Specter Switches Stories on Why He Switched Parties

"My change in party will enable me to be re-elected." —Arlen Specter, April 2009

"Look here, I had a clear shot at re-election. If I had stayed with the obstructionist Republican caucus, I would have been re-elected easily, especially in an out year when the party out of power is favored." —Arlen Specter, May 16, 2009

As fellow Gaggler Howard Fineman has pointed out, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) is in a tight Democratic primary race, and late polls suggest he may lose. He's being challenged by Joe Sestak—a Democratic congressman and former admiral who was the frontrunner for the Democratic nod before Specter switched party affiliations last year. One of Sestak's most potent weapons down the stretch has been an ad portraying Specter as a naked opportunist, using the April 2009 quote above.

Specter tried to push back on that claim this weekend on CNN's State of the Union. His rebuttal: he could have had a cakewalk to the GOP nod, but he was just too principled to stay with his longtime party as it slid right. CNN kindly doesn't include the context in which he changed affiliations, but it's pretty damning.

When he switched, Specter said when he was concerned that the GOP had moved too far right—which made some sense, since Specter has always been a moderate. But he'd previously resisted overtures from Dems, and the conventional wisdom was that electoral calculus was his major motivation: he made the switch because he was concerned (ironically, in hindsight) he might lose in a Republican primary to Pat Toomey, who led him in polls (although other polls showed Specter leading)—and, after all, part of the problem with the party moving right was that voters were unlikely to vote for centrists like him. It's hard to imagine this late flip-flop convincing very many wavering Keystone State voters.