Former Sen. Arlen Specter often changed his ideological persona during his lengthy career, shifting left, then right, then left again as political exigencies required. But one thing that never changed was his remarkable ability to annoy on a bipartisan basis.
And that peculiar candor abounds, for better and for worse, in the former Pennsylvania Senator’s autobiography, “Life Among the Cannibals: A Political Career, a Tea Party Uprising, and the End of Governing as We Know It,” which laments what Specter considers to be the death of the political center and points fingers at his former GOP colleagues and tea party activists for the partisan divide now gripping Congress.
Specter — a GOP centrist who abandoned his party in 2009 when it became clear his chances of winning a Republican primary for his long-held Senate seat were doomed — also calls out the “silent moderate majority” in Congress. This group, according to Specter, “sits on its hands,” and its members cast votes along party lines merely to ensure their own re-election.
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