

As he writes in Life Among the Cannibals, due out March 27 from St. Martin's Press, he was "the key 60th vote" to break a Republican filibuster of Obama's health-care overhaul.

Then a Republican, he also delivered a vital vote for Obama's $787 billion stimulus package, a decision he calls "the most important" of his career and one that "saved the nation" from a 1930s-style depression.

The memoir is the third from the former Yale Law Journal editor. It picks up where he left off in Passion for Truth (single-bullet theory, Anita Hill) and Never Give In (fight against cancer).

It comes a year after he left office. GOP backlash to his health-care and stimulus votes caused him to switch to the Democratic Party. Though party leaders supported him, he lost to then-Rep. Joe Sestak in the Democratic primary. Sestak ended up losing the general election to Pat Toomey, whom Specter sees as a hard-right Republican he might have beaten.

Never a man to stay down, Specter is emerging from a period of public silence. He still bristles with intensity in a new public-affairs program he hosts on Maryland Public Television. The first episode Friday featured a pair of ex-senators (Fred Thompson and Evan Bayh) in a lawyerly discussion of campaign financing and judicial activism.

The new book, written with the help of Charles Robbins, his onetime press secretary, is, if anything, breezier.

The tale of the Obama snub comes amid discussion of Specter's being halfheartedly embraced by Democrats he had fought with for decades as a Republican.

Toward the end of the 2010 primary, "White House support sputtered," he writes.

On an Air Force One flight to Pittsburgh, Obama was perfectly friendly and chatty, he says. But when they got to an event at Carnegie Mellon University, "I was a little surprised when he did not acknowledge my presence. . . . He acknowledged a number of people, but not me."

"Obama commented about how important the stimulus was, saving the country," he says, "and it would have been a perfect opportunity to throw me a mention."

He cites Harry Truman's dictum: "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog."

In a meeting last week with The Inquirer Editorial Board, he said Obama "has a problem with listening. In a roomful of people, he's always the smartest guy in the room - and always has to prove it."

In Cannibals, he complains that hardly anybody in Washington even tries to listen. Bad as that is for Senate comity, he argues, it's worse for the American people.

He writes: "The extremists in both parties have dominated the political process. . . . In some quarters, compromise has become a dirty word. . . . Polarization of the political parties has followed."

He faults two senators in particular, a Republican and a Democrat.

After Obama was elected in 2008, Republican Jim DeMint of South Carolina, a leading conservative, publicly refused to even consider the president's agenda, Specter recalls. He pledged, instead, to "break" Obama.

"The ink wasn't dry on the president's oath of office and opponents were laying plans to defeat him in 2012," Specter says.

He seems personally bitter toward Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, who he believes reneged on a pledge to let him keep his seniority on Senate committees when he changed parties. Having to sit at the end of the row, he writes, was "humiliating."

He says Reid's ironfisted approach on legislation - not letting Republicans have input on bills - has left the GOP with little alternative but to block passage through filibusters.

"Reid had a flip tongue - smart-alecky, really," he says.

One figure Specter goes out of his way to praise is former President George W. Bush, who he says always was warm to him. He cites a 2008 letter to Bush in which he called him "an outstanding president."

at 610-313-8205 or tinfield@phillynews.com.