Arlen Specter will be 80 shortly. He looks frail. He’s skinny, wrinkled, rumpled and balding with incision marks on his scalp, and the curly black hair he had when I was a kid is long gone. He’s older than my father.
He’s had two brain tumors, two bouts with Hodgkin’s disease, and cardiac bypass surgery. Once, as described in this great article in the Washington Post, after a doctor discovered a tumor “the size of a golf ball” between Specter’s brain and his skull, the doctor told him he had three to six weeks to live.
That was in 1993. He had the Hodgkin’s in 2005 and 2008. In other words, just yesterday.
Here’s a photo of a much younger, stronger man shouting in his face just a few days ago.
Here he is preparing for a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania, where’s he’s Senator.
For two minutes, Specter stood in silence and stared out a window into a scrubby back lot. He scanned over his notes on an index card, fiddled with the hearing aid in his right ear and said, “It’s showtime.”
Whether he turned the volume up or down, he still had to confront seething constituents face-to-face and stay true to the flinty, unflinching persona that has made him such a fixture in Keystone State politics. And knowing that this summer’s heat had more than the usual dangers, Specter asked the officers whether the audience had been cleared through metal detectors. The answer: No. Specter paused. For a moment, he processed the implications, with a hint of concern in his eyes. Then he clapped his hands together and shuffled slowly down an empty corridor toward the rowdy hall. Any fear fled from his face as he grabbed a microphone and entered the fray.
“Booo! Booo!” some attendees screamed.
So the old man walks out and faces big burly shouting men who stand two feet away and scream and point in his face. He faces angry crowds who come out just so they can berate him and take out their rage with whatever it is they’re all so constantly enraged about.
No metal detectors? Hmmm. A hint of concern. And then it’s show time.
Specter is 79. He’s a Democrat now.
And I’m sure the big brave hero who shouted in his face, and all those people who raucously cheered him for standing up to the old man who’d survived brain tumors, heart surgery, and cancer, are not.
