The Cover Sheet of Revelation

If you wanted any more proof of the epic fail of the Bush administration — its self-etiolating foreign policy, its passion for deceit in the name of a shining imperialist mirage of an objective — it’s available courtesy of a story in the June issue of GQ magazine (on their Web site now), a story that cuts to the heart of the Bushies’ desperate rationale for the Iraq War of Convenience.

Thanks to journalist Robert Draper, we see just how far they were prepared to go.

Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” a well-regarded biography of George Bush and the origins of 43’s evangelical leanings, writes in GQ about the illustration and presentation of the Worldwide Intelligence Updates personally presented to then-President Bush by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the tense time just before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and some months after.

Draper describes the Update as “a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful” of Pentagon insiders. But oddly enough, it’s not the content of the briefings themselves that’s at issue. We’ve been living that reality for more than half a dozen years.


What’s jarring, and deeply upsetting to many, are the cover sheets adorning these recently declassified documents (some still bearing the black bar of redaction). Photographs of American forces in the Iraqi theater of operations are mixed with biblical quotations from the books of Ephesians, Psalms, Proverbs and Isaiah, and the epistles of Peter.

In juxtapositions of images and text that amounted to a daily Christian/military motivational tool, these cover sheets, accompanying briefs on the nation’s intelligence capability, are just short of a call to holy war — expressions of what the cover sheets suggest is the military mission of an American theocracy.

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Draper writes:

”These cover sheets were the brainchild of Major General Glen Shaffer, a director for intelligence serving both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense. In the days before the Iraq war, Shaffer’s staff had created humorous covers in an attempt to alleviate the stress of preparing for battle. Then, as the body counting began, Shaffer, a Christian, deemed the biblical passages more suitable. Several others in the Pentagon disagreed. At least one Muslim analyst in the building had been greatly offended; others privately worried that if these covers were leaked during a war conducted in an Islamic nation, the fallout—as one Pentagon staffer would later say—‘would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.’”

Rumsfeld, who personally delivered the updates to Bush, was central to the communication of this cynical union of the religious and the governmental.

Draper:

The Scripture-adorned cover sheets illustrate one specific complaint I heard again and again: that Rumsfeld’s tactics—such as playing a religious angle with the president—often ran counter to sound decision-making and could, occasionally, compromise the administration’s best interests. In the case of the sheets, publicly flaunting his own religious views was not at all the SecDef’s style —“Rumsfeld was old-fashioned that way,” Shaffer acknowledged when I contacted him about the briefings — but it was decidedly Bush’s style, and Rumsfeld likely saw the Scriptures as a way of making a personal connection with a president who frequently quoted the Bible. No matter that, if leaked, the images would reinforce impressions that the administration was embarking on a religious war and could escalate tensions with the Muslim world. The sheets were not Rumsfeld’s direct invention—and he could thus distance himself from them, should that prove necessary.

Still, the sheer cunning of pairing unsentimental intelligence with religious righteousness bore the signature of one man: Donald Rumsfeld.

Reacting, Rev. Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said in a statement on Monday that American armed forces “are not Christian crusaders, and they ought not be depicted as such.”

“Depicting the Iraq conflict as some sort of holy war is completely outrageous. It's contrary to the constitutional separation of religion and government, and it's tremendously damaging to America's reputation in the world.”

Lynn’s of course correct. But coming so long after the fact of the military events these updates anticipated, they’re almost no surprise.

They’re a weak kind of revelation, confirming what we’ve known for some time, that Rumsfeld, the Bush administration and its various enablers were intent from the beginning — from before the beginning — on justifying an unnecessary war by any means necessary. Even a thoroughly calculated manipulation of American faith.
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Image credits: Update cover sheets: GQ via Department of Defense.

A co-signer of The Times

Thomas Edsall of The Huffington Post today canvassed several “well-informed observers” of The New York Times (specialists in bankruptcy law).

Their prognosis was not good. Their jointly downbeat assessment flies in the face of some new proposals by The Times to thrive in a battered economy populated by risk-averse advertisers and wary consumers content to graze at several stops along the information highway.

