Toomey, or Not Toomey

When Pennsylvania Democrat Joe Sestak talks about taxes and jobs, he sounds at first blush like a business-friendly pragmatist. “We need to stand alongside small businesses,” Sestak told a crowd of supporters at the Progress Plaza shopping center on Broad Street in mid-August. “A 15 percent tax credit for each new payroll job that’s created would soak up  …  over 5 million unemployed in about two to two and a half years.”

Republican Pat Toomey says his opponent doesn’t know the first thing about creating jobs. “Joe Sestak cannot begin to understand what makes an economy work and where jobs come from,” Toomey said three weeks later and several blocks south at the city’s Fraternal Order of Police lodge. “His voting record is ample evidence that he doesn’t understand.”

Both men are seeking to replace voter-retired Democratic senator Arlen Specter. Sestak, a two-term congressman from the Philadelphia suburbs, successfully challenged Specter from the left in the May primary. A solid vote for the stimulus package, cap and trade, and health care reform, Sestak also calls for stricter gun control laws and is staunchly pro-choice.

Yet since defeating Specter, the former Navy vice admiral has tacked toward the center, garnering endorsements from centrists like former Republican senator Chuck Hagel and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. Standing with Bloomberg at the Philadelphia shopping center, Sestak aimed to align himself with the mayor’s independent reputation.

“I would like to serve in the same pragmatic, business-like approach to resolving problems and let the consequences be what they might, as far as politics is concerned,” he said. Sestak is hoping plans like his 15 percent tax credit reinforce this independence.

But Toomey isn’t buying it. “Joe Sestak is from the liberal wing of the Democratic party, by his own admission,” he says in a phone interview. “He has supported an agenda that is preventing us from having the kind of economic recovery that we could and should be having.”

A former congressman and president of the Club for Growth, Toomey lost to Specter in the 2004 Republican primary, but his challenge six years later was strong enough to spook Specter into switching parties. Toomey’s an unabashed conservative, making the case that reduced spending and lower taxes are the path to economic recovery. Toomey says the tax cuts of 2003 ought to be extended and expanded.

“Those tax cuts helped generate economic growth. They also generated jobs,” he says. “I would [also] lower the capital gains tax rate, and I would lower the top marginal corporate tax rate to put it in line with our major trading partners and competitors.”

For now, messages like this seem to be working for the Allentown Republican. Toomey has polled anywhere from 6 points to 10 points ahead of Sestak in recent polls, and the Rothenberg Political Report recently updated its assessment of the Pennsylvania Senate race from “toss-up” to “tilts Republican.”

Still, problems abound for any Republican running statewide in Pennsylvania. Democrats outnumber Republicans among registered voters by over a million. Both current senators are Democrats, as is Governor Ed Rendell. The Keystone State last voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 1988. But Toomey says Pennsylvania is not as solidly Democratic as one might think.

“It’s a state with a common-sense conservatism,” he says, pointing out that Republicans hold 30 of the 50 seats in the state senate and are only 6 seats short of a majority in the house. “It’s a state where people want to see economic growth in the private sector, fiscal discipline, and some balance. I represent those things.”

Sestak, however, thinks Toomey represents big corporations, labeling him in the campaign’s first general election TV ad “Wall Street’s congressman.” The ad uses footage of Toomey proposing to “eliminate corporate taxes altogether” in 2007.

“I applaud that Congressman Toomey did well on Wall Street. That’s not the issue,” Sestak said in Philadelphia. “We do need a Wall Street that can invest our money wisely, safely, with the right referee on the football field. We need it. It’s where do you focus your attention, however, down in Wall Street—with a pragmatic approach or with an ideological approach?”

Toomey shot back with his own ad, attacking Sestak for voting for the 2008 bailout of Wall Street financial institutions and then receiving campaign contributions from some of those institutions. “Wall Street’s the last place that should ever get a taxpayer bailout,” he says in the ad.

As the White House’s failed “Recovery Summer” rolls into the last several weeks of the campaign, Sestak will continue to tout his independence from the unpopular Democratic party and argue, in the manner of Barack Obama, that Toomey will bring back the policies of the past. Toomey, meanwhile, will point out how Sestak’s votes with the Democratic caucus for increased spending have not helped boost the economy.

“Joe doesn’t understand the damage that he and his liberal colleagues are inflicting on our economy,” Toomey says. “They don’t understand that it’s free markets and limited government, it’s free enterprise that creates real opportunity.”

Michael Warren is a Collegiate Network fellow and an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.