Sen. Arlen Specter reflects on cancer battle

Even with this skilled team, the race intensified as primary day approached, and I worried that too many Republicans would not vote out of a lack of awareness of how serious a chance I had of losing. I knew I was in trouble from day one, and unsurprisingly, the race increasingly became a negative one. The Toomey campaign’s basic strategy entailed a persistent attack on me as a “liberal.”  The National Review provided a forum for my opponent, coming to his aid with a vitriolic September 2003 cover story headline, “The Worst Republican Senator: Why Pennsylvania Should Get Rid of Arlen Specter.” In response, my campaign procured a letter from the three former and the current Republican Senate majority leaders — Howard Baker, Bob Dole, Trent Lott, and Bill Frist — calling me “one of the best Senators in promoting Republican values and policies.” A Toomey ad charged that “nearly 70 percent of the time,” I “voted the same way” as John Kerry: “And that makes Arlen Specter 100 percent too liberal.” Those numbers, drawn from votes cast in 2002, omitted to mention that Kerry voted with President Bush 72 percent of the time.

In mid-April 2004, Wall Street Journal columnist Al Hunt ran a column about the campaign entitled, “Down and Nasty in the Keystone State.” Hunt remarked about me, “While he has made a legislative mark on important national issues—medical research most notably — he is a prodigious producer of pork and unsurpassed in constituency services.” The “pork” charge was a cornerstone of the Toomey campaign. My biggest challenge, in fact, was less my opponent than my own record, which a solid majority of Pennsylvanians approved except for the very-right-wing Republicans. Still, I find one of the best ways as an incumbent to deflect ill-considered criticism is to put the critic in my shoes. I unabashedly defended what I call “bringing home the bacon” and challenged Representative Toomey to share with the public what federal spending in Pennsylvania he would criticize as wasteful. For days, my opponent was unresponsive until his campaign came up with a single expenditure — an $800,000 outhouse in a national park that was finished two years before he was elected to Congress.

Terry Madonna, director of Franklin and Marshall College’s Keystone Poll, observed, “Arlen always wins ugly.” There was some truth to this, and in more ways than one. A little over a month before the primary election, I tripped on a sidewalk defect and fell flat on my face as I left the Tangerine Restaurant in Philadelphia on a Saturday night. I went to the emergency room of Jefferson Hospital and was visibly bruised, with two shiners and a split lower lip. I was scheduled to appear on national television — CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer — the next day.

To hell with it, I thought; I may as well go forward on the show in full glory. Blitzer asked me about my injury on the air, and I explained, “Came down hard on my lip, Wolf. I tripped on a defect in the sidewalk and got a little bump, but I’m feeling OK.”

The bruises worsened, and by Monday, I had become an absolute mess, but I attended a scheduled farm event in western Pennsylvania with Governor Ed Rendell, which was shown on C-SPAN. I had something to say on Sunday on CNN, on Monday on the farm, and Tuesday on the Senate floor, so I said it notwithstanding my appearance. It would be the same months later when I appeared for my Senate business pallid, skinny, and bald while undergoing a chemotherapy treatment.

Charlie Robbins, my communications director, said I looked as if I had gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson. Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, reported on my activities that Tuesday: “Senate tongues were wagging big-time on Tuesday night when Specter rose to give a speech on the Senate floor and showed off a busted lip, two black eyes and a scary-looking nose. (This, of course, was not the first occasion that the infamously testy Specter has had his nose out of joint — at least not figuratively.)”

Jokes aside, the race, as feared, tightened as primary day approached. In January 2004, polls had me with a 23-point lead over Toomey, which dropped to a 15-point lead on April 7 and a 5-point lead on April 20, a week before the primary. My opponent’s negative surge was apparently the result of his blitz of campaign commercials, which worked enough for him to come out ahead among self-identified conservatives by April 20 — a reversal of my previous lead among conservatives. Realizing the margin would be razor-thin, I pressed for every last vote I could get. Toomey was doing an effective job of reaching out to the base, and many were surprised to hear how close the contest was.

Of course, the only poll that counted was the actual primary election, which occurred on April 27. It was a day fraught with suspense. At the time I voted that morning in Philadelphia, voter turnout appeared to be low in the southeastern part of the state, which fed my team’s longstanding anxiety over the effects of little turnout. Several campaign staffers went to pray for victory at the Convent of Divine Love, the home of cloistered nuns known as the “pink sisters,” who invite prayers in times of difficulty.

That evening, the campaign camped out at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia as the numbers came in. I arrived looking exhausted, according to my staff, but I did not sense more than the usual fatigue of a tough campaign. I went to the ballroom, where numerous cameras and reporters were assembled. I went from camera to camera telling the voters very directly in the live 6:00 p.m. news shows that the election could be decided by a few votes. KYW, Philadelphia’s most widely listened-to news radio program, gave me three minutes live shortly after 7:00 p.m. to state my case. My constituents knew how I had served the state for twenty-three years, I said, and if they wanted me to continue, please come to the polls and demonstrate their support.

