Specter Makes It Official, Challenges Christian Right Candidate Will Stress Flat Tax, Be Pro-Choice
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., Thursday formally declared his presidential candidacy, stressing his commitment to abortion rights, a flat tax on income and to a reform of the Republican Party that would combine the values of Abraham Lincoln and Barry Goldwater.
“Let me say it as plainly as I can: Neither this nation, nor this party, can afford a Republican candidate so captive to the demands of the intolerant right that we end up by reelecting a president of the incompetent left,” the 65-year-old, three-term senator told audiences on the Mall here and in the rotunda of the Pennsylvania capital building in Harrisburg.
A central pillar of the Specter campaign is a challenge both to the ascendant power of the Christian right within the Republican Party, and to social issues conservatives who are pressing for the maintenance of a strong anti-abortion plank in the Republican platform.
The Republican Party is in a position to take command of both the Congress and the White House, Specter said in his announcement speech, but “there are those in our party who would lead us down a different path, and squander this unique moment in our nation’s history, by using our political capital to pursue a radical social agenda that would end a woman’s right to choose and mandate school prayer.”
Specter received support Thursday from Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights League, who said in a statement: “His presence in a field dominated by staunch anti-choice candidates may help the pro-choice Republican majority reclaim their party.”
The expected entry of California Gov, Pete Wilson into the competition will, however, add a second abortion rights candidate to the GOP field. Specter and his chief political strategist, Roger Stone, both addressed the threat posed by Wilson by challenging Wilson’s credentials as a fiscal conservative. Specter cited Wilson’s record of raising taxes in California and Stone noted Wilson’s 1985 support of a failed effort to reduce the rate of cost of living increases for Social Security recipients - a proposal opposed by Specter and three other GOP senators.
Prior to his presidential candidacy, Specter was best known for three things: his brutal cross examination of Anita Hill during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings into her charges of sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas; his leadership role in the defeat of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork; and his support of the “single bullet theory” in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy when assistant counsel to the Warren Commission.
Born in Wichita, Kan., Specter spent much of his adolescence in the tiny Kansas town of Russell (population 4,781), Dole’s hometown. Specter’s father, who had sold blankets in the winter and cantaloupes in the summer, ran a junkyard in Kansas.
Specter went to the University of Pennsylvania and Yale Law School.