Is Hillary Clinton Who The Dems Should Thank for Specter Jumping Ship?

PA Governor Ed Rendell and candidate Hillary Clinton in 2008

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or have swine flu, you’ve heard that Senator Arlen Specter has decided to become a Democrat.  CNN and others would like us to think this is a big deal.  It’s not.  This switch-a-roo thing happens a lot- Lincoln Chafee, Joe Libermann, the old Dixiecrats from the South who became Republicans when the Democrats became the party of civil rights, etc.

In a moment of refreshing honesty, Sen. Specter admitted he had no great philosophical shift, but rather the simple fact of the matter is that he probably won’t win re-election in Pennsylvania going up against a more conservative Republican who the national GOP will likely favor and even if he gets past that challenge, the reality is that the last eight years of ultra-conservative, reactionary, right-wing demagoguery from the Republican party has simply created more democratic voters in PA.

I was also glad to see that some are also pointing out another obvious fact- that the GOP is so out-of-step with the rest of the nation on issues like health care, foreign policy, federal spending priorities, the Iraq War and on and on,  that it’s not so much that Sen. Arlen Specter left the GOP, but rather that the GOP left him.

Over at Huffington Post, this commentary struck me as interesting- it basically points out that the epic battle between Obama and Clinton during the Democratic primaries, simply created more registered Democrats:

Credit Hillary Clinton’s relentlessness for the decision Arlen Specter made Tuesday to abandon the Republican Party and become a Democrat. It wasn’t her immediate goal, of course, but when Clinton decided to carry the primary to Pennsylvania despite incredibly high odds, the resulting statewide campaign led to hundreds of thousands of Republicans registering as Democrats so that they could vote in the April 22nd contest.

In terms of the delegate count, the primary campaign was effectively over in February, when Obama ran the caucus table. But Clinton soldiered on. A massive voter registration drive by both candidates ran up to the deadline of March 24th in Pennsylvania and was extremely successful.

I wonder if anybody at the DNC has had the good sense to pick up the phone and call Hillary Clinton and thank her?

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