Hope still springs eternal from the Times 52-story, $400 million headquarters in midtown Manhattan, even as a river of money seeps from the company inside.

Distilling the view of the observers, Edsall writes that, in their view,

[I]nsolvency may be roughly a year or two away.

If officials of the paper are forced to declare bankruptcy, it will be difficult — perhaps impossible — for the Sulzberger-Ochs family, which has been at the helm since 1896, to prevent the paper from falling into the hands of an individual or a corporation (for example, Rupert Murdoch and the News Corporation) whose journalistic principles are markedly different from, if not antithetical to, those that have guided the United States' dominant newspaper.

The family’s one out may be not in whether it sells but in who it sells to. With ownership of a majority of a special class of stock (without which no purchase of The Times is possible), the Sulzberger family can head off the ignominy of bankruptcy by selling those shares to whoever they choose. For this reason, and because of the economic headwinds the company faces, the enduring journalistic legacy of the Sulzbergers may well depend on the vision of the prospective buyer, and the family’s ability to get that vision.

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Of all the names floated as a possible new owner of The Times might be, the name of David Geffen — the billionaire investor whose early bets on Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, the Eagles and DreamWorks cemented his status as a media visionary — is for now easily the most intriguing.

Businessweek reported earlier this month that Geffen intended to invest $200 million for a stake in the Times Company of just under 20 percent, buying out the stake owned by the hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners.

It may be more than just a savvy piecemeal investment. According to Newsweek’s Johnnie L. Roberts, “two people familiar with Geffen’s thinking” said the mogul “would regard the newspaper … as a national treasure meriting preservation into perpetuity.”

As Newsweek lays it out, the Geffen plan, if one truly emerged, would entail running The Times as a nonprofit organization, something roughly analogous to the St. Petersburg Times, controlled by the independent Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a nonprofit educational institution — a relationship singular among American newsgathering organizations.

There’s another way. The Times could also explore the benefits of reforming as an L3C, a lower-profit variation on the limited liability company (LLC) that would combine the pursuit of work of a proven social benefit with a secondary profit motive, attracting both private investment and philanthropic capital.

Either way, it would be a shift not so much cataclysmic as epochal: the nation’s consistently pre-eminent newsgathering entity free to subordinate (if only slightly) pursuit of the relentless profit motive and to further its journalistic role as the template of a free press, an entity more fully in the public interest: “nytimes.org.”

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But something’s got to be done, and quickly, and smartly. This is a company bleeding cash, at the mother of all burn rates. Edsall reported that the New York Times Company lost a breathtaking $74.5 million in the first quarter of this year — compared to a loss of $335,000 the same time last year.

The reliable New York Observer reported Friday that Times executive editor Bill Keller met with staff on Wednesday to discuss not one but two! paid-content models apparently being considered by the Times:

”One includes a ‘meter system,’ in which the reader can roam freely on the Web site until hitting a predetermined limit of word-count or pageviews, after which a meter will start running and the reader is charged for movement on the site thereafter. He warned staff at the meeting that this pay model would be ‘tricky.’ If the word-count limit or page-view limit is set too low, it could chase readers off, compromising traffic and advertising revenue.”

We can credit (or blame) much of this idea on the fact that people who work at The Times take taxicabs all over New York City. Because that’s what this is: a use-weighted (as opposed to distance-weighted) approach to charging for content.

As such, it’s more than “tricky”; it’s truly problematic, on several levels. The New York Times has never been a snapshot of a newspaper; the very level of detail and complexity The Times can bring to bear on any topic under the sun has been its historical hallmark, and the very best asset it has to trade on in the future.

If the “meter system” hinges on word count, then, it’s highly subjective when the meter should kick in. What’s the criteria? How much of a Frank Rich piece do I get before the meter starts running? Is it the same word count I get for a David Brooks op-ed before the word-count flag drops? When will the meter kick in for breaking news stories?

A page-view threshold has its problems too; the vast numbers of computer screens in the world, Kindle and laptop, iPhone and desktop alike, are of different sizes and operate at different levels of resolution. It’s hard to enforce a page-view standard when there’s really no such thing as a standard page view.

