Former U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, who embodied a vanishing breed of liberal Republicanism before switching to the Democratic Party at the twilight of his political career, died Sunday after a long battle with cancer, his family announced.
Specter died of complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at his home in Philadelphia, his family said. He was 82.
The veteran Pennsylvania politician had overcome numerous serious illnesses over the past two decades, including a brain tumor. He had been in the public eye since serving as a member of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Specter was elected to the Senate in 1980 and represented Pennsylvania for 30 years, longer than anyone in the state’s history. His politically moderate image fit hand-in-glove in the politically blue Northeast, both with its Democratic centrists and its liberal Republicans.
He was also one of America’s most prominent Jewish politicians, a rare Republican in a category dominated by Democrats over the decades. And his name is synonymous with Pennsylvania, an idiosyncratic state that pushes and pulls between the two parties, and his home, the staunchly Democratic city of Philadelphia.
In 2006, Philadelphia magazine called him “one of the few true wild cards of Washington politics … reviled by those on both the right and the left.”
“Charming and churlish, brilliant and pedantic, he can be fiercely independent, entertainingly eccentric and simply maddening,” the profile read.
Former Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, called Specter “a mentor, colleague and a political institution” who “did more for the people of Pennsylvania over his more than 30-year career with the possible exception of Benjamin Franklin.” And Pat Toomey, the Republican who now holds Specter’s old Senate seat, praised him as “a man of sharp intelligence and dogged determination.”
And at the White House, President Barack Obama said Specter “was always a fighter.”
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article courtesy of CNN.com
