Specter Keeps Quiet About His Counsel to Craig
WASHINGTON _ Forget the looming Iraq progress report. Forget Sen. Tim Johnson, the South Dakota Democrat who returned to work Wednesday nine months after a stroke.
All anyone wanted to know Wednesday on Capitol Hill was this: Why did Sen. Arlen Specter go to bat for Sen. Larry Craig the day after the Idaho Republican announced his resignation?
Whatever the reason, Specter wasn’t saying. Not as the senator emerged from the GOP’s weekly luncheon, where he was besieged by reporters. Not at a news conference on a separate topic, where television crews had camped outside, waiting for Specter to emerge.
Over and over, he stuck to this line about Craig, who was arrested June 11 in a Minnesota airport sex sting and pleaded guilty last month to disorderly conduct: “At least for the time being, I do not intend to say anything further about Larry Craig’s situation.”
Specter had already gotten himself into a situation of his own. On “Fox News Sunday,” a day after the GOP appeared to have put the scandal to rest, Specter came to Craig’s defense.
“I’d like to see Larry Craig go back to court, seek to withdraw his guilty plea and fight the case,” Specter said. “I’ve had some experience in these kinds of matters since my days as Philadelphia district attorney, and on the evidence, Sen. Craig wouldn’t be convicted of anything.
“And he’s got his life on the line and 27 years in the House and Senate, and I’d like to see him fight the case, because I think he could be vindicated.”
GOP leadership didn’t see it that way. “I thought he made the correct decision to resign,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, said Wednesday, reaffirming what he said after Craig’s announcement Saturday.
Craig’s carefully crafted resignation statement appeared to have been influenced by Specter. In a voicemail left at a wrong number and obtained by Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, Craig said: “Arlen Specter is now willing to come out in my defense, arguing that it appears by all that he knows that I’ve been railroaded.
“Having all of that, we have reshaped my statement a little bit to say that it is my intent to resign on Sept. 30,” he said.
Asked about his conversation with Craig, Specter didn’t veer off course Wednesday: no comment.
Specter isn’t new to the role of defending embattled GOP senators. Five years ago, when Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., was forced to resign his leadership post after making racially insensitive remarks at Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday celebration, Specter chimed in.
“I know Trent Lott very well from working with him in the Senate for the last 14 years and can vouch for the fact that he is no supporter of Sen. Thurmond’s 1948 (segregationist) platform,” Specter said at the time. “His comment was an inadvertent slip and his apology should end the discussion.”
Lott, of course, would rise again, last fall winning the minority party’s second-ranking leadership post _ whip.
For Craig, it could be a steeper climb. Perhaps just how steep depends on what Specter has to say about it.
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