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Glory goes to a gutsy Sen. Specter kevin blaum in the arena

Sunday March 22, 2009 | 01:00 AM

Kevin Blaum

WITH THE U.S. economy in near freefall, Congress passed and sent to President Obama the administration’s $787 billion stimulus package for his signature. In the most perilous economic climate most of us have ever seen, our national leadership adopted the most far-reaching recovery plan any of us had ever witnessed. The president, with pen in hand, affixed his name, giving every dime the force of American law. That was Tuesday, Feb. 17.

Barack H. Obama had been president of the United States for less than a month.

Whether or not you agree with his plan, this remarkable achievement by America’s young president is nothing short of breathtaking. Broad by design and massive in scope, Obama’s monetary jolt of energy is now sending waves of electricity surging through a depressed economic climate comatose after eight years of physical neglect.

As the president sits bedside fixated on the patient before him, he and an anxious nation will watch for a fluttering eyelid, a twitching finger, any sign that our comatose economy might one day start coming out of it.

The Obama Plan was approved by the House of Representatives with not one congressional vote from the Republican side of the aisle. While Democrats have 58 votes in the U.S. Senate, they do not possess the 60 votes necessary, per Senate rules, to bring a considered issue up for a final vote. It would take the support of three Republican senators to reach 61 (one more than necessary, so no one Republican could be labeled the 60th and deciding vote).

The alternative was stalemate and a gaping black hole ready to swallow what remained of the strongest economic engine in the history of man. Republican U.S. Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine were not about to let that happen, neither was Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

Obama now had his three Republican votes. The extreme right of the Republican Party, which figures so mightily in statewide Republican primaries, went apoplectic.

Snowe, first elected in 1994, does not stand for re-election until 2012. Collins won’t be up again until 2014. They were insulated from the full retaliatory might of the right. With no clear shot at Collins and Snowe, the word went out to lock Phasers and get Specter.

Specter is up for re-election next year. Such predicaments tend to focus the mind and made Specter’s principled stand even gutsier.

The moderate Republican from Pennsylvania appeals to Independents and enough Democrats and Republicans to skate through any general election. His real test can come only in a contested primary, such as 2004 when he was opposed by Pat Toomey, the ultra-conservative former congressman from the Lehigh Valley. Specter survived by fewer than 20,000 votes statewide.

Since then, well over 100,000 moderate Republicans switched parties in 2008 to vote for a Democratic president. It is believed those defectors were moderate Specter Republicans who left for a much needed change in national direction. Getting them back by this time next year will not be easy and might not be the best use of the senator’s time.

Perhaps that’s why Specter last week told The Hill in Washington, D.C., that while he would never switch parties and run as a Democrat, he would not rule out remaining Republican but running as an Independent candidate in November 2010. Though unlikely, that little tidbit sent shivers down the spines of Toomey supporters everywhere.

Arlen Specter is very smart and very gutsy. Isn’t that what every senator should be?