Arlen Specter has been a Republican for over 40 years. His sudden conversion to the faith of the Democratic party, while welcome for those who think it will mean that key measures of President Obama's administration will be turned into law, nevertheless leaves us wondering. It is clear that Specter waltzed across the aisle because he didn't have the votes to beat a Republican challenger in the upcoming Pennsylvania primary. With Pennsylvania surging toward shades of blue in the last few elections, Specter saw the handwriting on the wall. Make no mistake: the senator openly admitted that his change of political heart, while spurred by the vote of his GOP colleagues against the president's stimulus package, was a vote to undergird his political future. Anyone who thinks that the man from Pennsylvania will abandon many of his right-leaning positions because he now sits with the Democrats may need to think again.
The Redistributor in Chief It is certainly an embarrassment. The ease with which John McCain and his team have elicited jeers from his supporters at the mention of “sharing the wealth” is an apt indicator of the brain damage sustained by a certain portion of the American populace over the years. With its roots in the Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s, the McCain campaign has pushed the buttons of the Cold War, tarring Barak Obama as a “socialist” for advocating what has been a part of the American landscape since 1903: the graduated income tax that places a larger tax burden on citizens with greater wealth. After enduring years of Bush administration policies that effectively transferred inordinate amounts of the nation’s wealth to those already wealthy, after witnessing the handover of $700 billion in a bailout of investment bankers and Wall Street manipulators, after seeing the loss of millions of jobs and the foreclosure of millions of homes, one would think that the great majorit...
Comments