Tuesday, April 28, 2009

The Specter Analysis

So Arlen Specter has finally decided to jump ship and is going to become a Democrat. The obvious reason being of course that the odds of him staying a Senator (i.e. surviving the Republican Primary) are pretty freakin' slim. It's over a year out and and the oposition was already polling ahead of poor Arlen by 3:1.

Well, good riddance to bad rubbish as they say.

Commitee assignments become interesting. Specter is the Ranking Member of the Judiciary committee, but Sen Kyl is the next ranking member on the Judiciary Committee. Thus there is no real change on Judiciary, as Kyl has always been the same sort of backstabing weasel as Specter. (backstabing weasel being defined as any Republican who voted FOR Eric Holder)

Short term this is a pretty big win for the Dems, no doubt about it. However, in the mid-term this is actually good news for the Republicans, as it means that they are finally (after 8 years in the wilderness) finding their fiscal conservative roots.

Admitedly, after Bush, the R’s trying to claim the mantle of fiscal conservatism is going to wear pretty thin. Some of them (The Jeff Flake wing) really are serious about it though. It remains to be seen whether the American public will believe “we really mean it this time” or not.

On the other hand, the Obama/Pelosi/Reid multi-trillion dollar deficits are going to make it a much easier sell. And since Obama is really just Jimmy Carter with a better suit, fiscal discipline is about the only way the R's are going to get back in power.

2 comments:

thirstyreader said...

More importantly, what would Joann Gavin do? Add Tim Goudie and Nancy Potts to the committee?

Mark Horning said...

Gavin would stick to her convictions,

Goudie would be easy to handle, just threaten to give the "gifted" class an open ended assignment...

As for Potts, I never could figure out what made that cast iron bitch tick.