My state breathes a sigh of relief.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...ennsylvania_dc
Specter Pulls Out Narrow Pennsylvania Win
By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Moderate Republican Sen. Arlen Specter scored a narrow primary win over a conservative congressman on Tuesday in a race that could influence the November battles for control of the Senate and White House.
Specter, a four-term Senate veteran and one of the chamber's last moderate Republicans, outlasted Rep. Pat Toomey 51-49 percent, winning by about 15,000 votes out of more than one million ballots cast.
"Having resolved our family disagreement, we can now move forward in November," Specter told supporters in a downtown Philadelphia ballroom after winning a race seen by both sides as an ideological battle for the party's future.
"Tonight established that there is a place for Arlen Specter in the Republican Party," he told reporters.
Conservative Republicans, angered by Specter's support for abortion rights and frequent disagreements with party leaders, had rallied around Toomey as he hammered Specter as an out-of-touch liberal.
But Toomey phoned Specter after the final results were in to pledge his backing in November, and told supporters in his hometown of Allentown that "our differences are not nearly as great as our differences with the Democrats."
A Specter loss could have been disastrous for national Republicans. It would have given Democrats a shot at picking up one of the two Senate seats they need to reclaim control of the chamber.
It also would have made a win in the state tougher in November for President Bush, who narrowly lost Pennsylvania in 2000. A conservative firebrand like Toomey could have kept swing voters at home and brought Democrats to the polls in larger numbers in November.
Bush and other establishment Republicans like former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani campaigned for Specter, who ran ads emphasizing his strong relationship with the president.
But Toomey received an injection of nearly $2 million from the anti-tax crusading Club for Growth and campaign visits from conservative activists like James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family.
The campaign's ideological war drew national attention to a race that mirrored the battles in the national Republican Party, where conservatives have sometimes crowded out the party's shrinking band of moderate voices.
SPECTER LOST GROUND
Specter, 74, began his re-election bid well ahead of Toomey, 42, but the challenger steadily gained ground through the campaign.
"We knew we had a steep hill to climb," Toomey told supporters in Allentown, but he said his ideas of limited government, personal freedom and a strong defense "are at the heart of the Republican Party."
"We sent a very strong message," Toomey said.
Specter frequently has drawn the anger of party conservatives over the years, particularly with his staunch opposition to President Ronald Reagan's Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in 1987. Bork recently backed Toomey.
That conservative anger helped fuel Toomey's race, along with Specter's role in reducing the size of Bush's tax cuts, his support of abortion rights and his votes with Senate Democrats on issues like minimum wage increases and health maintenance organization regulation.
Toomey, a product of working-class Allentown, has been a leader in debt reduction and challenging pork-barrel Appropriations Committee spending.
Now Specter will face Democratic Rep. Joseph Hoeffel, a three-term congressman from northeast Philadelphia and the city suburbs, who would have gone from a decided underdog to an early favorite if Specter had been knocked out.
Specter, who served two terms as Philadelphia district attorney, is in line to take over the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee next year.
As a member of the panel, he became the target of angry feminists nationwide for his grilling of Anita Hill during the 1992 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, years after angering conservatives during the Bork hearings.
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Hopefully Hoeffel will be able to capitalize on all this controversy.
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