Conservatives loyal to liberal Specter

Strange is the only way to tag the Pennsylvania Republican Senate primary contest scheduled for April 27.

The front-runner is liberal Republican incumbent Arlen Specter, whose congressional voting record and public statements have been angering many conservatives for nearly a quarter century.

Yet some high-profile, hard-core conservatives are backing Mr. Specter, from the state’s junior senator, Rick Santorum — a clout-wielding religious, social and economic conservative who is also a member of the Republican Senate leadership — to Reaganaut Faith Whittlesey, a former ambassador to Switzerland who is remembered as one of the most conservative officials in the Reagan White House.

The Bush administration and the rest of the Senate Republican leadership also are behind Mr. Specter.

Other conservatives in the state, however, are strongly supporting Rep. Patrick J. Toomey, whose voting record and campaign rhetoric put him as far to the right as Mr. Specter is to the left.

Why conservatives are so split over a liberal such as Mr. Specter when they have a conservative such as Mr. Toomey as their option comes down to two factors, Republicans say.

From the White House on down the party ladder, the view is that only Mr. Specter can hold the seat for the president and the Republicans in November. The other is that Mr. Specter’s liberal voting record doesn’t tell the whole story.

He has come through for several conservatives inside and outside Congress, behind the scenes and sometimes out front, on various bills and causes while still maintaining a liberal record.

While some critics in his own party accuse him of putting politics over principle — or of having no principles — others say he helps the Republican cause more than he hurts it. They say he has played an invaluably strategic role as liaison in the Senate between moderates and the party’s more conservative leadership.

“Generally, Arlen has delivered for the state and for the president,” said Rep. Phil English, a Republican from Erie. “That’s a story that hasn’t been told. To my mind, there is no way the president’s tax-cut plan would have moved through the Senate without Arlen’s support.”

Mr. Santorum, the Senate Republican Conference chairman and former National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman, tried to tell part of that story in a commercial he cut for Mr. Specter, in which he said in effect that people call Mr. Specter a liberal but he has been there for Mr. Bush when he needed him.

Mr. Santorum, a vigorous opponent of abortion and same-sex “marriage,” faced rejection by the party establishment and voters when he first ran, but Mr. Specter, despite holding opposite views, embraced him. Mr. Santorum has not forgotten that, friends say.

Meanwhile, some well-known Republicans in the state appear to be moving quietly toward Mr. Toomey, despite the wishes of the party establishment.

“I’ve always been with Arlen in past, but I’m with Toomey this time because I think he is a conservative who can win — that’s what I look for,” said Charlie Gerow, a party activist and one of the few political heavyweights in the state who backs Mr. Toomey.

“I do see some Toomey activity in the state but not a great deal in my district,” Mr. English said.

Mr. Toomey antagonized state Republicans in the last election when he used money from the National Republican Congressional Committee to finance his own ads, while using his campaign donations to retire a loan he made to his campaign and to create a fund for his senatorial bid.

That may explain why not one of the state’s 12 Republicans in the U.S. House has endorsed Mr. Toomey.

“Pat is not known as a team player,” Mr. English said.

Meanwhile, a potential kingmaker in the contest is the Washington-based Club for Growth, which has put $800,000 into the Toomey effort.

“But I don’t see a lot of individual political heavyweights supporting Pat,” Mr. English said.

Mr. Toomey does have conservative support from other big-name national groups such as Citizens Against Government Waste, the National Taxpayers Union and National Review magazine.

Mr. Gerow dismisses what he says are claims by the Bush administration and the Republican Senate leadership that Mr. Toomey is too conservative to win in Pennsylvania.

“That’s what they said about Ronald Reagan 25 years ago, and George W. Bush in 2000,” Mr. Gerow said.

An April 3-5 SurveyUSA poll of self-identified Republican primary voters shows Mr. Toomey trailing Mr. Specter by six percentage points — compared with nine points in the same poll taken last month — but within the error margin of plus or minus 4.5 percent.

Mr. Toomey’s biggest problem may be the lack of a statewide campaign organization to match Mr. Specter’s.

“My greatest fear is Pat doesn’t have the ground game,” Mr. Gerow said. “He has had to wage his campaign almost exclusively in the air. But he’ll have to do hand-to-hand combat across the state to win.”