Word: specter
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...Arlen Specter has always been a survivor. The Pennsylvania Senator has endured two bouts of Hodgkin's lymphoma and the chemotherapy that goes with it, a couple of procedures for a recurrent benign brain tumor, and heart-bypass surgery that sent him into cardiac arrest. And in a political career that has spanned 45 years, he has regularly sidestepped doom. Specter's most celebrated swerve came last April, when he switched parties to avoid a Republican primary against a conservative challenger he had barely beaten in 2004. He acknowledged he could never win the GOP nomination for a sixth term...
...time, Specter's switch was hailed as a heady affirmation that Barack Obama had ushered the nation into a new, post-partisan era. With the defection of one of its last Senate moderates, what was left of the GOP appeared to be careering rightward, to a hard-core base that was beginning to resemble a cult as much as a political party. (See 10 elections that changed America...
...year later, those calculations have been tossed upside down. Obama's poll numbers have come back to earth. And the filibuster-proof Senate majority that Specter's defection delivered to the Democrats vanished when Massachusetts voters handed Teddy Kennedy's old seat to Scott Brown. Democratic control of the House is in jeopardy, and the party stands to lose at least a half-dozen seats in the Senate. "Unless something significant changes," political handicapper Charlie Cook wrote last month, Democrats "are headed toward the losses of the magnitude we saw in the midterm elections...
...Shifting Keystone Nowhere is the political shift more evident than in Pennsylvania, a quintessential swing state, where Specter now finds himself in the political fight of his life. Last year's party switch has left him exposed on both his left and his right in a 2010 political environment that has turned decidedly toxic for incumbents. This is despite the fact that the Democratic establishment has locked arms around its 80-year-old convert. After Specter became a Democrat, he spent the next few months wooing party officials in all 67 Pennsylvania counties and reminding them of all the federal...
Many of the applicants, hurried on by the specter of California's Proposition 8, feared that their freedom to wed could be fleeting. Brian Guse and Theran Shelton, the 23rd couple in line, got to the courthouse at 7:30 a.m. "We looked at each other and said, 'We gotta act. We gotta act while it's still available to us,' because I imagine [the legislation] will be challenged," Guse said. "Our mothers said the same thing...