Turncoats

Something we haven’t seen much during the Bush era is turncoating.  We haven’t seen many senators or representatives who have been willing to change their positions away from the party line or, perhaps turn away from their party all together.

Until now.

Just this past year, Arlen Specter, long-time Republican from Pennsylvania, switched sides and became a Democrat, which gave the Senate (at the time), the 60 seats it needed to become filibuster-proof.  It was a controversial move, motivated by Republican attacks on Specter’s middle-of-the-road style of conservatism (which is going largely out of style) and certain concessions he’d been making to the Democrats.  This does not go over well in the Senate.

Ask Joe Lieberman.  Lieberman was a prominent Democrat in the first part of the decade, and ran as Al Gore’s vice-presidential candidate in the 2000 election.  His middle-of-the-road style led to his ultimate downfall in the Democratic party, and when he ran for Senate in Connecticut in 2006, he lost the Democratic primary, so he ran as an independent.  And of course he won.

Now he’s talking about what he wants to run as in the 2012 Senate Election – Republican or Democrat.

Truthfully, he fits in neither right now.  Neither does Arlen Specter.  There isn’t much of a space for moderates in the Senate right now.  You can maybe get away with it in representative seats right now (though there is not a single rep who is neither Republican or Democrat), but nuanced, complex views are not necessarily appreciated in the high-profile Senate.

And people don’t like it when their congressional representatives change their mind.  They want to be spoken for, and voting for one thing and getting another feels like a betrayal.  But at the same time, moderates tend to respect the ability to analyze a situation and change your mind, and to have viewpoints that fit the issues, rather than follow a cookie-cutter platform.

There are a couple of questions to be asked about these men (Specter is running in 2010, Lieberman in 2012), and their futures in the Senate.  Specter has a serious problem in 2010 – more of a problem than Lieberman, who already won as an independent – in that he is probably going to lose the support of Republicans, who have been the ones voting him into office for years.  He says that his stances as a moderate were going to make it impossible for him to win the Republican primary in Pennsylvania, so he was just going to switch now.

The whole thing caused a bit of an uproar, and there’s a decent chance it will result in his removal from office.  If it doesn’t, however, it could show that America is moving towards a more moderate stance, where they are willing to deny polarization and support candidates who are more moderate.

The question about Turncoats is:  are they a trend?  Is this a new thing?  Or is it just coincidental that two Senators switched sides in the past few years?  If it’s a trend, it could make things a bit harder to predict for pollsters, and it could make the legislative processes a bit more fluid.

Or maybe it’s just a coincidence.