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But frankly, all of these seemingly fresh ideas point to a problem as fundamental to the Times as its identity as a news operation: the people directing the Times as a news operation. For any of these ideas to see the light of day would mean that, in less than 10 years, the New York Times will have gone from supporting a free-content online business model to endorsing a paid-content model to renouncing that paid-content model to championing the free-content model to backing another paid-content model likely to be one of the most intrusive and complicated of anything online.

This after having announced a raising of the price of the Times newspaper for the third time in 23 months.

Who’s in charge? How did the most respected single voice in American journalism come to lurch from one strategy to another, frantically tacking left and right in search of some faint breeze? How’d they lose sight of the overall? Who's got the throughline?

Given the challenges facing them, you have to wonder what pact with the devil may be necessary to keep The Times viable and independent. Who’ll co-sign to let the Sulzbergers stay in charge? And if the center can’t hold, can the Times brain trust make a next move that upholds the journalistic principles of the institution as well as the fiduciary principles of a business?

Last month, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., said this at the Times annual meeting:

“We know that there are considerable challenges before us, but past experience teaches us that the outcome will be determined by our ability to adhere to the formula that has successfully driven this Company for so long.”

And there lies the ominous problem: The formula that has successfully driven the New York Times for so long may be close to driving it into the ground.
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Image credits: New York Times front page: ©2009 The New York Times Company. Geffen: Paul Hawthorne/Associated Press. New York taxi: Nrbelex, republished under GNU Free Documentation License v1.2. Sulzberger: jdlasica at flicker.com

Speak, Comedy: The Wanda & Barack Show

Brash and acerbic, Wanda Sykes is a comedian who is — like scotch, jazz, hunting and certain anatomical positions attempted between consenting adults — an acquired taste. Her Emmy-winning brand of comedy, developed for years on the standup circuit and sharpened with her role on CBS’s “New Adventures of Old Christine” or appearances on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” isn’t for everyone. Either you get it or you don’t; either way, you best keep your head down.

This was known when Sykes was invited to speak Saturday at the White House Correspondents Dinner — the annual nerd scribes’ prom that for Washington journalists is attitudinally the closest thing to the Golden Globe Awards, with none of the awards and only some of the Globes attitude.

For relatively strait-laced journalists in a risqué-averse city like Washington, the WHCD is a chance to let off steam. And let others do the same thing. Like Wanda Sykes.

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The fallout is still continuing over Sykes who, her natural self-confidence squared with the self-confidence of brand-new parenthood, took on that progressives’ target of opportunity, the talk-radio dirigible Rush Limbaugh. No amount of Tell will ever trump the Show. You have to see the videos to believe:



At least one writer gives Sykes credit, in her reliably over-the-top way, for making the resuscitation of the GOP at least possible, by asserting the wish her heart makes: the GOP as a Rush-free zone. John Batchelor at The Daily Beast observed as much on Tuesday:

“Wanda Sykes articulated a simple vision. She pictured a day in the distant future when the Republican Party will be free of its childlike dependence upon burlesque acts like Rush Limbaugh and his acolytes; free of their droning, repetitive excuses that the attack on New York and Washington gives them writ to bait and bully everyone who isn’t on the burlesque stage with them.” …

Jon Stewart commented with professional admiration, “That’s a hard joke.” But it was much more. It was a revelation to the GOP of what it means to be lost, without power, without leadership, out of ideas, time, patience, courage, and yet to be needy to the point of strung out on the daily palaver of a disembodied, troubled, ill-educated, powerless performer in his Orson Welles costume babbling alone in a radio studio in Florida.

What Wanda Sykes has done for the GOP is to name the problem, and the problem is the party’s addiction to hambone performers who each day claim to be speaking for the so-called conservative base of the Republican Party.”

The headliner, President Obama, who actually preceded Sykes on the fight card, flat-out killed. Again, peep the videos to see just how accurate and pitch-perfect Barack Obama’s comic timing really is, even when the focus is … Barack Obama. It’s clear that the 44th president has the ability to bring his formidable skills as an orator to the world of comedy.

