Podcasts

Arlen Specter | Life Among the Cannibals: A Political Career, a Tea Party Uprising, and the End of Governing As We Know It

Recorded: 3/29/2012

The longest-serving senator in Pennsylvania history, Senator Arlen Specter began his goodbye speech after 30 years in office by declaring: "This is not a farewell address but rather a closing argument." Referring to the internal ideological wrangling that forced him from the Republican Party in 2009—only to be defeated in a Democratic primary in 2010—Specter decried the gridlocked Senate in his farewell address, lamenting: "In some quarters, compromise has become a dirty word… Politics is no longer the art of the possible when senators are intransigent in their positions." In Life Among the Cannibals, he shows how increased extremism extinguishes any opportunity for moderate, bipartisan agreement.  

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