A Pennsylvanian's Thoughts On Specter's Defection

A Pennsylvanian's thoughts on Specter's Defection

This morning, I saw something hilarious on YouTube. Senator Inhofe (R-OK) went on Fox "News" to talk about how since Specter jumped ship to avoid certain death in a Pennsylvania closed Republican primary, the Republicans can mount a counter-offensive in the 2010 elections because ideological purity somehow gives them legitimacy. It seems to me that the Senator from Oklahoma needs a lesson in recent PA political history.

Pennsylvania is a political double-stuffed oreo. Blue on the edges, with a big creamy red center known fondly as Pennsyltucky. One need only ask Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pennsyltucky) to find out that the "Hillary Democrats" of this area are terrified both of black people and the government coming to their doorsteps trying to take away their guns. Imagine the terror a black secret islamo-fascist gungrabber must inspire!

Despite having vast swaths of red through it, Pennsylvania had millions of democratic crossovers this year, enough to make the GOP preemptively cry voter fraud. While there were concerns that a lot of these new registrations were to boost Hillary, and that the white creamy center of the Pennsyltucky Oreo would never vote for Obama, on election night my home state went firmly blue (Solidified by Obama calling for NCAA football playoffs on election eve, something Penn State fans have been after for decades. No surprise I didn't see much about that in the MSM).

The point is that most of these new democrats (barring the Operation Chaos bozos) didn't change their registration back. Turns out that mixed in amongst the racists, militia nuts and teabaggers were a lot of reasonable people who happen to have centrist political views, who might just be registered Republican because all their neighbors are. Perhaps these people have even been nudged a little left of center by the epic failure of the Bush administration, and are now open to ideas they found reprehensible when Clinton proposed them with Reagan's "golden age" in recent memory.
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