As I wrote in an earlier piece, Sestak has the potential to be a superb candidate and can beat Specter in the Democratic Senate primary. Clearly, though, it isn’t a lock. For all his vulnerabilities, most political pros learned long ago to never, never, never count Specter out. The man’s relentless will to win, his access to big money, his long history of running statewide make him a formidable opponent.

For all his potential, Sestak is unknown and untested.

Just raising the money he needs to run statewide is going to be difficult, especially given the hostility of the Democratic establishment—not to mention that of the Obama White House—to his candidacy.

Here’s my list of six things Sestak will need to do if he is going to beat Specter.

1. Hire some pros

Sestak needs to hire pros to handle his campaign and his media, preferably folks with a track record of running campaigns in Pennsylvania. He’s already off to a good start on this front by hiring Gov. Ed Rendell’s longtime political adviser Neil Oxman, and he’ll need more of that ilk.

Running for Congress in Delaware County, Sestak has used family members to run his campaigns and I hear they were chaotic affairs. It would be a huge mistake to put them in charge of this one. They don’t know anything about statewide politics and they shouldn’t be forced to learn on the job.

The only thing worse than using family members would be for Sestak to run his campaign himself, which he may be inclined to do—he is, after all, a former Navy admiral and they think they were born to rule. Trust me, that would be a disaster.

2. Listen to the pros

If he hires professional managers, Sestak should do himself a favor and do what they say (as it turns out, Navy admirals also are more used to giving orders than taking them). Political professionals—even if they are hired guns—have wisdom to impart.

One thing they are likely to tell Sestak is that his job is not to run the campaign. His job is to raise the money. That will go against Sestak’s instincts, but he should follow those orders and get out of their way.

3. Put a zip on it

Another thing professionals are likely to tell Sestak is to stop with the 40-minute answers to simple questions. At times, Sestak can make Joe Biden look like Gary Cooper. You can give three-minute answers and still say something with substance—most of the best pols can do it.

4. Don’t get nasty

There’s enough material in Specter’s record and his flip-flop of parties to keep your media advisers happy with “record” pieces for the paid media, so there is no need to go personal against the incumbent. In fact, Sestak’s best strategy might be to go gentle on Specter and aim instead at Pat Toomey, the likely Republican candidate in 2010.

Democratic primary voters may be cool to Specter, but they wouldn’t be distraught if he won re-election. They would be distraught if Toomey won.

If Sestak presents himself as the man most likely to defeat Toomey, that message will resonate the most with activist Democrats, who are inclined to vote strategically.

5. Go up early

Sestak’s instincts may be to marshal his media money for the final days of the campaign. That would be a mistake. Sestak has a compelling personal story to tell and he should go up relatively early in the campaign to tell it. If Sestak doesn’t define himself with voters early, Specter will do it for him. Specter will have enough money to do saturation media and a lot of the early stuff will be aimed at raising his opponent’s negatives.

6. Keep Obama out of it

The most important moment in the Sestak campaign won’t come on primary day, but about three weeks before it. That’s when the final polls—public and private—will give everyone a good reading of where the two men stand. If Sestak is up a few points and the trend lines are showing Democrats leaning to him, the President may be disinclined—the kind of word he would use—to do a last-minute blitz in person or on paid media for Specter. The President’s advisers won’t want to make the election a referendum on Obama’s popularity and lose. Sestak should do his best to keep Obama out of this campaign—early or late.

The writer, a frequent contributor to pa2010.com, is a former Inquirer reporter and columnist.

Get out your pencils and begin

1. Who was the last Republican candidate for President to win Pennsylvania?
(a) George W. Bush
(b) Ronald Reagan
(c) George H. W. Bush

2. Arlen Specter has run for the U.S. Senate in a general election 5 times. How many times did he win his hometown of Philadelphia?
(a) Once
(b) Twice
(c) Never

3. Over the years, there have been many third-party candidates on the Presidential ballot in Pennsylvania, but only three got more than 5 percent of the vote. Can you name them?
1.___________________
2.___________________
3.___________________

4. Aided by a surge in support from what came to be known as “Reagan Democrats” Ronald Reagan twice won the vote for President in western Pennsylvania.
True____________ False_________

5. Who was the last Republican statewide candidate to win the eight-county Philadelphia media market?

6. Arlen Specter has won the Philadelphia media market in each of his five elections for the U.S. Senate.
True____________ False_________

7. In the last 30 years, no Republican candidate for governor has won Philadelphia, but can you name which Republican came closest to winning the city?
(a) Lynn Swann
(b) Tom Ridge
(c) Dick Thornburgh

8. Name the presidential candidates who won Pennsylvania by the widest margins since the 1960s.
1.________________________
2.________________________
3.________________________

9. Though he lost to Bob Casey in 2006, Rick Santorum did win in his home base, the Pittsburgh media market.
True____________ False_________

10. Lyndon Baines Johnson was the last Democrat to win in the Republican heartland of central Pennsylvania.
True____________ False_________

*******************************************************************
Answers:

1. C. In 1988, the elder Bush defeated Michael Dukakis by 51-48 percent, a margin of 105,000 votes out of 4.5 million cast.

2. A. Specter won the city of Philadelphia just once. In 1980, he beat Pete Flaherty by 11,923 votes.

3. The third-party candidates who got more than 5 percent of the vote in the state were:
Ross Perot in 1992 (18 percent) and in 1996 (10 percent)
John Anderson in 1980 (6 percent)
George Wallace in 1968 (8 percent)

4. False. Reagan lost in the Pittsburgh media market twice. In 1980, he lost to Jimmy Carter by 51,870 votes. In 1984, he lost to Walter Mondale by 138,731 votes.

