The Republican Party’s annus became considerably more horribilis this week, with Arlen Specter switching parties, President Obama taking what amounted to a 100-days victory lap (despite the economy’s continuing decline), and a new poll showing that even the GOP’s most reliable wedge issues (gay marriage and immigration) have largely lost their traction with swing voters. Even poor Susan Collins, the moderate senator from Maine who got flu-pandemic-preparedness funding stripped from the stimulus bill for entirely principled reasons, appears short-sighted and Scrooge-like (in other words, like a mainstream Republican) as the Swine Flu scourge grows.

Specter’s big switch has opened yet another gaping wound in the party, as its few remaining sane people moderates bemoan the ugly extremism (would you like some tea and assault weapons to go with those accusations of fascism?) that has driven the number of self-identifying Republican voters to an abysmal 21 percent of the electorate. Meanwhile, Rush, Newt, Kristol and the rest of the GOP booboisie are actually celebrating “Benedict Arlen’s” departure as one more step toward ideological purity, even as the influence of elected Republicans upon national policymaking has faded from “just a little” to “practically none” – or, perhaps, “exactly as much as Obama is willing to give them as he continues to pay lip service to bipartisanship.”

Still, any political analyst with, say, 15 years of hindsight will tell you that “Specter the Defector’s” move across the aisle (he’s done this before, having become a Republican to run against his boss for Philadelphia district attorney in 1965) is just as likely to haunt Democrats as they approach next year’s midterm elections. It was perhaps the perfect political calculation — You want a filibuster-proof majority? Well, I want to save my electoral ass! – but Specter’s presence in the Democratic caucus probably won’t engender a profound shift in his political beliefs. He says he’s still against the Employee Free Choice Act (i.e., card-check unionization votes), though he’s already flip-flopped on the issue once – he voted for it last year, then announced his opposition as Pennsylvania right-wingers held an AK-47 to his head. He’s opposing Obama’s appointee as legal counsel in the Justice Department. Just last night, he voted against Obama’s 2010 budget proposal because he doesn’t like the rules it establishes for debating health-care reform in the fall. (more…)