A thought on the Specter switch: If you're Norm Coleman, wouldn't you be begging Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe to follow Arlen into the Democratic caucus right now? I mean, you want to run for Minnesota governor but you look like a jackass for dragging out the Senate recount. Unfortunately, with that one seat being the only thing keeping the Dems from a filibuster-proof majority, the National Republican Committee has your balls in a vise tightened all the way to the busting point. Snowe seems more amenable to a switch than Collins, but, if you're Norm, you should be pleading with both of the Maine senators, in the whiniest, most pathetic voice possible. It's really your only hope at this point.
Maybe, but I think Collins and Snowe actually have more leverage now, and can be the Lieberman twins of Maine for the Republican party. All those hammy threats against them, that their funding was going to be cut off when they run again, I'd bet that goes away because now the GOP needs them more than ever.
Yeah, but the party can only string along the Minnesota race for so long. Wouldn't they be better off getting a couple of good committee chairs from Reid while they still can?
True! Hadn't thought about that. Because otherwise it's a folding chair for them, in the hall...
Of course, the GOP would have to have the sense to see that.
I agree!
And I hope it's Olympia who takes him up on it because then her media title will read Snowe (D) and that will make me giggle.
If she were from Indiana, it would read:
Snowe (D-IN)
"in the whiniest, most pathetic voice possible." That is Norm's ONLY voice. Also: Everyone keeps talking about what it says about the GOP losing its way that Specter left for the left; but what does it say about the left's way that he saw his decades as a conservative more in line with the modern left?
Snowe and Collins should have switched years ago but Norm Coleman is finished. He'll never be able to run for anything again. Except RNC chair.
I think the point at which Coleman could salvage something reputation-wise was passed sometime before the inauguration, when Bush v. Gore was still thought of as the more outrageous electoral litigation.
But please don't let that talk Coleman out of further self-abasement.