April 30, 2009

It’s all about us, isn’t it? When Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter announced this week that he was switching his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat, it meant that two Jews are in a position to give Democrats in the Senate a 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority come 2010 (assuming, of course that Minnesota Democrat Al Franken is ever sworn in as the winner of the race against Norm Coleman [another Jew, incidentally]). Specter’s move leaves Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia as the only Jewish Republican in the U.S. Congress.

Good news for the Democrats? Perhaps. But their celebrations should be tempered by the knowledge of the increasingly partisan nature of our national political scene, and the internal and external factors that have made the Republican Party a less hospitable place for moderates like Specter. Internally, party powerbrokers and pundits have been narrowing the definition of what it means to be a Republican on issues like health care, gun control, abortion, and tax policy. (GOP enforcers have their mirror image among the Democrats, although the majority party can better tolerate the notion of the big tent.) And on the outside, last November’s election and its repudiation of the second Bush term ended up punishing moderate Republicans around the country — the kind of pragmatists who could and did seek compromises with similar moderates across the aisle.

We can’t read Specter’s mind and can’t say what combination of ideology and self-preservation prompted his defection. However, it has been an axiom of Jewish political advocacy that Jewish communal interests are best served when we have allies, and voters, represented in both the major parties. The sizeable majority of Jews who have always voted Democratic should appreciate the Jewish Republicans who have articulated the Jewish communal agenda in the red states. As the Republican Party retools and prepares for the electoral challenges ahead, it’s in the Jewish and national interest that they find a way to widen the definition of loyal opposition, and find a home — within their own party — for politicians like Specter.

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