Ex-U.S. Sen. Fred Harris breaks down the Arlen Specter switch

I bumped into ex-U.S. Sen. Fred Harris in downtown Albuquerque yesterday. Of course, Harris isn’t just an ex-senator. He’s been a very popular UNM political science professor for years (now semi-retired), and back in the late 1990s, he served briefly as chairman of the Democratic Party of New Mexico.

The “prairie populist” as Harris was known, was a very young U.S. senator when he was elected from his native Oklahoma in 1964, the same year Bobby Kennedy and Joe Montoya were also elected. In fact, Harris’ senate floor desk sat between them. Following his term in that most exclusive club, Harris later served a very consequential term as chairman of the DNC and ran a populist campaign for president in 1976.

Given his senate experience (and later scholarship on the subject), I couldn’t help but follow up over e-mail and ask Harris for his thoughts on this week’s big senate news – new Democrat Arlen Specter.

How important is the addition of a 60^th Democrat even though you still have a few mushy moderates, I asked. Here’s Harris’ unabridged answer:

Senator Specter’s party change is a really big deal. First of all, It will make it much more likely that the Democrats will be able to get the 60 votes necessary for cloture, to cut off a Senate filibuster, on any major policy measure proposed by the president. Sen. Specter can’t be counted on always to vote for an Obama-backed bill, nor, for that matter, can all the other Democratic senators, but he, and other Democrats, can probably most often be persuaded to vote for cloture, to close debate, on a major measure, even though they might sometimes thereafter vote against the measure itself, final passage of which requires only a majority vote.

Harris, like other observers, also sees the Specter shakeup as an indictment of the GOP:

Sen. Specter’s change shows how the Republican Party has now shrunk to a small right-wing core; shockingly, only 21 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans in recent poll. Yet, Republican leaders and potential presidential candidates continue disastrously to claim that the party’s fortunes have tanked because Republicans haven’t been conservative enough.

Then I asked if Harris sees any major similarities — or differences — between the heady days (for liberals, that is) in 1964 and 1965 as even bigger Democratic majorities were busy passing President Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious agenda to the current president and recently enlarged Democratic majorities in Congress.

This is where Harris’ analysis, I think, is most interesting:

The present situation in regard to the partisan divide in Congress and the country is vastly different from the situation back in the 1960s. Then, each party, in Congress and in the electorate, was much more internally diverse. There were goodly numbers of conservative Democrats, then (in the Senate, Sens. Eastland, Stennis, Russell, for example), and a pretty good number of moderate-to-liberal identifiers and officials within the Republican Party (Sens. Javits, McMathias, for example).

Harris elaborated:

That’s all changed. Both in the electorate and in Congress, there has been an ideological and party realignment. Moderate-to-liberal Republicans have almost disappeared. Conservative Democrats have nearly vanished. As a result, in Congress, each party is internally more homogeneous and, at the same time, more unlike the other party on ideology and issues. Therefore, almost all voting in Congress is now party-line voting, where a majority of one party, generally a heavy majority, votes one way, and a majority of the other party, generally a heavy majority, votes the other way. With the shrunken numbers of congressional Republicans, Democrats have gained great advantage.

And Fred Harris doesn’t seem all that distraught over this “great advantage.”

I guess that means he won’t be switching teams – a la Arlen Specter – anytime soon.