You want self-confidence?

“Good evening. I am Barack Obama. Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me. Apologies to the Fox table.”

He took on all comers, from the Republican party to RNC chairman Michael Steele to once-but-not-yet future rival Hillary Clinton to … himself.



"I would like to talk about what my administration plans to achieve in the next 100 days,” he said. "During the second 100 days, we will design, build and open a library dedicated to my first 100 days." …

"I believe that my next 100 days will be so successful, I will be able to complete them in 72 days -- and on the 73rd day I will rest."

To the president, former vice president and reigning dark lord Dick Cheney was a chip shot from the duckblind: "He is very busy working on his memoirs, tentatively titled "How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People." …

“I must confess I really didn't want to be here tonight. But I had to come. That's one more problem I inherited from George Bush.”



A good time was had by all, more or less. Obama can take pride in his own versatility. If for some reason this President of the United States thing doesn’t work out, he’s got a standup career waiting.

And Sykes, a beneficiary of a blessed event, may have met her match for outspokenness. TV Guide announced on Thursday that the comedian and her companion, identified only as Alex, welcomed twins, boy (Lucas Claude) and girl (Olivia Lou), into the world on April 27.


No doubt those two kids, the couple’s first, will share Wanda’s flair for trying out new material, shouting whatever comes to mind whenever the mood strikes.
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Image credit: Wanda Sykes: Still from C-SPAN.

T.I.’s pre-lockdown props

We’re used to the rapper esthetic being played out to the hilt in public, a parade of people bearing stereotypes from the arc-welder eyeshades to the cap cocked at quarter to nine to the Attitude, the indispensable ‘tude that helped the media establish Cristal, Glock and Escalade as some kind of holy trinity of the rapper ethos. With the rappers’ ready approval. And the world’s eager consumption.

The rapper T.I. was no exception. On March 27 the three-time Grammy-winning rapper, who starred in “ATL” and “American Gangster” was sentenced to serve a year and a day in prison for possession of illegal firearms. In 2007 T.I. (aka Clifford Joseph Harris Jr.) was arrested hours before the B.E.T. Hip-Hop Awards, and charged with holding three unregistered machine guns and two silencers, and possession of firearms by a convicted felon.

The year 2007, a wild one for T.I., was a capstone on other years that were even more, uh, eventful. In 1998 he was charged with violating a state controlled substances act and giving false information. In 2003 he was sentenced to community service for assault of a female sheriff deputy at a Tampa mall. In 2006 he was arrested on a probation violation warrant from Florida.

So far, you’re thinking, it’s the traditional arc of a tragedy about to happen. We’ve seen this doomed trajectory before. But credit T.I. with a change of heart that seems sincere. As part of the 1,500 hours of community service that’s part of his March conviction, T.I. has spoken several times before tens of thousands of high school students, warning them off the culturally seductive path of gun culture.



Then on May 11, in a blog on The Huffington Post titled “Responsibility Is a Lifestyle,” T.I. wrote of his personal awakening, speaking truth to power with the eloquence of the street and an eloquence beyond it:

“In a few weeks, I will begin a one-year prison sentence for being in the possession of illegal firearms. Where I come from, having a gun is just part of everyday life. But, through this painful process of going to court and being convicted, I realized that I had to make a change. I made some bad decisions. I broke the law and will accept my punishment. With deep reflection about where my life was headed, I have begun the process of redemption, and decided that before I go to prison, I want to speak to young people about responsibility as a lifestyle. I hope that through my mistakes, young people can begin to learn, as I did, that we have to put our guns down and start to give our guns back. …”

This is a forthright cry from the heart; there are politicians who'd do well to adopt T.I.'s forthright admission of wrong and his pledge to improve. But he also understands the broader dimension of responsibility about gun violence. He recognizes it's as much about the collective, societal We as it is about the individual's role.

“Now is the time to speak out against gun violence. Now is the time to take responsibility for our actions. Now is the time to make our communities safer. … Now is the time to give back our guns. Now is the time for me to lead by example.
”

May 11 was also the day that T.I. marched through Harlem with (among others) rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton, Russell Simmons of Def Jam, and Kevin Liles of Warner Music Group to denounce gun violence, and to remember the lives of two teenagers shot to death recently in the area.

