Specter says Obama ditched him after he voted to pass health law - TheHill.comI love that they don't identify him as a Democrat. The Wall Street Jounal Best of the Web identifies his party as R2D2, but R2 is much more intelligent and interesting.
Former Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.) writes in a new book that President Obama ditched him in the 2010 election after he helped Obama win the biggest legislative victory of his term by passing healthcare reform.
Specter also claims that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) did not uphold his promise to grant him seniority accrued over 28 years of service in the Senate as a Republican.Don't you just hate it when you can't trust people Arlen.....really sucks when a man gives his word after looking you in the eye and then stabs you in the back. Then again you know all about back stabbing.
Specter, who rocked Washington’s political establishment and made headlines around the country when he left the Republican Party to join Democrats in April of 2009, has kept quiet about these slights until now....
...Specter declined to discuss the behind-the-scenes machinations of his party switch when he granted an interview with several news outlets on his final day in the Senate, when he reminisced about his career in his hideaway on the first floor of the Capitol.
He promised instead to put the juicy details in his memoir, “Life Among the Cannibals,” which will go on sale later this month...
...Specter laments that Obama and Vice President Biden did not do more to help him in the final days of his primary race against former Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.), who beat him 54 percent to 46 percent in the 2010 Pennsylvania Senate Democratic primary.
Specter writes that Obama turned down a request to campaign with him in the final days of the primary, because the president’s advisers feared he would look weak if he intervened and Specter lost.
“I realized that the president and his advisers were gun-shy about supporting my candidacy after being stung by Obama’s failed rescue attempts for New Jersey governor Jon Corzine and Massachusetts attorney general Martha Coakley. They were reluctant to become victims of a trifecta,” he writes.
The snub was made all the more painful by Obama flying over Philadelphia en route to New York City a few days before the election and then on primary day jetting over Pittsburgh to visit a factory in Youngstown, Ohio, 22 miles from the Pennsylvania border, to promote the 2009 economic stimulus law. The painful irony for Specter is that his vote for the stimulus legislation, which was instrumental to its passage, hastened his departure from the Republican Party.
Specter was also disappointed that Biden, who was only a few blocks away at Penn University, did not attend a pre-primary day rally at the Phillies’s Citizens Bank Park — a missed opportunity Specter attributes to a failed staff-to-staff request.
Just over a year before, Obama and Biden welcomed Specter to the Democratic Party with a press conference at the White House and promised him his full support.
Specter believes Reid acted with “duplicity” while managing the party switch. Specter said Reid promised him that he would be recognized on the seniority list as a Democrat elected in 1980, but failed to deliver on it.
Had Specter been given the seniority he was promised, he would have become chairman of the powerful Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations subcommittee and next in line to chair the Judiciary Committee.
Instead, Reid stripped Specter of all his seniority by passing a short resolution by unanimous consent in a nearly-empty chamber, burying him at the bottom of the Democrats’ seniority list.
Specter found out about it after his press secretary emailed him a press account of the switch. Specter was floored that Reid had “violated a fundamental Senate practice to give personal notice to a senator directly affected by the substance of a unanimous consent agreement.”
Specter was left simmering after Reid’s spokesman at the time told the AP that Specter had known about the resolution and even joined in a deal to draft it, which Specter characterizes as a “falsification.”
“Overall, my sense was that Reid didn’t extend himself much to advance my seniority on either committee,” he wrote.
Specter writes that several senior Democrats refused to cede seniority to him, significantly damaging his reelection chances against Sestak.
He says Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), now the chairman of the Labor, Health and Human Services subcommittee, declined a request to let Specter take over as chairman at least until the election.
Sens. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) refused to let him move past them in seniority on the Judiciary Committee.
But Specter praised Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the third-ranking member of the Democratic leadership, for treating him generously. Durbin gave Specter chairmanship of the Judiciary subcommittee on Crime and Drugs and both Durbin and Schumer let him climb ahead of them on Judiciary’s seniority ladder.
Specter also describes in detail McConnell’s response after learning that he would become the 59th member of the Democratic Caucus — Sen. Al Franken’s (D) delayed victory in Minnesota would give Reid later that year the 60th vote he needed to pass healthcare reform...
A real public servant this leach. Phil Graham switched from Democrat to Republican in the 70s but unlike this snake Graham was a man about it. He resigned after the change and said he would run as a Republican. And he never lost another election for the House or Senate.
The problem with politicians like Specter is his blind quest for power. The fact he voted to nationalize a sixth of this country's economy, destroy the best health care system in the world and waste trillions of dollars to put the US on the road the economic ruin is of no consequence as long as he is the chairman of a committee. Why should he care. His life is good and he'll never have to deal with the damage he caused.
Arlen, you a worthless piece of s#~£ who is a poster child for term limits and IQ tests on Congress. Again, don't go away mad, just go away.
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