5. Tom Ridge won the Philadelphia media market when he ran for re-election in 1998. He beat Democrat Ivan Itkin 56-36 percent, with pro-life independent candidate Peg Luksik getting 8 percent

6. False. Specter won against Pete Flaherty (1980), Bob Edgar (1986) and Bill Lloyd (1998), but lost in the market to Lynn Yaekel in 1992 by 29,147 votes and to Joe Hoeffel in 2004 by 58,074 votes.

7. C. Dick Thornburgh came closest in 1978, when he lost to Pete Flaherty in the city by only 34,875 votes. Thornburgh was helped by the fact he came out strongly against Mayor Frank Rizzo’s effort to amend the city charter to remove the two-term limit on mayors. The proposed charter change was soundly defeated by the voters. Lynn Swann did the worst of any GOP candidate in the city, getting only 11 percent of the vote against Gov. Rendell in 2006.

8. The three winningest candidates for President in Pennsylvania were:
Lyndon B. Johnson over Barry Goldwater in 1968 by a 1.4 million margin.
Richard Nixon over George McGovern in 1972 by a 917,000 margin.
Barack Obama over John McCain in 2008 by a 610,000 margin.

9. False. Santorum lost to Casey 60-40 percent in the Pittsburgh media market.

10. False. Johnson did win the Harrisburg-Lancaster media market in 1964 55-45 percent over Goldwater, but the last Democrat to win in this area of the state was Gov. Bob Casey in 1990. He defeated Republican Barbara Hafer in this market 71-29 percent.

How you stack up:
0-3 correct. You must be from out of state.
4-7 correct. Not bad, but some brush up needed.
8-10 correct. You are a bona fide expert in Pennsylvania politics.

The writer is a former reporter at columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

If Arlen Specter is a left-winger, then I am a prima ballerina. Arlen Specter is no Leon Trotsky. He is now and has always been what is called a moderate.

While that word may have been expunged from the lexicon of post-modern Republicanism, it still has a nice ring to it among the millions of Pennsylvania voters who have shown a decided preference for electing moderate politicians, Democrat or Republican.

Like Goldilocks, we like our governors and U.S. Senators to be not too conservative, not too liberal, but just right.

There have been exceptions, of course, but voters have used the electoral process as a self-correcting exercise when that happens. That’s why Senator Joe Clark, a bona fide liberal, was defeated by moderate Republican Dick Schweiker, while Senator Rick Santorum—now that’s a conservative!—lost to moderate Democrat Bob Casey.

Specter’s defection may be the occasion to note the strong correlation between being moderate and being successful in politics in Pennsylvania.

Think of these Republicans we have sent to the U.S. Senate: Schweiker, John Heinz and Hugh Scott, who was so relentlessly centrist there was even a joke about it. (When asked what his favorite color was, Scott was said to reply: “Plaid.”)

Now, onto the GOP governors: William W. Scranton, Raymond Shafer, Dick Thornburgh and Tom Ridge.

It makes me wonder, what would be the book on Scott, Schweiker or Heinz if they were serving in the Senate today? Like Specter, I suspect that they would fail the modern Republican litmus test, with traces of pink found in their voting records.

How about Scranton, Thornburgh and Ridge? They would be in trouble, mostly because of being on the wrong side of the abortion question. In addition, they would sometimes consort with—and even hire—known members of the Democratic party.

Therein lies the problem in declaring that there is a right and a left and no in between in politics. It may satisfy the psyche, but it defies political reality. It is out of step with the disposition of most voters.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Philadelphia suburbs, once the home base of moderate Republicanism. To varying degrees, every one of the above-named Republican politicians owed their elections to support among voters in Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties. They served as an antidote to the strong numbers that Democratic candidates usually rolled up in the city of Philadelphia.

Who has won the suburbs in recent years? Barack Obama, John Kerry, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Ed Rendell, Bob Casey Jr., Bob Casey Sr., Bill Clinton—and Arlen Specter.

At first, moderate Republicans switched their votes. Lately, they have switched their registration – about 124,000 suburban Republicans have defected to the Democrats in recent years.

True-blue (or is it true-red?) Republicans may say good riddance to those voters. After all, who needs those wishy-washy cafeteria Republicans in the party? The Big Tent theory of Republicanism, already in disfavor before last year’s election, is anathema to the emerging conservative wing of the party.

On second thought, it’s imprecise to call it the conservative wing. It may now constitute the whole party. As Specter realized this week, it’s hard to rally party moderates to your cause if none are left.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Not only that, it can draw a good-sized audience on talk radio. But, out here in the real world, where real voters live, it doesn’t have legs.

The Republicans just lost Specter. Democrats already outnumber them by 1.2 million voters in the state. With a little luck, they could also alienate the remaining moderate Republicans and independent voters. Who’s left to support the party?

Conservative, right-thinking Republicans that’s who. That’s not a political party. That’s a private club.

It is also the path to political oblivion.

The writer is a former political reporter and metro columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer who covered Arlen Specter’s first race for the U.S. Senate in 1976.

Previous columns on pa2010.com by Tom Ferrick:

Specter the survivor had no choice

Specter’s ‘Santorum Syndrome’

Tom Ferrick is one of my idols. The longtime reporter and columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer has a nose for news and an intellect that, frankly, puts other political reporters to shame, including yours truly.

I’m too young to really remember him as a reporter, but for years his columns were the highlight of The Inquirer for me. I remember reading some columns he wrote about the size of local government that left me thinking: “Gee, how come nobody else talks about this?”

In other words, he’s the man. And now he’s writing for pa2010.com! I’m proud to say we just published his first column—which is of course excellent—and there will be more in the months to come.

Please join me in thanking Tom for his contribution to pa2010.com. You can leave the fawning and hyperventilating to me if you’re not comfortable with that.