PHILLY
EVENTSThe Full Specter
VI. President, Um, Specter
In March 1995, Specter announced he was running for the Republican nomination for president. The campaign would turn out to be one of the more quixotic endeavors in his career. He spent much of his time criticizing figures such as Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan, and saying the party had become beholden to religious conservatives — fully aware that the most reliable block of voters in the Republican primaries was religious conservatives.
Mark Klugheit: I remember it was an absolutely wonderful morning in Washington when Arlen actually made his announcement that he was running for president. Arlen had a terrific slogan — he and I still argue over who wrote it. It was something like, "The Republican Party can't afford a candidate who is so captive of the intolerant right that we will end up reelecting a Democratic president of the incompetent left." He thinks he wrote it, and I think I wrote it.
Howard Stern, radio host, on his program in 1995, to Specter: The number one reason I like you for president is that when I said your wife looked like Pamela Anderson, you didn't know who that was. I like that.
Craig Snyder: Specter was the first serious, high-ranking official who was Jewish to run for president in either party. It was striking to me how much hate mail we got. We got a lot of anti-Semitic mail. You know that stuff is out there, obviously, but when you see it concentrated and put forward that way, that's a wake-up call.
Mark Klugheit: Long shot as it was, there was a time when we actually thought it might happen. We started at probably one percent in the polls, and we always thought that if we could maneuver it in such a way that Arlen was the only moderate against a field of right-wing Republicans, which seemed possible, and we could get to California — a winner-take-all state at that point — and it was us vs. three or four conservatives, we might just have a shot. And it seemed to be working. Pete Wilson dropped out. Bill Weld decided not to get in the game. Then Colin Powell made some rumblings about getting in, and the air got sucked out of our balloon.
Elliott Curson: It was like going to an Orthodox synagogue and saying, "I've got pork for sale." It was the wrong message for the wrong group of people.
Craig Snyder: The message of his campaign was that the Republican Party had to be a big tent — if the party was captured by the right wing, it wasn't going to be competitive in national elections. I think he was proven exactly right. I think Dole lost in 1996 because it was believed the party had been controlled and captured by the hard right. And I think Bush went on to win in 2000 because Karl Rove created the concept of "compassionate conservative."
