as the smoke clears for Arlen Specter...

It seems the choice for him turned out to be frying pan v. fire

It appears his understanding about retaining seniority apres switch was not shared by his new fellow caucus.

and after reviewing recent polls  (although I'm not that familiar with this one)  Michael Barone isn;t quite so sure than Specter is the general election lock he may have appeared to be on first blush. Looking at the general election, Barone concluded.

 it’s possible that a competent opponent who starts out little known but raises sufficient money to change that could sweep up the lion’s share of the undecided vote and make this a close race. Conceivably even a winning race, if the balance of partisan opinion changes over the next 18 months. 

There's some reason to believe this. Specter is obviously buoyed post shift by Obamamania, which is still regnant in PA---Q showed him @66% favorable. If this sinks, ebbing tides lower all boats,

Specter also is presently the "Philly candidate".  This poses two problems. He's probably close to his ceiling there already, but metro Philly only casts about 30% of the state's votes.  There's still enough votes elsewhere in the Commonwealth  for a Republican to fashion a victory.

Second, Specter's 2004 results against a Democrat from the Philly suburbs (Joe Hoeffle) lead me to wonder if a similarly situated Democrat (Sestak) could mess things up huge for Arlen in a Democrat primary. 

Specter lost the city of Philadelphia by 270,000 votes and won the suburbs by 145,000....barely winning Montgomery and Delaware. Specter's big wins that year were in smaller urban areas like Erie, Reading and Scranton who are not so predisposed to him of late. Specter may be feeling the effect of another demographic change---the city of Philadelphia is about 500,000 smaller than when Arlen started his  political career and the loss has been disproportionaly of blue collar whites enamored of moderate candidates as opposed to hard line partisan Democrats.

Will the Philly machine turn out black voters for Specter in a primary? It may depend on how fervent the President is in his support.

One thing from looking at the results from 2006 is it is hard to fathom even the relatively unknown Toomey starting off worse than Santorum ended up. It looks like we may have defined 41% as the hard GOP base in PA.

And I credit Specter's pollster , Glen Bolger, for confirming what I wrote. Specter dug his own hole with Republicans with the stimulus vote., crushing his job approval with Republicans by 30 points. 

"The most important number was the approval rating - it dropped from the 60s to 31" percent just in the last few months, Specter said.

But the stimulus vote was a "watershed," Specter said. "It all turned on that. The pollsters had never seen that kind of precipitous drop. It was stark"

 Pat Toomey just showed up after the hole was dug.

I suppose my question now is we might finally have a Republican party serious about fiscal conservatism. What are we going to do with it?  

===POSTSCRIPT===

I would be remiss in not linking to Dan McLaughlin's excellent RedState post that points out that while the GOP can certainly abide the "socially liberal but fiscally conservative" candidate, especially in Blue States. it's is sort of a condition precedent to be fiscally conservative in order to claim this status. The PA GOP could nominate Specter until his stimulus vote took the legs out of the equation, and by my math, even if the 200,000 "lost moderates" returned to the fold it would not have saved Specter from a primary defeat.