“I carried guns and swung dope as a 13-year-old,” T.I. told the New York Daily News. “I had my best friend taken away from me through guns. I was so hurt from the loss of his life, I didn't take notice to the knowledge that I still had mine.”

The cynics among you will say he’s fishing for a plea bargain, and maybe he is. But sometimes it’s sensible, to say nothing of refreshing, to acknowledge a statement for exactly what it states. T.I. wouldn’t be the first person in America to make some new personal pivot in the wake of the election of President Obama. In an era of change, let’s give T.I. the benefit of the doubt.

If he’s serious, and there’s no reason to think he’s not, this could signal another sea change in the tropes and traditions of Hiphop Nation, as profound in its way as the shift of rap fashion that Jay-Z, Kanye West and P. Diddy spearheaded not so long ago. But needless to say, this is bigger than fashion. This is a straight-up renunciation of the ballistic code of honor that’s been central to young black music, and young black life, for far too damn long.

The skills of manhood are bigger than skills of the mic. All props to T.I. for recognizing that.
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Image credits: T.I. top: Promotional still. T.I. lower: Still from TheDeeCez.com video.

The ‘57-state solution’

After last year’s presidential election, some voices in the media said that President Obama would excel as an American president by exploiting the momentum of history laid out before him. The way to Obama's possible greatness in the office would lie in his willingness to seize opportunities, to make bold moves, to step outside of the footprints laid before him, to step out on faith and possibly change everything — starting with people’s expectations of what is possible.

Next week, President Obama faces one of those opportunities.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his first visit to Washington since regaining the leadership of Israel, will meet with President Obama, at the White House sometime in the next week. To say there are high hopes would be a colossal understatement.

“All eyes will be looking to Washington,” King Abdullah of Jordan told The Times Online (UK), in an interview dated Monday. “If there are no clear signals and no clear directives to all of us, there will be a feeling that this is just another American government that is going to let us all down.”

The King's forecast, which might seem to make him the purveyor of possible doom, the Cassandra of the Hashemite Kingdom, may be the kind of gimlet-eyed pragmatism the Israeli-Palestinian issue has called for.

”If there is procrastination by Israel on the two-state solution or there is no clear American vision for how this is going to play out in 2009, then all the tremendous credibility that Obama has worldwide and in this region will evaporate overnight if nothing comes out in May.

If we delay our peace negotiations, then there’s going to be another conflict between Arabs or Muslims and Israel in the next 12 to 18 months — as sure as the other conflicts happened.”

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Such statements suggest that the leaders of 57 Muslim majority nations, borrowing from Obama’s playbook of lightning change, may be prepared to attempt to engage on a broad range of solutions, including discussing the two-state solution that has been the third rail, tripwire, minefield and stumbling block of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades.


For Obama, barely started on his first term in office, the stakes could not be higher. To emerge from meetings with Netanyahu and Muslim leaders with a framework for finally, comprehensively settling generations of bad blood and old scores would establish Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as a diplomatic tandem equal to the greatest in our nation’s history.

And more: Obama’s achievement of a comprehensive Middle East peace— the kind of broad stroke our young president has already shown a facility for — would seriously undercut the recruiting tools of terrorists, begin cutting off the air supply of resentment, outrage and ethnic emotionalism that terrorism needs to survive.

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But it’s all gone south before. The shimmering dream of a comprehensive Middle East peace has frustrated administrations past, most notably that of President Clinton, who went at it hammer & tongs with then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The offer of a separate Palestinian state awaited Arafat; this was the door he could not, would not step through when the opportunity presented itself in December 2000 and January 2001.


This door of opportunity is one Barack Obama’s clearly ready to walk through. He intends to give a major speech on Muslim-American relations in Egypt in June, the beneficiary of a wave of goodwill from everyday people in leading Arab countries. Reuters reported Sunday on a new Ipsos Poll that found “Obama's popularity in leading Arab countries far outstrips that of the United States, suggesting he could be able to boost goodwill in the region toward his country.”

