The Annals of Arlen
By GAIL COLLINS
NYT
“I love you, and I love Arlen Specter,” Barack Obama told a crowd in Philadelphia last fall. If you happen to be in Pennsylvania, you can relive this incident many times a day, thanks to campaign ads that Senator Specter hopes will save his hide in next week’s Democratic primary.
Was the president sincere? If he loves the guy, maybe the voters should take it into consideration. However, I suspect that Barack loves Arlen in the same sense that he loved that crowd, which was in Philadelphia at a Specter fund-raiser. Definitely, he was grateful to them for showing up. And raising funds. But everybody understood that he was not, you know, planning to invite them all home for dinner.
The president appreciated Specter’s help in shoving the stimulus bill over the finish line last year, when the senator was still a Republican. And he really did love the fact that Specter’s party switch gave the Democrats what would turn out to be a very temporary 60th vote in the Senate. But he is not so grateful that he is going to go to Pennsylvania to campaign for him and risk adding yet another political carcass to the list of uncharming Democrats who went down the drain while clinging to his coattails.
(Martha Coakley, Jon Corzine, Arlen Specter. What’s with all these unpleasant people running for office? I have a very clear memory of politicians as lovable rogues. Or at least reasonably affable rogues.)
(More here.)
NYT
“I love you, and I love Arlen Specter,” Barack Obama told a crowd in Philadelphia last fall. If you happen to be in Pennsylvania, you can relive this incident many times a day, thanks to campaign ads that Senator Specter hopes will save his hide in next week’s Democratic primary.
Was the president sincere? If he loves the guy, maybe the voters should take it into consideration. However, I suspect that Barack loves Arlen in the same sense that he loved that crowd, which was in Philadelphia at a Specter fund-raiser. Definitely, he was grateful to them for showing up. And raising funds. But everybody understood that he was not, you know, planning to invite them all home for dinner.
The president appreciated Specter’s help in shoving the stimulus bill over the finish line last year, when the senator was still a Republican. And he really did love the fact that Specter’s party switch gave the Democrats what would turn out to be a very temporary 60th vote in the Senate. But he is not so grateful that he is going to go to Pennsylvania to campaign for him and risk adding yet another political carcass to the list of uncharming Democrats who went down the drain while clinging to his coattails.
(Martha Coakley, Jon Corzine, Arlen Specter. What’s with all these unpleasant people running for office? I have a very clear memory of politicians as lovable rogues. Or at least reasonably affable rogues.)
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home