Will Specter switch?

Democrats are pressing hard to get Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) to switch sides, the Hill reports:

Democrats want Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) in their ranks — and they’ve been sending in their big guns to lobby him to make the switch.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D) said he, Vice President Biden and Sen. Bob Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) have tried to get the longtime senator and centrist Republican to come to their side of aisle but that so far he won’t budge. …

In the interview with the Regional News Network, Rendell also said Specter would be a shoo-in as a Democrat.

“We’ve tried — myself, Sen. Casey, Vice President Biden,” Rendell said. “We’ve tried to talk him into it, but he’s bound and determined to stay a Republican. He doesn’t want to see Republican moderates vanish from the earth.”

In response, Specter’s office referred to a recent radio interview in which Specter said he would run with the GOP.

“I’m prepared to say that I’m running as a Republican,” he told conservative host Michael Smerconish.

Rendell said the welcome would be warm for Specter, who has spurned his party on the recent stimulus package and could do so again on the Employee Free Choice Act, also known as “card-check.”

“The Democrats in the Senate would welcome him,” Rendell told the station. “I think he’d be basically unopposed for the Democratic nomination, and I think he’d win 60, 65 percent of the vote in the general election.”

Democrats have no strong front-runner for Specter’s seat at this point in the 2010 cycle. If the senator switched parties during the 111th Congress, he could be the 60th vote for Democrats in the Senate, a number needed to end debate on legislation. …

Rendell’s office on Monday confirmed the governor’s comments, but said that Rendell might have been referring to more casual lobbying efforts by other Democrats.

“The governor has had conversations — both public and private — trying to urge Sen. Specter to switch parties, and each and every time, he has received a resounding ‘no’ in response,” Rendell spokesman Chuck Ardo said.

Ardo agreed with Casey’s office that Rendell might have been referring to an event last month at which the governor and Biden joked publicly with Specter about switching parties

Former Philadelphia Jewish Exponent editor Jonathan Tobin, at his new home at Commentary, explores whether Specter is serious, or just trying to frighten some Republican leaders:

Specter has been the bête noire of Pennsylvania conservatives for a generation but, with the recent decision of former Rep. Pat Toomey to challenge him again in next year’s Republican primary, it looks as if his luck has run out. Though Specter’s fundraising prowess and ability to win in November has won him five terms, his defections on key conservative issues (dating back to his opposition to the nomination of Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court and demonstrated as recently as this winter, with his votes for the stimulus package and against school choice in the District of Columbia) have convinced many Republicans that the pleasure of defeating him is more important than the risk of losing the seat if Toomey is the nominee.

Rendell told the Hill that Specter “doesn’t want to see Republican moderates vanish from the earth.” The problem is, a majority of Pennsylvania Republicans may not agree. And without big guns like George W. Bush and former senator Rick Santorum to bail him out this time (as they did when he beat Toomey by a hair in 2004), conservatives sense that Specter is more vulnerable than ever. The senator may realize that 2010 will be different. That’s exactly why the Dem big guns are hoping he will re-join their ranks 44 years after he switched parties. In 1965, he left the Democrats in order to challenge the Philadelphia Democratic Party machine in a successful run for the post of district attorney.

If Specter did flip, he would certainly be a heavy favorite to win both the Democratic nomination and the general election. But just because Rendell is ready to welcome him back into the fold doesn’t mean that those Democrats who are currently planning to challenge him will all back down. I can easily imagine Rep. Allyson Schwartz, who represents parts of Philadelphia and suburban Montgomery County in the U.S. House and who has been raising money for a senate challenge, gambling that a feminist rebellion against Specter might be worth a try. Liberals still hold Specter’s tough questioning of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in 1991 against Arlen the way conservatives still resent his dismissal of Bork. And Schwartz, who ran a Planned Parenthood clinic in Philadelphia from 1975 to 1988, might decide that she would be able to rally partisan Democrats and feminists to beat Specter.

On the other hand, it’s also possible that Specter’s camp is itself trying to promote the idea that the Senator will switch sides. They may hope to scare Republican leaders who understand that giving the Dems a 60th vote in the Senate would be disastrous for those who hope that Congress will be able to restrain President Obama’s liberal agenda.