Word: pennsylvania
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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Arlen Specter has always been a survivor. The Pennsylvania Senator has endured two bouts of Hodgkin's lymphoma and the chemotherapy that goes with it, a couple of procedures for a recurrent benign brain tumor, and heart-bypass surgery that sent him into cardiac arrest. And in a political career that has spanned 45 years, he has regularly sidestepped doom. Specter's most celebrated swerve came last April, when he switched parties to avoid a Republican primary against a conservative challenger he had barely beaten in 2004. He acknowledged he could never win the GOP nomination for a sixth term...
...Shifting Keystone Nowhere is the political shift more evident than in Pennsylvania, a quintessential swing state, where Specter now finds himself in the political fight of his life. Last year's party switch has left him exposed on both his left and his right in a 2010 political environment that has turned decidedly toxic for incumbents. This is despite the fact that the Democratic establishment has locked arms around its 80-year-old convert. After Specter became a Democrat, he spent the next few months wooing party officials in all 67 Pennsylvania counties and reminding them of all the federal...
...popular former governor Tom Ridge. So dark were Toomey's prospects that Senator Orrin Hatch, the vice chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, lamented to Politico.com, "I don't think there is anybody in the world who believes he can get elected Senator there." (See pictures from the Pennsylvania Senate race...
...well-funded antitax organization, which Toomey ran from 2005 to 2009. He is also a favorite of Tea Party activists, who account for so much political energy on the right these days. "It's an uphill battle in the general - no ifs, ands or buts about it," says Pennsylvania's Democratic governor, Ed Rendell, who has thrown the force of his political operation behind Specter. (See "Portraits of the Tea Party Movement...
...question is whether Pennsylvania voters will see those kinds of moments as evidence of principle or opportunism. As I followed the candidates around the Philadelphia area recently, I found both sentiments. "He's an independent voice," insists Charles Johns, an Allentown retiree and lifelong Democrat. Johns says he has voted for Specter ever since watching the Bork hearings on C-SPAN. But for Debbie Goldstein, 54, who changed her registration to Republican to vote for him when she was 18, Specter's party switch was the last straw. "I always thought Specter was good for Pennsylvania. He fought to keep...