FOUL!

Did Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania switch parties as a matter of pure political expediency, even of political survival?

Well . . . duh.

So did Sonny Perdue, and Richard Shelby, and a couple of smug Auburn twits a few years ago who called a press conference to “confess their sins” before switching to the straight and narrow of (Republican) political righteousness, and a few hundred other nervous Democrats in years of GOP dominance.

Shelby’s Damascus conversion, in particular, was interestingly timed, coming literally days after the 1994 “Contract With America” GOP takeover of Congress. In fact, the number of former Democrats who have jumped ship since the dawn of the Reagan Revolution in 1980 would fill a pretty good size file.

Yet to listen to the hyperventilation of the conservative media, especially here in the (Red) Peach State, you’d think we were talking about Arlen SPECTRE, a Bond flick nasty who throws people in shark tanks and makes nerve poison out of fish gonads.

"Arlen Specter has waddled and quacked and strutted his webbed feet for years," huffed the always entertaining Augusta Chronicle.

"Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter did more spinning Tuesday than a Maytag washing machine . . . he let his principles and his former party out to dry," was the verdict of the Savannah Morning News.

“Sometime there has to be an endowed chair of political survival in the name of Sen. Arlen Specter,” was the lead of the Marietta Daily Journal.

Local TV commentator Al Fleming scorned Specter as “a pathetic old man” -- which prompted one of our readers to speculate on how long it had been since Al looked into his own mirror . . . which in turn prompted my wife to speculate on whether Al even casts a reflection.

Give Specter this much (or don’t): He’s been relatively honest about his motives. He doesn’t think he can even win the primary as a Republican, so he’ll try to win one more round as a Democrat. For what it’s worth, I think he’s probably toast anyway.

It was interesting to hear Specter’s spin on the familiar “I didn’t leave the party – the party left me” routine parroted by 25 years of Democratic ship-jumpers. In his case, it sounds valid: Right-wing fulminations notwithstanding, Specter is a conservative in the Goldwater-Rockefeller-Eisenhower (even, in some ways, McCain) tradition. As he’s watched his party taken over by wing nuts, Specter, like McCain, has seldom hesitated to speak out against the grosser excesses of the right.

To acknowledge anything principled in that, of course, it is first necessary to acknowledge that the right is capable of excess. Which is, I suspect, where rational response to Arlen Specter inevitably breaks down.

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