Pa. Senate Race Goes Down to the Wire

In the final days of his campaign, Republican Pat Toomey was telling supporters that a victory in the Pennsylvania Senate race was within reach but was not in hand.

"This race is still very close," Toomey told a breakfast gathering in Tamaqua, PA last week. "The winner of this race is going to be whoever turns out his supporters best."

Toomey, 49, a former Congressman who earned a near perfect rating by conservative groups, has maintained a consistent but slight lead in pre-election day polls against Joe Sestak, a two-term Democratic congressman who previously served 31 years in the Navy.

Pa. Senate: Toomey (R) vs. Sestak (D)
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Sestak's voting record, as well as President Barack Obama's legislative program passed by the Democratic-controlled Congress, has come under a relentless rhetorical attack by Toomey.

"We've got the most liberal elected government in the history of the Republic, and they're trying to transform America into something like a European-style welfare state," Toomey told a rally in Scranton on Thursday.

"It's no wonder we don't have the job growth we need. It's because the policies in Washington are preventing it from happening. That's why we need to make a change," he said.

He found a receptive audience in Ray Nearhood, who has been unemployed for a year, and blames the Democrats. "They have put so much uncertainty into the private sector that people just aren't hiring," Nearhood said.

Toomey's number one complaint is the extent of federal government spending and the record national deficit exceeding $1.4 trillion annually.

"You can't borrow and spend your way to prosperity," Toomey told the crowd in Tamaqua. "The danger is we're going to become the first generation of Americans to hand over to our kids a diminished country."

In an interview with CBS News, Toomey added, "The people that I talk to all across Pennsylvania have had enough. They want a government that is going to live within its means, that's going to exercise some fiscal discipline."

Toomey served in the House of Representatives from 1999-2005, when Republicans were in the majority. He voted for President Bush's income tax cuts and the Iraq War. He opposed adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. He shunned earmarks. American Conservative Union, the National Taxpayers Union, and Citizens Against Government Waste rated his votes near 100% for their points of view.

In 2004, Toomey mounted a conservative Senate primary challenge to long time incumbent Arlen Specter, then a moderate Republican. Specter won by two percent and went on to win a fifth term. Not long after Toomey entered this year's race, Specter switched parties, and became the Democrats critical 60th vote in their filibuster-proof majority.

"We've got a government that's taken us down the wrong track. I mean badly so, I think," Toomey said in the interview when asked what has changed in the six years between his races. "Huge expansion in the size of government, the cost of government, serial bailouts, nationalizing whole industries, staggering amount of spending, unprecedented deficits and debt."

In challenging and beating Specter in the Democratic primary, Sestak, 59, defied his party establishment and the White House, a sign, he says, of his independence.

"If anything that Senate needs it's people to reach across the aisle and do something for us," Sestak told union supporters in Dunmore, outside Scranton this week. "I don't believe in compromise of principle but boy do I believe in the principle of compromise."

Sestak urges restraint in the use of U.S. military power and opposed the Iraq War, though he was deployed there and in Afghanistan. "In the navy, we don't breed liberals when you're the ground in Afghanistan, we do breed problem solvers," he says.

While his national security credentials - the highest-ranking military officer to serve in Congress -- earned him a slot on the House Armed Services Committee, his focus on Capitol Hill has been on the domestic agenda.

"Look, national security actually begins at home in the health education and economic security of our people," Sestak said in an interview with CBS News.

Before he retired from the military, he served as an aide to President Bill Clinton on the National Security Council. The former President showed his support for Sestak by appearing with him at three college rallies in the Philadelphia area on Thursday.

"Joe Sestak has a vision and a plan to build a 21st Century economy based on clean energy, small business, bringing back manufacturing, modern infrastructure," Mr. Clinton told a crowd gathered on the lawn at Bryn Mawr College.

In his remarks there, and at historically black Cheyney University and at Temple University, Clinton made the case for letting Democrats maintain control of Congress in order to get out as he put it, of the economic hole left by the Bush years. He said last year's $800 billion Recovery Act, also known as the "stimulus" bill, was the right move.

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Sestak supported President Obama's signal legislative achievement, health care reform, which passed without Republican votes. For Sestak, the vote was also personal. He credits his government-provided health care coverage that his family had while he served in the military with saving the life of his daughter, Alexandra, who beat brain cancer.

Toomey rejects the President's health care plan and would act to repeal it.

"It's already resulting in escalating costs, it's resulting in employers dropping their private coverage," he says.

After leaving Congress five years ago, Toomey led the Club For Growth, a political group which advocates for limited government and lower taxes. Toomey supports making the Bush personal income tax cuts permanent and proposes reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 to 25 percent.

"It's not a trickle down theory, it's a growth theory. It's an expanding the pie theory," Toomey said in the interview.

Toomey also advocates allowing younger workers to invest some of their Social Security contributions in private accounts, saying the current system of payroll taxes is "not going to be able to go on forever in its current form."

Although his economic message is paramount, Toomey is also a social conservative who opposes abortion rights, except in cases of rape and incest. Many of his supporters, like Patty Domalakes, from Frackville, PA, know this.

"He believes in all the things that I do. Which is smaller government, government off of our backs, fewer smaller taxes, and he is for the babies, he is for life," Domalakes says.

Toomey criticizes Sestak, who supports abortion rights, for backing the agenda of the president and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, going so far as to label Sestak a "San Francisco liberal," referring to Pelosi's hometown.

"We took some tough votes. They were necessary to keep the ship from sinking," Sestak says. He is soft-spoken for a man who used to order hundreds of sailors on battleships.

He adds, "Congressman Toomey voted 1.400 times with Nancy Pelosi. That's 1,200 times more than I have, so those kinds of benchmarks he uses are ridiculous."

In fact, according to a voting analysis by National Journal, 31 percent of House members and 59 percent of House Democrats had a more liberal voting record than Sestak between 2007-2009.

"I'm smack dab, in my three and half year voting record, smack dab in the middle of the Democratic Party," Sestak said in the interview.

Sestak calls Toomey a "wolf in sheep's clothing" for not detailing how he would try to balance the federal budget.

"What is it he's going to cut? What is it? You know, Social Security is on the cutting board for him. We know he tried to close down the Medicare system twice," Sestak says. "If Congressman Toomey is consistent about anything, if it's a program for people, he doesn't like it. If it's a program for corporations, he supports it."

Sestak, who won re-election in 2008 with 60 percent of the vote, might have had a safer path back to Washington through the House. But he chose to run statewide.

Sestak said in the interview, "I just want to help restore the trust - you're not a politician, you're a public servant who's willing to do the things that need to be done, listening, but doing what's right and not worrying about one's job. That's what people in Pennsylvania want."

Sestak has garnered the majority of major newspaper endorsements, from the Philadelphia Inquirer and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to the Harrisburg Patriot-News and Scranton Times-Tribune, and that may have helped him narrow Toomey's lead in the polls.

Typical was the Erie Times-News, which called Toomey "talented" but said "he represents the most extreme views on the political spectrum," while the Philadelphia Daily News said Toomey held to the "extreme gospel of the free market."

The Altoona Mirror credited Toomey for realizing "we cannot barrow our way to prosperity" and said electing him would send a message "to the Washington establishment that change is needed."

Each candidate has described the other as extreme, but both say Pennsylvania voters have common sense. We'll learn the voters' verdict on Tuesday.