Toomey for Senate

By Cheryl Allison
Main Line Times
3.11.10

After a historic presidential election that shifted power — and a large chunk of area voter registration — to the other party, Republicans might have been excused to feel a little glum.

That was hardly the mood Monday night when a beyond-standing-room-only crowd packed the Merion Tribute House for the Republican Committee of Lower Merion and Narberth’s 45th Annual Lincoln Day Dinner.

“Could there be a better time to be a Republican?” marveled one speaker.

The answer from keynote guest Pat Toomey, the likely Republican nominee to be Pennsylvania’s new senator, was emphatically upbeat.

“I think what is happening in Washington is an unmitigated disaster, but I am extremely optimistic about our future,” he told the crowd of more than 250. “There’s this great American awakening happening, and we’re all a part of it.”

That awakening, said Toomey, a former Allentown entrepreneur and three-term congressman from 1999 to 2004, is building in reaction to what he termed “the most liberal elected government in the history of the Republic” under President Barack Obama and current Democratic leadership, “a government that has attempted to take us on a lurch to the left that we haven’t seen in 80 years.”

“What’s happening is that we’ve got a government that never really believed in the traditional American model of limited government, personal freedom and responsibility, and free enterprise,” he charged, but rather “always wanted a European-style welfare state with a powerful federal government.”

“People all across the country are rising up and pushing back, and it’s clear to me,” Toomey said, “that we can prevent this from happening.”

Toomey, who lost narrowly to veteran Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter in the 2004 primary, is the clear Republican front-runner to take an aim at the seat again in November. The prospect of a tough primary rematch was a factor in Specter’s decision last April to switch to the Democratic column for a run for a sixth term.

After a career in finance and as a business owner in the Lehigh Valley, Toomey since 2004 has been the president of the Club for Growth, an organization that advocates for limited government and free enterprise.

In his speech in Merion, Toomey called for a return to fundamental American principles and criticized the Obama administration and Democratic leadership, touching on the same themes as Republican lawmakers in Washington and elsewhere in recent weeks.

Those include opposition to what Toomey called “serial bailouts” of failing companies, attempts to “nationalize whole industries,” the attempt to “borrow and spend our way to prosperity,” interfering with employees’ traditional rights of secret balloting in companies undergoing unionization (the issue known as “card check”), and health-care reform.

On that last, especially volatile topic, he suggested a “series of modest reforms,” including allowing people to buy insurance “from anywhere in the country” to promote competition and enacting tort reform to lower costs, “instead of a 2,000-page, $2-trillion set of mandates.”

And finally “I think this administration is going in the wrong direction on the war on terror.” Toomey echoed some others in charging that it is adopting “a pre-9/11 mentality,” viewing attacks and attempted attacks by Islamic radicals as “a series of incremental criminal events.”

Recalling former Vice President Dick Cheney’s criticism of the handling of the “underwear bomber” incident, “I would want to find out everything we can learn about that person and then put him away for life” rather than “give him a lawyer and reading him his Miranda rights,” Toomey told the group.

There is ample evidence that many Americans are frustrated and dissatisfied with the country’s direction, Toomey said, from the rise of the Tea Party movement and the town-hall meetings, to the results of governors’ elections in New Jersey and Virginia, to the capstone event, in his view — new Republican Sen. Scott Brown’s election to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s seat in Democratic stronghold Massachusetts.

“We as Republicans have a great opportunity because of what they [the Democratic leadership] have done,” Toomey said. “There is an opportunity for us to restore the fundamental principles of our party and our country and have terrific success.”