Obama “currently enjoys widespread optimism among citizens of that region that he will have a positive effect on their own country, the Middle East, the United States and indeed the world,” Ipsos reported in its canvass of 7,000 adults in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan.

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For King Abdullah, though, the stakes are even higher than the conventional wisdom might suggest. A two-state solution — Israelis in one sovereign nation, Palestinians in another — has long been the Holy Grail of diplomacy.

The king would beg to differ. For him, it’s bigger. And deeper. And wider. And basic to the leadership skills of Obama and Netanyahu, two of the newest world leaders facing a challenge that could eventually reshape nothing less than the map of the Middle East. A carpe diem moment that starts sometime in the next week.

“The critical juncture will be what comes out of the Obama-Netanyahu meeting,” he told The Times.

”We are sick and tired of the process. We are talking about direct negotiations. That is a major point. We are approaching this in a regional context. You could say through the Arab peace proposal. The Americans see this as we do and I think the Europeans. Britain is playing a very vital pro-active role, more than I have ever seen in the ten years of my experience in bringing people together.

What we are talking about is not Israelis and Palestinians sitting at the table, but Israelis sitting with Palestinians, Israelis sitting with Syrians, Israelis sitting with Lebanese. And with the Arabs and the Muslim world lined up to open direct negotiations with Israelis at the same time. So it’s the work that needs to be done over the next couple of months that has a regional answer to this — that is not a two-state solution, it is a 57-state solution.

That is the tipping point that shakes up Israeli politicians and the Israeli public. Do you want to stay Fortress Israel for the next ten years? The calamity that that would bring to all of us, including the West? This has become a global problem.”

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Image credits: Obama: Still from White House video. Netanyahu: © 2009 World Economic Forum. Obama and King Abdullah: Pete Souza/The White House. Clinton, Barak and Arafat: The White House via UPI.

Specter value to Democrats: Not Proven

The wrapper’s still on the welcome-neighbor fruit basket the Democrats sent to Arlen Specter’s place. He moved in all of ten days ago, and he’s stunk up the whole block already.

The prodigal 29-year senator from Pennsylvania, lost as a Republican and newly found as a Democrat, was a source of some distress for the GOP last week, as the Republicans reckoned with the loss of a seat in the Senate, and with it the probable loss of the filibuster as a weapon against the Obama legislative agenda.

That was last week. A lot goes down in seven days. In that time, the newest Democratic senator has his neighbors wondering why he moons the cars as they pass by on the street — wondering exactly what side of the aisle Arlen Specter is really on.

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For years now Arlen Specter has made a habit, if not the better part of a career, by pledging allegiance to no one but himself. Going his own way has been a hallmark of his style on Capitol Hill.

The senator, who infamously voted “not proven” in 1998, during the Clinton Senate impeachment vote — a weird sideways invocation of Scottish law that essentially just means voting “not guilty” — broke with the Republicans in 1987, over the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. He pissed off his own party again in 1999, when he condemned the GOP for the relentlessly zealous pursuit of the impeachment of President Clinton, in the fallout of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Maybe for this reason, according to recent polls by Quinnipiac University, Specter has a higher approval rating among Democrats in Pennsylvania than Republicans, 62–55 respectively.

Not that he’s above angering the Democrats — the party that, until just about ten days ago, was his loyal opposition.

On April 28, President Obama was told of Specter’s pending switch to the Democrats. Specter told Obama, “I’m a loyal Democrat. I support your agenda.” Hey, everybody, welcome the prodigal!

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Well, that didn’t last long. About a week. Specter had by this time already been re-necklaced by David Broder of The Washington Post, with the title “Specter the Defector” That's what they called Specter when he flipped from Democrat to Republican back in 1965.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Then, on May 2, on NBC's "Meet the Press" last Sunday, Specter raised the, uh, spectre of a loose cannon in the Senate having rolled from one aisle to the other.

