Republican Senate candidate Pat Toomey claims he isn’t dismayed in the least not to be running against the politically vulnerable incumbent, Sen. Arlen Specter, in Pennsylvania’s general election this November.

Instead of facing the 80-year-old, five-term, Republican-turned-Democrat, the GOP nominee is up against retired three-star admiral Joe Sestak, a well-regarded two-term congressman who defied the Democratic Party establishment, Gov. Ed Rendell’s machine, and even President Obama to beat the pants off Specter in Tuesday’s primary.

When I ask Toomey if he likes Specter, he erupts in laughter. “Let’s put it this way—I never really got to know Arlen Specter,” he says. “We had very little interaction.”

“I’m a pretty disciplined guy, and I was determined not to have an emotional investment in the outcome of a race I can’t control,” Toomey tells me, a few days after easily winning his own party’s primary—a victory that, compared with Sestak’s upset, received scant media attention. “So I really never developed a preference. Both of these guys have their strengths and weaknesses. But I feel great about running against Joe Sestak and I think we’re in a very, very good position to win.”

Maybe. The latest Rasmussen poll shows Sestak running slightly ahead of Toomey, 46 to 42 percent, and the expected slash-and-burn campaign has hardly started. “That poll is no surprise to me,” Toomey says, “because Joe has gotten a tremendous amount of very favorable media attention, a huge picture above the fold in every newspaper in Pennsylvania, lots of coverage—and it’s all favorable. It’s a fairly sensational election result, so we fully expected that he’d get a pretty good bump in the polls. I think it’ll be temporary.”

Toomey dismisses suggestions that the outcome of Tuesday’s special election for the late Rep. John Murtha’s seat—in which Democrat Mark Critz unexpectedly beat a well-funded Republican—is an ominous sign for a Republican running statewide.

He points out that in the 12th Congressional District, where Democrats account for 70 percent of registered voters, the winning candidate ran as a pro-life, pro-gun, anti-tax conservative—more aligned with Toomey’s views than with Sestak’s. “Critz apparently ran as some kind of variety of Republican and distanced himself from an awful lot of what is happening now in Washington,” Toomey says. “So I don’t look at that as an ominous sign for me at all.”

Some might be surprised that the 48-year-old Toomey—a former president of a regulation-hating Washington advocacy group, the Club for Growth, and a retired three-term House member from Allentown—says he actually likes the 57-year-old Sestak. Indeed, Toomey frequently calls him “a good man.”

The same cannot be said about Specter—the politically moderate, personally ornery senator nicknamed “Snarlin’ Arlen”—who switched parties last year when he realized that, unlike in 2004 when he beat the conservative Toomey in the Republican primary, Toomey would kill him this time around.

When I ask Toomey if he likes Specter, he erupts in laughter. “Let’s put it this way—I never really got to know Arlen Specter,” he says. “We had very little interaction.”

How is it possible that a six-year member of Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation barely knew his senior senator? “We just didn’t cross paths that much. Actually, that’s not all that uncommon in Pennsylvania. It’s a big delegation.”

Uh huh.

A classic contest of ideological opposites—Toomey already has aired a television spot branding “Says-Tax,” as he calls his opponent, a big-spending liberal—the Senate race will be one of the most-watched races of the 2010 midterms, and a bellwether (as the Keystone State usually is) of the prevailing political winds in the country as a whole. It will also test the influence of the Tea Party movement that has embraced Toomey’s candidacy. “I think of it as a very loose network of unaffiliated but like-minded folks,” he says. “In Pennsylvania, I think we’ve identified 79 Tea Party organizations. I think, generally speaking, they’re wonderful people. They’re ordinary Americans. They love their country. They’re concerned that Washington is heading down the wrong path of way too much spending and way too much interference in the economy, way too much deficits and debt. And they have spontaneously formed, tried hard to push back. And I do have a lot of support from the Tea Party movement, and I’m delighted to have it.”

Also receiving Tea Party support is Kentucky’s renegade Republican Senate nominee, libertarian purist Rand Paul, who got himself in a heap of trouble this week by suggesting to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow that he would have opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act because it empowered the federal government to force private businesses to stop engaging in racial discrimination.

Toomey makes clear that he supports the civil-rights law—“I think it’s an appropriate role for government to prevent discrimination on the basis of race”—but he also defends Paul. “I haven’t been following that very closely,” he says. “I know there was a dustup about it, but I’m really not close enough to have an informed comment about it. But, just as a general matter, my sense is that he is a very strong general election candidate. My limited understanding is that he’s doing pretty well in polling against his Democrat opponent. I’m sure voters aren’t going to agree with him on everything, but the gist of shrinking the size of government is something that he’s clearly on the right side of.”

A Harvard graduate who worked on Wall Street and in the restaurant business before getting involved in politics, Toomey is a smooth operator who speaks in reassuringly measured tones—refusing to play the hard-right hothead that Sestak will seek to expose and lambaste.

For instance, last year he favored the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, and says he is “open-minded” about Elena Kagan.

“I would approach her the same way I approached Judge Sotomayor,” Toomey says, “and that’s with an open mind, with a recognition that she is considerably more liberal than I am, but it’s not reasonable for me to expect that a Democratic president is going to nominate someone who shares my political views.” He adds: “The question for me is not whether she and I agree on political philosophy, the question is: Does she have the intellect, the experience, the temperament, the willingness to administer justice impartially? Does she have those qualifications and is she within the mainstream of American political thought?”

And unlike Rand Paul, who in a television appearance Friday morning sought to diminish British Petroleum’s culpability for the oil-rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (“Accidents happen,” Paul claimed), Toomey—a staunch proponent of offshore drilling—says BP should pay the entire cost of the cleanup if an investigation finds the company at fault.

“Look, we’ve got to find out exactly what went wrong and why, and we absolutely have to do whatever it takes to prevent it from ever happening again,” Toomey says. “But I don’t think it’s an argument for ending the oil drilling.”

He even gives props to the Obama administration. “I think generally [they have been handling the oil spill] reasonably well,” he says. “I have to be very candid with you. I haven’t studied all the things that the Obama administration has been doing. You know, I’ve had a lot going on while this has been unfolding. But I’m certainly under the impression that they’ve deployed quite a lot of assets to try to contain this—and they certainly should.”

The only time Toomey sounds extreme and unreasonable is when he talks about his hatred of New York City, where he lived for a time during the 1980s when he worked for Chemical Bank and the investment bank Morgan, Grenfell & Co.

“I had gotten fed up with New York City,” he says, explaining why he escaped and headed for Pennsylvania in 1990. “The ‘80s were not a great time in New York. I lived in the West Village most of the time. I had a place down on Horatio Street. It was a high-crime area—actually there were murders right on my block. It was a city where you were accosted by squeegee guys and panhandlers and the quality of life was low.”

I guess Toomey won’t be supporting, if that hard time comes, a bailout for the Big Apple.

Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.