After the polls closed, several hundred supporters gathered in the ballroom. A smaller group of about seventeen people occupied a computer-filled war room off to the side, where returns were being tracked. There Joan, Shanin, Tracey, Shanin’s friend and law partner Tom Kline, and Tom’s wife, Paula, joined several campaign and Senate staffers around a large table, where everyone was mulling over numbers as they came in. The experience was an emotional roller coaster. At one point, a 95,000-vote error from Bucks County gave me a reported 59 to 41 percent edge. The jump startled several of us. What happened? Tel Aviv must have come in, joked my campaign treasurer, Steve Harmelin. Once the error was discovered, the margin shrank to 51 to 49 percent, then further to a fifty-fifty statistical tie. There was great concern over the last returns to be reported, which would come from rural conservative areas that were thought to be leaning toward Toomey. The situation appeared so bleak that several staffers were convinced I had lost. Some even began to formulate their farewells, telling their coworkers it had been nice working together. When three returns came in, however, my team was elated to find I had carried those areas — some in greater numbers than the suburban regions typically considered my areas of strength.

Notwithstanding that pleasant surprise, my lead continued to shrink. I sat next to my pollster, Glen Bolger, who was analyzing the narrowing race, with the total vote yet uncounted. My anxiety, still high, was eased substantially as Bolger told me Toomey would have to get a very high percentage of the outstanding vote in order to overcome my narrow lead. As the lead shrank, so did the number of outstanding, unreported votes. I do not recall Bolger’s precise comments, but with a small number of outstanding votes, he said something to the effect that Toomey would have to get 70 percent of the remainder. And then a few minutes later, with the lead even closer but fewer votes outstanding, he said Toomey would have to get something like 80 percent of the remainder. I derived considerable solace as the lead narrowed, because it seemed highly unlikely that Toomey could get enough of the remaining votes to take the lead, which he never did.

Watching the election returns for the tension-filled 2004 primary was vastly different from my narrow loss for mayor in 1967. My pollster at the time, John Bucci, worked for Philadelphia’s KYW radio on election night and would take a few sample returns, compare them to previous elections, and make a projection. He did that a few minutes after the polls closed on the mayoral election. At about 8:15 or 8:20, while Joan and I were dressing, preparing to go to election headquarters, Shanin, then ten, walked into the bedroom and said, “Daddy, John Bucci says you lost.” It was an abrupt, decisive end to a vigorous, sometimes violent campaign.

Now the final tally showed the numbers at 50.8 percent to 49.2 percent; I had eked out a 1.6 percent victory, with a margin of 17,146 votes out of 1,044,532 cast. It was not until about 1:00 a.m. that Toomey called me to concede. Our phone call was brief, but my opponent was gracious in congratulating me on the victory. After he spoke to his supporters, I spoke to mine in Bellevue-Stratford’s ballroom: “I compliment Congressman Pat Toomey on a hard-fought campaign. Now is the time, having settled our family disagreement within the Republican Party, to unify, to re-elect President Bush, to maintain the Republican majority in the United States Senate.” A good portion of the crowd had left, but I was pleased to see about half, numbering 150 or so, remained to the end.

It was a bittersweet moment for my friends and for me, for reasons beyond those visible to the viewing public. Carey, who had taken off the last several weeks after a long streak without missing a day of work, spent the entire primary night with the team, but she was in tremendous pain. She was not up to taking part in all the cheers and hugs that followed the victory announcement, but she stood behind me as I gave my victory speech — despite her difficulty standing at any length that evening. I was not alone in thinking this would be her last campaign. She had fought cancer tenaciously years earlier, but the illness returned, too aggressive to overcome — and, in my view, preventable. She died less than three months after the primary — four days after getting married, wheelchair-bound, in the chapel of the Georgetown University Hospital. She was a statuesque blonde, personable, a brilliant and studious leader who was a mentor to the young staff. I could always trust her to handle the issues that cascaded into the office with aplomb, dignity, and efficiency.

I visited her home the night before she died. Carey was propped up in a hospital bed that had been brought to her home, yet she looked radiant. I thought it was beautiful she had just been married. Our most prominent memory at that moment was our work to expand health care research. Over the years, we had striven to increase funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the nation’s principal vehicle for such research. Holding her hand, I told her that she and I had led that fight and that I would continue our work. She spoke softly when she could, and she said she was at peace with herself, fully aware of her imminent fate. Her words said it all about the type of person she was: “I’ve had a good run.” She was forty-eight.

Excerpted from "Never Give in" by Arlen Specter. Copyright © 2008 by Senator Arlen Specter. Reprinted with permission of St. Martins Press. All rights reserved.

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