Be prepared to be dazzled by names of important white men you’ve never heard of and distant dates from Pennsylvania’s past. Take 1848. . . Please! Try to remember the year 1848 because that’s the last time that Pennsylvania had a Democratic governor and two Democratic United States Senators. At a news conference last Tuesday Arlen Spector announced an unexpected Democratic Party Pennsylvania trifecta in a race no one saw running at post time. Specter’s announcement to become a Democrat after serving 29 years as a Republican U.S. Senator from his adopted state of Pennsylvania was both stunning and nationally important, but beyond that, mindblowing in Washington. The new American congressional reality is this: as Specter turns so turns the United States Senate.This is heady stuff. So heady that it’s easy to forget the parochial considerations of Pennsylvania history. Arlen Specter, at 79, has stepped onto the national stage like no Philadelphian of that advanced age since, well, Benjamin Franklin, who was 81 years old when he joined 54 men meeting at Independence Hall in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Like Franklin, only in William Penn’s Philadelphia could a Russian Jewish immigrant’s kid with a sense of justice from the junkyards of Kansas have figured out how to fit right in and cause such problems. Specter’s decision has created a once in a sesquicentennial-plus situation in Pennsylvania electoral politics. Eight score and one year ago was the last time Pennsylvania Democrats controlled the Governor’s Office and both upper house seats in the U.S. Congress. The year was 1848. That was six years before what we call the Republican Party would even exist. But despite the early head start by the Democrats, Pennsylvanians have preferred Republicans more than two-to-one in those three statewide elective offices in the years since. Most of those Republican years, incidently, fell between the administrations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

Since then it’s been in-again-out-again-Finnigan for both party’s candidates for governor and U.S. Senate. You’re in, you’re out; it’s time for a change, Democrat or Republican every other election cycle. Our change in political mood has been as dependable as the seasons. All except for Arlen Specter who has served longer than any U.S. senator in Pennsylvania history. For a brief period of less than a month in January 1848, the governor, Francis Shunk (of South Philly Shunk Street fame!) and U.S. Sens.Daniel Sturgeon and Simon Cameron were all Democrats. Cameron famously served in President Lincoln’s cabinet and later was elected twice to the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania. . .  as a Republican.

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