Karen Heller: Specter-Sestak: The hold-your-nose primary

After months flailing in the muck, Arlen Specter and Joe Sestak have convinced Pennsylvania voters on one issue: They're both awful.

I'm not sure how two smart, capable, experienced men brought us to this place, but they most surely did.

Tuesday is the hold-your-nose-and-vote primary.

Joe, you've won your case. Arlen switched parties to save precisely one job, his. In the best political ad of the season, produced by Neil Oxman and J.J. Balaban of the Philadelphia-based Campaign Group, Specter says, twice: "My change in party will enable me to be re-aaahlected." While that last word sounds as if it has been wrung through Auto-Tune, the irritating drawl is Specter's unvarnished own, turned on him like an attack dog.

The ad slaps the five-term senator for his opportunism, transforming his former embrace of George W. Bush, Rick Santorum, and Sarah Palin into invective. How many political leaders of both parties can be his BFF? The photo ops carry the emotional heft of a cardboard cutout.

Specter did himself no favors offering such defensive dribble: "As the Republican Party has moved farther and farther to the right, I have found myself increasingly at odds with the Republican philosophy and more in line with the philosophy of the Democratic Party."

How come Specter didn't feel this way under the Bush White House, when he supported the Republican cause 70 percent during the president's final two years? Or when he championed Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., or John G. Roberts Jr.? Last March, Specter voted against President Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan for solicitor general.

A month later, after voting for Obama's stimulus package, Specter realized he could be Senator Popularity by helping deliver a Democratic super majority. He caught the political vapors and realized that the Republican Party had left him behind when, really, he was worried about conservative challenger Pat Toomey, who came within 17,146 votes of besting him in the 2004 primary. Since his conversion, Specter has voted with his new party 95 percent of the time. What a difference two years make.