Specter, Pennsylvania Democratic primary foe spar over tenure, trust in US Senate race

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Specter, Pa. primary foe spar over tenure, trust

PHILADELPHIA — The competing messages of experience and trust were the calling cards of Pennsylvania’s two Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate on the last, hectic day of campaigning before Tuesday’s primary election in the too-close-to-call race.

Sen. Arlen Specter, who has served in the Senate since 1981, flew to campaign stops around the state Monday to remind voters of the battles he has fought and won for Pennsylvania.

“With Jack Murtha gone, I’m the only guy left standing with seniority and experience,” Specter said inside an airplane hangar building, invoking the name of the U.S. Rep. John Murtha. The western Pennsylvania Democrat died in February.

Specter, who switched parties last year after enraging Republicans over his vote for President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus bill, called Sestak’s criticism of his switch as “below the belt.”

The stimulus bill, he has said, kept America from falling into an even deeper economic downturn and saved millions of jobs.

Sestak continued Monday to criticize Specter, however, of switching parties simply to improve his chances at re-election and of supporting the GOP’s economic policies that he said contributed to the recession in the first place.

Sestak met with voters in a Pittsburgh a coffee shop and then appeared with a group of black clergy members in Philadelphia to make his case that Specter — a Republican senator for 28 years — cannot be trusted to support Democratic Party causes.

Democrats “really do want someone that they’re willing to lose their job over doing what’s right,” Sestak told reporters outside the New Hope Baptist Church in south Philadelphia. “Someone of conviction and core beliefs of why they’re a Democrat.”

One of the clergy members endorsing Sestak, the Rev. Leonard C. Goins of Chestnut Hill Church, called Sestak the “last Democrat standing.”

If Sestak loses the Democratic Senate primary, he will be out of Congress at the end of the year because he is not running for re-election to his own seat in the U.S. House.

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Associated Press writers Joe Mandak in Pittsburgh and Mark Scolforo in Harrisburg, Pa., contributed to this report.