Thread: Specter finds voters just plain angry

Specter finds voters just plain angry
Sunday, August 19, 2007
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07231/810614-181.stm
By James O'Toole, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Lake Fong, Post-Gazette

When, the woman demanded, will the partisan Democrats get off the back of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales?

"That's all right with me, to get the Democrats off the back of Attorney General Gonzales,"' Sen. Arlen Specter replied evenly, "But then he'd still have me to contend with."
The exchange in a standing-room-only meeting room at Seton Hill University came as Mr. Specter neared the end of a two-week tour of the state that has elected him to the Senate five times.

He'd enter a room with a posse of note-taking aides; give a short speech, usually emphasizing the Iraq War and immigration; and call for a show of hands from those who wanted to ask questions. "Questions, not speeches," he'd caution his inquisitors.

The issues have changed from year to year, but this town hall tour through the state's 67 counties has been the same through the decades. This year, however, the Republican has seen a marked change in the tone and intensity of his questioners.

"The meetings are a lot bigger ... and there's a lot more passion and a lot more anger," he said as he headed from one meeting to another across the rolling, green hills of Washington County. "And they're angry at everything. ... They're boiling mad about Iraq. They're almost that mad about immigration.

"They're as mad about Gonzales as they are about immigration. They're mad at the president for taking all the power he has. There are a lot of people talking about habeus corpus. Where in the hell would you expect to have all these people talking about habeus corpus?"

In a voice that still betrays the flat intonation of his native Kansas, he said, "You can barley get through the litany of screams."

Through two days of meetings this past week, Mr. Specter sought to underscore his image of independence. It proved impossible to strike a balance that would please all audiences on the war. His questioners included defenders of the administration's Iraq policies, but more of them -- who were also more impassioned -- were critics.

On immigration, the issue on which he'd been an administration ally in a losing fight, the vast majority of those who spoke up were sharply opposed to eased immigration rules and irate that the ones in existence hadn't been enforced more vigorously.


During the public exchanges and in a wide-ranging interview, Mr. Specter, who's gearing up for another re-election battle three years away, signaled his expectation of a significant change in the Congressional response to the war, heralded a long-shot concept to revive legislative attempts at immigration reform, and reiterated his ill-concealed contempt for Mr. Gonzales' record in the Justice Department.

To each audience, Mr. Specter also volunteered that his health had rebounded from his recent and very public battle with Hodgkin's disease, a cancer of the lymph system. A bald and pale Mr. Specter presided over two Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2005 and 2006 as television cameras highlighted the effects of a withering regimen of chemotherapy. Last week, an apparently energetic senator, at 77, showed no lingering effects of the disease.

"Like Samson, when my hair came back, I got my strength back,'' he repeatedly reassured his listeners.


Congress tilting on war
Mr. Specter, was circumspect on what course he might endorse after the much anticipated report on Iraqi progress next month from the administration. But he said repeatedly that barring a showing of "light at the end of the tunnel," a significant change in tactics would be warranted.

He noted several times that Congress had forced another administration's hand by exercising its power of the purse to wind down American involvement in the Vietnam War, although he stopped short of predicting that he or Congress would follow a similar course in the coming months.

Mr. Specter's reservations about war tactics weren't reserved for the administration of his own party, however. He dismissed Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign trail promises to end the war as "rhetoric, that's all it is," noting that neither she nor any of the leading Democrats are calling for an immediate troop withdrawal.

Mr. Specter also flayed the parliamentary tactics of Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the Democratic leader. He maintained that, in refusing to allow a floor vote either on a proposal from Republicans Sens. John Warner and Richard Lugar to order the president to draft a new Iraq plan, or an endorsement of the Iraq Study Group, Mr. Reid had both abused his authority and short-circuited measures that might have spurred a shift in administration war planning.

"Reid was really wrong to pull the bill before we considered the Warner-Lugar propositions. That was a very shrewd plan to require the president to come up with a plan."

Mr. Specter was also scornful of the president's broader approach to foreign policy, calling for an fundamental shift in the nation's approach to negotiations with unfriendly regimes.

"I think it's a major foreign policy failing," he said. "We're foolish not to have bilateral talks with Iran, and without preconditions. How can anybody say ... to a negotiating partner, 'I'll talk to you, but only if you agree to a, b, c, d, and e.' Then the partner says, 'What the hell are you talking about? That's the issue, whether I agree to a, b, c, d, and e.' "


Hybrid immigration bill
Mr. Specter stood by the president on the failed immigration bill, and the preponderance of the questions on that issue this past week showed the political peril of that stand.

