Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Friday, March 26, 2004

Robert S. Scardelleti, president of Transportation Communications International Union, sent registration cards to thousands of TCIU members in the Keystone State urging they switch to the GOP in time to rescue Sen. Arlen Specter, Republican in name only, from a humiliating defeat April 27. The deadline for registering is Monday.

The challenger, conservative Rep. Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., sees the move as a sign of desperation and yet another indication that Specter is losing support among fellow Republicans.

“For 23 years, he has worked to undermine the core values in the Republican Party,” Toomey Press Secretary Joe Stearns told NewsMax.com. He defined those values as “lower taxes, less government spending and traditional values.”

Recent polls have shown the congressman gaining on Specter, shrinking the margin of the four-term senator’s lead from 25 percent to just 10 percent. Given the advantage Specter has in statewide name recognition, political analysts view Toomey’s gains as phenomenal.

The union defends the last-minute organized registration switch as legal, though some say it raises issues of ethics and dirty politics.

'Unusual Request'

“I realize that this is a somewhat unusual request,” Scardelleti says in the letter to his members, “but I can assure you that it is vitally important.”

Will the move backfire? Stearns points out to NewsMax that Congressman Toomey has been elected three times in Pennsylvania’s 15th District, “which is majority Democrat and union heavy, and he has won convincingly. So he has the crossover appeal.”

Many blue-collar unionists fervently favor the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Toomey, not Specter, agrees with them.

Earlier this year, Sen. Specter tried unsuccessfully to persuade organized conservatives to support him lest a farther-left Democrat replace him after the November general election. But the memories of his votes against confirming Reagan nominee Robert Bork to the Supreme Court and against convicting President Bill Clinton after the House had impeached him were too vivid.

In fact, Toomey’s immediate predecessor, a Democrat, was one of just five members of his party in the House to cast his vote in favor of ousting Clinton. But the nominally Republican Specter couldn’t bring himself to do that, and offered a strange reading of Scottish law to justify his stance.

Those are just two examples. American Conservative Union rates Specter’s voting record at 65 percent, compared to Toomey’s 92 percent. That 27-percentage-point difference takes in many gut issues important to conservatives and other Pennsylvanians.

True to the “playing it safe” strategy of sticking with incumbents in a primary, the Bush White House supports Specter, as does Pennsylvania’s other U.S. senator, the conservative Rick Santorum.

However, as the 2004 Almanac of American Politics notes, “Toomey has taken on daunting odds before and prevailed.”

Editor's note: