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Whatever happened to that ‘formal endorsement’ for Specter?

On the day Senator Arlen Specter said he would switch parties, he proudly told reporters that Gov. Ed Rendell would soon join top members of his new party in Washington to give Specter a sweeping endorsement.

“He wants to come to Washington tomorrow to get [Senator Bob] Casey and [Congressman Bob] Brady and the delegation together to make a formal endorsement,” Specter said on a conference call that afternoon (audio here).

Three weeks later, that still hasn’t happened. Instead, many top Democrats have embraced Specter far more warily, if at all, while grassroots demand for a competitive primary has been building.

Whether or not Democrats eventually choose him as the party’s standard-bearer for next year’s election, it’s clear Specter spoke at least a little hastily in implying an endorsement was imminent. Even by that evening, his spokeswoman had said that there would be no such endorsement event the following day. Asked what had happened to the endorsement plan, campaign manager Christopher Nicholas gave this simple reply in an e-mail:

“The Senator will be with Gov. Rendell at the upcoming Democrat State Committee meeting in Pittsburgh June 5/6,” he wrote.

That’s a far cry from what Specter had said. Democratic staffers on Capitol Hill said the notion of a delegation-wide endorsement had caught them off guard at the time.

“I had heard of such an event, but our office was never contacted,” one Democratic staffer said. “My sense of it is was either the Senator speaking off the cuff or being more optimistic than he should have been about his welcoming to the party.”

After fiercely lobbying Specter to make the switch, Rendell himself has been uncharacteristically silent on the issue. He issued a relatively tepid statement more than a day after Specter made his announcement, and has yet to appear publicly with the Senator. Rendell spokesman Chuck Ardo said not to read too much into that, and that the Governor has a meeting with Specter in Washington later this week—though the topic is government business, not politics.

“I think you will see the Governor being very active in his support of Senator Specter in the near future,” Ardo said.

In the meantime, Democrats continue to eye their new colleague carefully before becoming more vocal in their support.

“I think both elected officials and ordinary Democrats  … are just kind of watching to see what Senator Specter does and how he votes,” the Democratic staffer said.

May 19, 2009 at 12:08 pm

--Dan Hirschhorn

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