The Specter of Defeat

To read some of the coverage of Arlen Specter's political re-affiliation, you would think that he is the most significant leader the country has seen since at least the time of FDR, if not Lincoln or Jefferson. While one would not be surprised to find that Wobblin' Arlen often imagines himself carved from granite and wearing a toga, it is less clear why the rest of us should share this opinion.

Specter has for many years been the Republican party's least rigid opponent and the Democrats' least reliable friend. Tempting as it is to view his betrayal as a pivotal event in the nation's politics, we are living in precisely the same world today as we would have been, had Pat Toomey not promised to administer a Ned Lamont-esque primary defeat. The difference is illuminating. Joe Lieberman, whose Democratic alignment is entirely sincere, took his beating in the primary as a good party man, before whipping Lamont in the general election.

The Republicans will almost certainly gain Senate seats in 2010, with the cry "don't let them have 60 seats" likely to play strongly in many seats now considered safe. Roland Burris, Chuck Schumer, and Chris Dodd are all to some degree embroiled in scandal, and power is rarely conducive to discipline in office. The world has changed drastically in the past 6 months, and the 18 ahead are unlikely to be any less momentous.

As to the future of the Republican party, the Democrats and liberal media voices have pronounced the last rites over its body more times than Madonna has discovered religion. We cover elections as horseraces and imagine that either man could at any time change places with the other, but it is almost never so. Election results are the produt of the interaction between great cycles in public taste, which are driven by demographic and economic forces that reciprocate over the course of decades, with the epicycles of events.

It is a great conceit to project the future based on a few observations of the present. The Democrats lost three times with increasing severity from 2000 to 2002 and 2004, and yet these changed neither their governing philosophy nor their future electoral prospects. All parties reek of defeat and desperation when their cycle wanes. I see nothing different in the present moment. The "fierce urgency of now" is a constant, as "now" is the sole moment in time with which we are in direct communion. It is only with the leisurely remove of history that we can more clearly discern that who today appears to ride astride the events of his time, is almost always the horse.