In an exchange with Specter, MTP moderator David Gregory said:

GREGORY: It was reported this week that when you met with the president, you said, “I will be a loyal democrat. I support your agenda.” Let me test that on probably one of the most important areas of his agenda, and that’s health care. Would you support health care reform that puts up a government run public plan to compete with a private plan issued by a private insurance company?
SPECTER: No. And you misquote me, David. I did not say I would be a loyal Democrat. I did not say that. And last week, after I said I was changing parties, I voted against the budget because the budget has a way to pass health care with 51 votes, which undermines a basic Senate institution to require 60 votes to impose closure on key issues. …I did not say I am a loyal Democrat.

Real loyal Democrats everywhere dropped their remotes (along with their jaws) and asked themselves, “Can this marriage be annulled?” Which assumes there was a marriage in the first place. There were some Democrats who were already skeptical of Specter’s truer motives for making this switch.

He talked a good game about making the leap across the aisle on the basis of principle and values, and Specter’s historically iconoclastic voting pattern, not always in lockstep with his own party, has happened often enough over 29 years to make that believable.

But then you drill down a little further and you hit the bedrock of the reason for Specter’s morphing from red to blue: Specter faced a primary challenge from Republican Pat Twoomey, a former Congressman and figurehead behind the Club for Growth. It was generally conceded that Specter would have lost. Rather than risk the end of his senatorial career in a loss to a primary challenger in his own party, Specter made the switcheroo of the label on the can; whether there’s a transformation of the product inside is in doubt.

"I did not say I would be a loyal Democrat," Specter said, apparently losing sight of the fact that you can be a loyal Democrat without being servile or reflexively obedient.

When The New York Times asked whether he lamented the absence of Jewish Republicans in the Senate, he said, "I sure do. There's still time for the Minnesota courts to do justice and declare Norm Coleman the winner."

It’s apparently hard for the new guy to lose his old habits.

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It may be just as hard for Pennsylvania Democrats to lose one of their old habits — like loyalty to the party and its principles. The state, which went for Obama last year, has its own iconoclastic streak. The working-class voters of the state, faced with the prospect of Twoomey (a Republican they don’t know) and the reality of Specter (a Democrat they don’t trust), could just go a different way altogether.

Enter Joe Sestak. He’s a former Navy rear admiral. He’s got a Ph.D from Harvard. He’s worked with the Joint Chiefs and the National Security Council. He’s currently a Democratic congressman in Pennsylvania’s 7th district, and the highest ranking former military officer to ever serve in Congress. And he’s considering whether or not to run against Specter in the primary next year.

Sestak is impressive on camera. He knows the talking points, has a firm command of the need for rapid-fire encapsulation of a point of view, and he doesn’t back down. He looked good on May 1 on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” muzzling the notoriously hyperactive pit bull Chris Matthews — actually finishing his answers before Matthews piled on with more.

He looked just as good, sharp and articulate the day before, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program:

Sestak looks believable; his arguments are reasoned and couched in a rhetorical style that’s accessible, at odds with Specter’s curmudgeonly flintiness. Sestak would give Specter all he could handle in the Democratic Senate primary campaign. Sestak is younger than Specter, his resume is frankly more impressive, he’s more energetic, way easier on the eyes, and he’s more of a piece with Pennsylvanians’ sense of themselves as independents living in the future tense, rather than the past.



Some in the Democratic party are already putting Specter, and his possible value to the party, in a less-than-awestruck perspective.

Democratic strategist James Carville said Specter’s shift was possibly a "major event in terms of how the Senate conducts its business," but "a relatively minor event in political history."

"[Specter] was the least reliable Republican. So he will just switch to become the least reliable Democrat," he said in a May 4 interview with The Huffington Post. "I wouldn't try to make much more out of it than the political survivor comes up with one more act in a long-running play of political survival …”

Some in the press have caught on, too. Broder of The Post has. "[M]uch as Specter's decision reflects an increasingly serious weakness in the Republican Party, there is no escaping the fact that it is also an opportunistic move by one of the most opportunistic politicians of modern times.

"The one consistency in the history of Arlen Specter has been his willingness to do whatever will best protect and advance the career of Arlen Specter."
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Image credits: Specter: Public domain. Sestak: Public domain.