Specter, Pennsylvania Democratic primary foe spar over tenure, trust in US Senate race

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Specter, Pa. primary foe spar over tenure, trust

PHILADELPHIA — The competing messages of experience and trust were the calling cards of the state’s two Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate on the last day of campaigning before Tuesday’s primary election in the too-close-to-call race.

Sen. Arlen Specter, who has served in the Senate since 1981, and his challenger, U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, also dueled Monday over who is more dedicated to Democratic Party values while many Democrats wonder who can beat the Republicans in the fall.

Barry Alfonso, a regular at the Tazza D’Oro Cafe & Espresso Bar in Pittsburgh, where Sestak met with voters Monday morning, said: “It’s not the only issue, but it’s the most important.”

The election is Specter’s first running as a Democrat after he switched parties last year. He nonetheless is endorsed by President Barack Obama, the Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO.

Known as a political survivor and a centrist, Specter, 80, has used his willingness to cross party lines to bolster his clout in Congress and has won numerous narrow victories over the years by appealing to moderate voters.

However, many Democrats remain undecided in the race and suspicious of a man they have voted against before.

At his six stops around the state Monday, Specter reminded voters of the battles he has fought and won for Pennsylvania, from a Delaware River dredging project expected to bring tens of thousands of jobs to Philadelphia’s port to directing federal spending to Penn State University research.

“With Jack Murtha gone, I’m the only guy left standing with seniority and experience,” Specter told a small group of supporters and reporters inside an airplane hangar building in suburban Harrisburg.

U.S. Rep. John Murtha died in February.

Sestak, a former Navy admiral and second-term congressman from suburban Philadelphia, dismissed Specter’s accomplishments simply as the kind of “hard work” that any senator should undertake and turned the discussion to whether Democrats can trust Specter.

He repeated his accusation that Specter’s switch to the Democratic Party was a cold, political calculation intended to ensure re-election, not advance the Democratic Party values he said Specter has worked against for decades.

Voters “really do want someone that they’re willing to lose their job over doing what’s right,” Sestak told reporters outside the New Hope Baptist Church in south Philadelphia, where he was endorsed by about a dozen members of the city’s black clergy. “Someone of conviction and core beliefs of why they’re a Democrat.”

He also contrasted Specter’s decision to switch parties with his own to run for Senate as an example of a principled decision. If Sestak loses the primary, he will be out of Congress at the end of the year because he is not running for re-election.

Specter called Sestak’s criticism of his party switch “below the belt.”

In a Monday evening campaign stop amid Philadelphia Phillies fans streaming into Citizens Bank Park, Specter insisted he had doomed his re-election prospects in the GOP by crossing party lines to support Obama’s economic stimulus bill.

“I decided to put the country’s welfare ahead of mine when I voted for the recovery act,” Specter said.

Sestak also supported the bill, but he said Specter’s endorsements from Obama and his vote for the bill shouldn’t get him re-elected because he supported Republican policies that ran up the nation’s debt and sparked the recession.

Associated Press writers Joe Mandak in Pittsburgh and Mark Scolforo in Harrisburg, Pa., contributed to this report.