Specter prepares his farewell after 30 years in the Senate

WASHINGTON - The family photographs came down Monday, packed in bubble wrap and boxes for the trip home, leaving nothing but some nails and sun-faded outlines on the walls of Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter's inner office.

After 30 years on Capitol Hill, the state's longest-serving senator is clearing out and heading back to Philadelphia.

Specter, 80, will deliver his final floor speech Tuesday morning, decrying a gridlocked Senate that has lost its political center and the sense of collegiality that once kept senators from campaigning against one another.

"Eating or defeating your own is a form of sophisticated cannibalism," Specter, a Democrat, plans to say, according to his prepared remarks, referring to conservative Republican senators - notably Jim DeMint of South Carolina - who helped tea-party insurgents fell three moderate incumbents in the 2010 primaries.

"Collegiality can obviously not be maintained when negotiating with someone out to defeat you, especially in your own party," Specter says in the 2,600-word speech, scheduled for 10:30 a.m. "In some quarters, compromising has become a dirty word. . . . Politics is no longer the art of the possible when senators are intransigent in their positions."

In some ways, Specter's journey over the last 20 months sums up the plight of the homeless centrist: He was all but forced out of the Republican Party and was embraced by the White House and other top Democrats, but could not survive his new party's primary.

He says he is cheered by the triumph of Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican who lost to a tea-party candidate in the primary but who has evidently won reelection as a write-in.

"Her victory proves that America still wants to be and can be governed by the center," Specter says in his remarks.

For three decades, Arlen Specter's life has been ruled by the rhythms of the Senate, its roll calls and recesses, its deals and debates. And he has been in public life in one form or another for twice as long.

Now, Specter has to figure out life outside the bubble. He plans to teach a course on the Supreme Court at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law and is weighing offers to join several law firms as senior counsel. He also wants to do commentary for NPR or a television network and hopes to be tapped for special assignments by President Obama's administration, much as former Sen. George Mitchell (D., Maine) has been.