Specter: Driven to crisscross Pa.

MEHOOPANY, Pa. - They turned off the noisy fans blowing hot air through the bare, steel-sided headquarters of the FWM Volunteer Fire Company, and the sweaty crowd leaned forward to listen.

When Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.) takes the stage at one of his famous town-hall meetings, you never know what you're going to get: a joke, a story, or a blunt declaration.

This was a declaration.

"I have to disagree with you - there's a hell of a difference between being wounded and not," Specter told a man who thought uninjured combat veterans deserved the same Veterans Affairs health benefits as the wounded. The man started to argue. "I already answered your question," Specter said. "I don't know what more I can tell you."

Such jousting is a summer ritual for Specter, who uses congressional recesses to visit all 67 counties in Pennsylvania - his version of a permanent campaign. Most politicians try to mingle with voters, but few are as methodical and intense about it.

The tradition dates to mid-1980, when Specter trailed the Democratic candidate for Senate, former Pittsburgh Mayor Pete Flaherty, by 19 percentage points. Specter promised to go to every county, and the press loved the gimmick. He succeeded by the end of August.

"That's the way I caught him," Specter said.

The forums, a mixture of relentlessness and intimacy, have helped the moderate Republican sink deep political roots in all corners of the state, one reason he has withstood challenges from both the left (1992) and the right (2004).

At midafternoon Wednesday, Specter's maroon Lincoln Town Car crested Rural Route 78 in the center of Mehoopany, population 993, a township dotted with dairy farms and a Procter & Gamble paper plant. It is about 140 miles northwest of Philadelphia.

Specter took 19 questions from the crowd of 87 people baking in the firehouse. There were as many questions about the pending farm bill and milk prices (three) as about the war in Iraq. Immigration and health care brought two questions each. Residents also asked about the new restrictions on lobbyists, education, and how Specter makes up his mind on a bill.

He was accompanied by a platoon of aides who took information from people about government problems, collected comment cards, and provided instant research.

At one point, a man angry about illegal immigration questioned why only "two or three" miles of a proposed fence along the border with Mexico had been built. That didn't sound right to Specter, so he summoned chief of staff Scott Hoeflich.

"Scott, make a call to Homeland Security and get me a number," Specter said. (Seventy-five miles, with 350 miles scheduled to be done by the end of the year, he told the man later in the meeting.)

Marianne Cleary handed Specter a photo of her son, Army Lt. Michael Cleary, killed in Iraq in 2005.

"Truly, he was the best of the best," she said, wondering when enough would be enough.

Said Specter: "I don't know that there is any victory there. We're not going to be able to defeat all the crazies in Iraq."

But he also said that the nation needed to be more stable before U.S. troops leave. Afterward, he sought out Cleary to give her private words of comfort.

The Mehoopany stop was the third of the day, which began in Smethport, McKean County, a town 150 miles to the west, near the New York state border. By the end of the day, a forum in a stifling courtroom in Honesdale, seat of Wayne County, Specter had traveled 260 miles along the U.S. Route 6 corridor.

Questions were sharp at times, but even the most querulous voter usually thanked Specter for visiting before unloading.

"In these small counties, it's an event," Specter, 77, said in an interview in the backseat of his car, sipping a chocolate milk shake on the way to Honesdale. "People love it that you get the hell out of Washington and show up."

Specter seemed invigorated at each stop, pacing the room as he talked. He looked lean and fit, with no sign of the two cancers he has survived, a 1993 brain tumor and Hodgkin's disease in 2005. It was, perhaps, testimony to his regime of morning squash, a demanding job - and an evening martini.

"I find it very relaxing," Specter said of the cocktail. "I'm glad to talk about it. I think that people in my position sometimes don't want to admit that they have foibles like everybody else, that they're human."

Telling an audience in Gaines that "we've lost the political center," Specter said he wants to run for a fifth term in 2010. He has raised $2.2 million from Jan. 1 through June 30 - more than all but a handful of senators. The intent is to get enough cash to scare off a conservative challenger before the GOP primary.

Specter barely fended off then-U.S. Rep. Pat Toomey, a Lehigh Valley conservative, in the 2004 primary, winning by 27,000 votes even though he outspent the challenger by 3-1.

Toomey has not decided whether to challenge Specter again, adding that "his record continues to be very objectionable to conservatives."

Among the latest complaints: Specter was the only Republican senator to vote for a bill making it easier for unions to organize; he has hinted he has been troubled by the rulings of Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel A. Alito; and he sponsored the defeated immigration bill that would have given illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

"He's ripe for defeat," said Franklin County Republican County Chairman Jim Taylor, an activist with the Minutemen, who want to stem illegal immigration. "He votes with the Democrats a good deal of the time on critical issues."

Pollster Chris Borick believes that kind of flexibility is the secret to Specter's survival in a state that is neither Republican red nor Democratic blue.

"Specter has established himself in the middle of the political spectrum, and Pennsylvania is a place that is toward the middle," said Borick, of Muhlenberg College. "He's a natural."

To see a slide show of Arlen Specter's town-hall meetings, go to http://go.philly.com/specterEndText