A Grand Illusion

From The Onion: “Sen. Arlen Specter awakens to severed donkey head in bed.”

In the summer of 2007, I went to work communications for a group called Americans Against Escalation in Iraq. The organization was an offshoot of MoveOn.org, and other groups like Americans United for Change, which sought to end the war in Iraq by putting pressure mostly on Republicans who were vulnerable in the coming elections.

We operated much like a lobby, targeting specific senators and representatives, trying to persuade them to vote with us. There was a major difference. While lobbies use mostly the carrot to get elected officials on their side, we used only the stick. We put together highly organized field programs in about twenty states, and did everything we could to be a thorn on the side of pro-war representatives.

One of our field people’s favorite tactics was to follow representatives around with a video camera, and ask them questions like “Representative X, why do you continue to send State Y’s sons and daughters to Iraq?” or “Representative X, why do you continue to support George Bush, and not the people of State Y?” Then, we’d try to get the videos on the evening news. If they answered the question, they rarely looked good because they just didn’t have a good answer, and if they simply kept walking, they looked evasive on a very important issue. You have to remember how unpopular the war and George Bush were around this time. This was right before the surge, and during the time Iraq was spinning out of control. The economy had not totally collapsed at that point, and the war and its mismanagement were the main concerns of the American people. None of the representatives who were still supporting it wanted to talk about it.

About 20 of the roughly 30 elected officials that we targeted, were not reelected in 2008. We obviously can’t take credit for that since they were vulnerable before we targeted them, but I’d like to think we helped even if just a tiny bit.

Why am I telling you this story? Take a look at this picture:

One of the senators we targeted was a Sen. Arlen Specter, then the senior senator from Pennsylvania. Sen. Specter and President Bush had a rally during that time in Philadelphia, and we pounced. We organized a bunch of field people and protesters in Philadelphia. I hired those ad trucks, which is logistically harder than you expect. It was nearly impossible to find a high resolution picture of Bush and Specter together. Eventually, my newspaper background lead me to the idea of buying a picture from Getty Images.

When Senator Specter announced he was switching parties this week, I would estimate that a substantial majority of the people who attacked him for the positions he took as a Republican welcomed him with open arms into the Democratic party, including myself. But we had nothing to do with Specter switching parties. It was the extreme ultra-right wing of his party that drove him away. Instead of being happy with having a Republican senator in a moderately liberal state, the Republicans attacked him, and tried to get him out of office for taking moderate stances.

It wasn’t enough to have a Republican in office; they wanted another Rick Santorum. Well, we know how poorly Santorum worked out for them, and it didn’t work with Specter either. In two election cycles, Republicans went from controlling Pennsylvania’s two Senate seats to controlling none.

My ultimate point is one you’ve heard before, that politics is the art of the possible. And I’ll gladly take the pragmatist over the intransigent ideologue, the fanatic. That doesn’t mean that as Democrats we have to sacrifize our ideals, or stand for absolutely nothing at all in order to build a universal coalition. But it does mean that we shouldn’t canibalize the candidates that don’t vote down party lines. Sen. Specter is going to take some positions as a Democrat that we don’t like, and we have to call him out on it, but we have to think twice before we decide to run liberals against him in the Democratic primary.

And so, after working so hard to be a thorn in the side of Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), I welcome Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) to the Democratic Party.

From The Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene II:

PORTIA: Upon the rack, Bassanio! then confess
What treason there is mingled with your love.
BASSANIO: None but that ugly treason of mistrust,
Which makes me fear the enjoying of my love:
There may as well be amity and life
‘Tween snow and fire, as treason and my love.
PORTIA: Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack,
Where men enforced do speak anything.
BASSANIO: Promise me life, and I’ll confess the truth.
PORTIA: Well then, confess and live. [emphasis mine]

Other writers have commented on the torture issue, like the Miami Herald’s own Jackie Bueno Sousa. She seems to think water boarding is not really torture, but torture lite, she calls it. Yeah, Jackie, in terms of harm, water boarding is to torture what soy milk is to milk. I would counsel Jackie to at least put herself through a little methodical and synthetic water boarding, and see how she feels about it. Learn a little something from Chris Hitchens, see below, who had the journalistic integrity to put himself through the experience before he ran his mouth off about it.

She might find the only thing lite is the unbearable stupidity with which she writes about it.

Oh yeah, Sen. Arlen Specter is now a democrat. About freaking time.