Will Women Forgive Him? Arlen Specter's Record is Great. Except for One Little Thing.
Back then he was Darlin' Arlen, the crime-busting district attorney and mayoral hopeful. He was so clean and relentless, so "brilliant," the newspapers said, that the corrupt and contented Democratic machine at City Hall lived in peril.</br></br>At one point in that 1967 race, which Arlen Specter lost by a hair, the Democratic machine retaliated by floating a rumor that Specter, then 37, had taken ill on a city street corner and had died. There were reports of jubilation in City Hall until he was traced - alive - to a meeting in a downtown office.</br></br>"If Mark Twain hadn't said it first, I would have said that rumors of my death are greatly premature," Specter said recently.</br></br>Twenty-five years later, Specter's image has gone from Darlin' Arlen to Snarlin' Arlen. The mere mention of his name is now the most reliable hiss-and-boo line at women's and Democratic gatherings, his job performance rating has taken a slide here since October, and he faces in Democrat Lynn Yeakel an unsullied, anti-Establishment candidate with a star quality that was his in the 1960s.</br></br>But Twain could still have it right. For if Yeakel is one of the country's best examples of an irresistible force fueled by the angry electorate, Specter may yet be the immovable object.