But rather than being deterred by the defeat of the immigration proposal he helped steer through the Senate, Mr. Specter holds out the hope that a hybrid concept of his devising could produce at least some movement toward a new immigration policy. He concedes that the vote in Congress, and the sentiment on display for his constituents makes clear that a path toward citizenship, derided as amnesty in the Congressional debate, was a non-starter.

In its place, Mr. Specter has called for an incremental change that would, as he describes it, end the "fugitive status," for the estimated 12 million people in this country illegally. The new legal category, which Mr. Specter described in a recent op-ed article in the Washington Post, would end the path toward citizenship that was the object of so much criticism, but allow such people to remain in the country without fear of deportation unless they violated other laws.

While he conceded that his own aides disagree with his analysis, he predicted that an administration crackdown on undocumented workers, announced after the failure of the immigration bill, would prod a search for new legislative solutions.

"I think we're in for a real shock when these Social Security letters hit,'' he said of the Labor Department initiative to curb the use of false identifications by illegal workers. "They're going to eliminate a vast part of the labor force in this country.''

He noted a Senate colleague's prediction that the crackdown would mean, "These crops are going to rot in the fields,'' and said "When we go back in September, we may find a near panic situation . . . and people are going to start to say what's the best deal we can make.''

Mr. Specter suggested that strong views against immigration were so widespread "because there is a feeling of unfairness, that people take advantage of breaking he law.

"And I think that notwithstanding the mantra of America as the refuge for the huddled masses ... that there has been a historic anger of the last guy on the block, when the Poles came over, when the Italians came over, when the Jews came over."

Mr. Specter is the son of an immigrant, Harry Specter. At almost every stop he mentions, his father's frustration over the government's reneging on a promised bonus to World War I veterans.

Mr. Specter's father enlisted in the U.S. Army after fleeing Czarist Russia.

"My father didn't want to go to Siberia because he heard it was cold there," he said in a deadpan voice. "He wanted to go to Kansas. It was a close call."

When asked if the son of immigrant Harry Specter was ever tempted to lash out at questions on immigration reflecting a tone of unmistakable intolerance, he said, "No, I'm not going to do that because the whole point of the meeting is for me is to hear them out. And if they're intolerant, and I see a lot of them are, that's a fact of life, and I'm not going to correct them by lecturing them about tolerance."


Hard line on Gonzales
Mr. Specter has no similar reticence when it comes to chastising the attorney general. with whom he has clashed repeatedly in Judiciary Committee hearings.

"The attorney general needs replacing,'' he told the dozens of listeners at St. Francis of Loretto Wednesday. "What I want to do is get a Justice Department functioning. ... It's dysfunctional now.''

In an interview, Mr. Specter said that his concerns about the department extend not only to top officials he has criticized in committee but also to the administration of justice across the county.

"Yeah, I do," he said when asked if he feared that Justice Department actions had been compromised at the field level.

He described Judiciary Committee testimony by a federal prosecutor from Virginia who described a call from a former senior department official, Michael Elston, in which Mr. Elston questioned a since-resolved prosecution of the maker of the drug Oxycontin.

"That's a hell of a note," Mr. Specter said. "He didn't order him to discontinue it, but that is inappropriate pressure.''

Just as Mr. Specter is sometimes at odds with the administration, he is a perennial target of criticism from the conservative wing of his own party in Pennsylvania. In 2004, he barely survived a primary challenge from former U.S. Rep. Pat Toomey, despite a huge financial advantage and the united aid of party's hierarchy.

Despite that near-defeat, Mr. Specter said he is confident of re-election in 2010.

"Why do I think I can win a Republican primary?'' he said. "Because I've won a lot of Republican primaries so far.''

Referring to the immigration battle, he said, "When you've got all these talk radio guys against you, and the bloggers, you better have a big megaphone to combat it. But I think they can be combated, but you've got to be prepared.''

With that, he headed off to the fund-raiser that would end his day and help pay for the megaphone he may need in 2010.

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Post-Gazette politics editor James O'Toole can be reached at jotoole@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1562.

Sen. Spector's remarks sound like nothing short of extortion. It appears that he and others are hoping, if not conspiring, for circumstances so dire that they can convince the American people that their ill-conceived legislation is the only salvation for the country.

He will defy the wishes of the people he serves because of BIG Business's desires.??

His remarks about his father being an immigrant has NO bearing on the situation today and he knows it.

He and other members of congress keep looking for ways to justify their planned and willful defiance of the Peoples Will.........Unbelievable !!!!!!

The American people are not buying your amnesty scheme Specter! And politicians -- especially those facing an election shortly -- would be foolish to try to bring this up again, no matter how they try to spin this.

If anything, voters are more adamantly opposed to amnesty now than they were during Specter's last amnesty attempt just a few weeks ago. With the new media, voters are more sophisticated and will not be fooled!