When you read this, you’ll have an advantage. You will know who won. As I begin to write, however, I’m not even sure who’s running. That the Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Pennsylvania in 2010 will be forty-eight-year-old Patrick Joseph Toomey, Sr., of Zionsville in the Lehigh Valley is the only certainty. Well, that and the likelihood that this race will prove to be among the most compelling of a particularly tumultuous election year. Who wouldn’t want to write about it?

Toomey’s opponent, to be determined in the May 18 Democratic primary, will be either the five-term...

Back in the day when rhetoric still reigned in political discourse, mellifluous Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen of illinois nominated Barry Goldwater for president as the personification of America’s boundless possibilities: “the peddler’s grandson.” He repeated it so often it rather embarrassed many in the Republican assemblage, but it was certainly more inspirational than introducing Goldwater as “the millionaire’s son.”

Arlen Specterisa peddler’s son. He still recalls, as the youngest of his parents’ children, accompanying his father as they went from town to town, door to door, selling fruit in rural Kansas. Harry Specter was also a scrap-metal dealer...

On May 1, at the downtown Philadelphia studios of Fox 29, all was being readied for the only televised debate between Arlen Specter and Joe Sestak. Whether by means of makeup or simply because of the zest of combat, Senator Specter came on camera looking better, and younger, than I had seen him in years. May 1 is still celebrated with proletarian parades and exhortations in the much-diminished enclaves of regimented collectivism around the world. In these environs, however, most remaining radicals who once hoisted their signs of solidarity have been reduced to reclining and relaxing in wobbly lawn chairs....

While Toomey and Sestak each took a brief break from intensive campaigning over the Memorial Day weekend, a degree of bipartisanship had actually been achieved half a continent away. But at what a price. The disaster dominating the news spawned frustrated fervor throughout and beyond the bayous and parishes of Louisiana, and it would dramatize the deep differences between Pennsylvania’s senatorial candidates. The two angriest men in America this spring were diminutive Republican Governor Bobby Jindal and lanky Democratic political strategist James Carville. Married to Republican strategist Mary Matalin, Carville, the “Ragin’ Cajun” who had provided Bill Clinton with his...

Back in the darkest days of World War II, a popular Mutual radio commentator named Gabriel Heatter used to start off every broadcast with the upbeat salutation, “Good evening, everybody—there is good news tonight!” It might only be the downing of a single Zero, but wasn’t that good news, implying better news to come?

Therewasauthentic good news in both the Toomey and Sestak camps this July. Focusing on campaign donations alone gave Toomey the optimism edge. In the second quarter of 2010 his campaign raised a record $3.1 million in contributions, up $800,000 from their impressive first...

The first person I saw on television was myself—at the New York World’s Fair of 1939–1940 in a demonstration of one of the wonders to come in the “World of Tomorrow,” projected to arrive by 1960. And indeed, by the time FCC chairman Newton Minow labeled television a “vast wasteland” in 1961, over 85 percent of American homes had television sets. These days, with the expansion of cable, it’s infinitely more vast.

The “happy talk” format of bland banality that pervaded local news back when more people actually watched it today extends to every TV genre, on an...

Why isn’t this escalator going up? Hasn’t it been only a matter of months since everyone from professors Madonna and Borick toHardball’s Chris Matthews was touting this race as the most riveting in the nation? They could hardly wait to see it unfold. Here were these two “good men,” as Pat Toomey’s early ad put it, coherently espousing diametrically opposed views for our future as Americans. Despite the circus of claims and counterclaims every election entails, the personal confrontation of Toomey and Joe Sestak promised to be that political rarity, both uncommonly elevated and exciting.

Yet by September the...

I always thought Groundhog Day was in February. So why do I keep being reminded of that movie here in October? Does déjà vu haunt thePhiladelphia Inquirerunder its new ownership? From her photo, longtime columnist Monica Yant Kinney doesn’t look very much like longtime columnist Karen Heller. And Kinney’s collaborator, Saint Joseph’s University history professor Dr. Randall Miller, whom I’ve actually seen in the flesh, looks even less like the expert Heller consulted, Dr. Terry Madonna. A popular scholar whose range of interests extends far beyond Pennsylvania politics (he was recently a notable contributor to PBS’sGod in...

The morning was clear and crisp—bracing, as the weathercasters say. Some sunlight, not too cold, no sign of precipitation in the air or in the forecasts. Despite their lofty sentiments, I can imagine some Republican strategists would have preferred a monsoon in Philadelphia, with gusts so powerful that no amount of Brady’s street money or Sestak’s zealotry could motivate voters out of their homes. Turnout, as always, would be the critical factor. In the Democratic primary Arlen Specter had come out of the Quaker City with less than a fifty-thousand-vote margin. Joe Sestak would need five, perhaps even six...