Senate race is testament to importance of Pennsylvania

Based on the run-up to last Tuesday's Republican senatorial primary election, Pennsylvania is being seen as a keystone to President Bush's re-election campaign.
Conservative Republicans wanted so badly to depose Arlen Specter that they could taste it. Specter, 74, is seeking his fifth term and is derided by GOP conservatives as a RINO, Republican In Name Only.
One of the big guns aiming at Specter was the conservative anti-tax group Club for Growth, which poured $2 million into Pennsylvania to defeat Specter. Last year, the Club had painted a target on Ohio's moderate GOP senator, George Voinovich.
Specter's opponent was Rep. Pat Toomey, 42, a social and economic conservative and rising star of the right with an impressive resume. He was reminiscent of Pennsylvania's junior senator, Rick Santorum, when he went to the Senate 10 years ago.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the election, which Specter narrowly won.
Despite dire warnings from the right of what would happen if Specter were re-elected (among the things that horrified his opponents, Specter, a pro-choice Republican, is slated to assume chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, through which all judicial appointments must pass), Santorum endorsed Specter.
And despite President Bush's tendency to never antagonize conservatives in his party unless he has to, he endorsed Specter.
We have a winner
Politics trumped ideology. Pragmatic Republicans were willing to back Specter, who voted in 1987 against conservative Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and who voted "not proven" on removing President Clinton from office, if that's what it was going to take to win in November.
Despite Santorum's success as a conservative Republican who unseated a liberal incumbent, Democrat Harris Wofford a decade ago, neither Santorum nor Bush was willing to gamble on Toomey being able to defeat a relatively unknown Democrat, Rep. Joe Hoeffel in the Nov. 2 general election.
The stakes were simply too high. Had Toomey won the primary, he had the potential to energize Pennsylvania Democrats and to drive moderate independents and Republicans away from the GOP in the fall.
At stake were possible Republican control of the Senate and President's Bush's ability to carry Pennsylvania over the presumptive Democratic nominee, John Kerry.
The election provided an interesting insight into Pennsylvania's importance this November as a swing state and into the president's willingness to pick and choose when he'll stand firmly on the right and when he'll move to the center.