My favorite political science professor makes it a practice to ask the same question of his classes at the beginning of each semester.

“What is the main purpose or goal of a politician?”

A whole bunch of students would then raise their hands with answers like “making a change” or “enacting meaningful legislation” or — strangely enough — “representing the people who elected you.”

This professor would politely listen to all the naive, incorrect responses until all the students gave up, and then he would give them the correct answer.

“The only goal of a politician is winning.”

I took two classes from this professor, so of course I wasn’t surprised when Senator Arlen Specter announced that he was officially leaving the Republican Party to join the Democratic Party. I say “officially” because anybody who knows anything about this guy’s voting record hasn’t considered him to be the posterboy for Republicans in… well, ever.

What’s refreshing and amusing to me is that nobody is really trying to hide the true nature of this switch. It’s about winning, folks, and everybody knows it, and now it’s not even a secret anymore! Specter saw the writing on the wall, which told him that he was bound to lose the Republican primary in Pennsylvania in 2010. That’s it. Of course, there’s the obligatory castigation of the right-wing extremists who’ve taken over the party and… and… provided a bunch of new entitlement programs, voted to bail out a bunch of banks, and made a bigger disaster of our education system and our foreign policy. Did I say right-wing extremists? Well, whatever.

Other Republicans, though, are doing a great job of feigning their utter disgust at this treacherous, traiterous, nakedly political ploy by the senator. How dare this politician play politics, of all things!! In truth, this doesn’t change that much as far as votes go. Specter was never a reliable Republican vote, and I’m guessing he won’t be a very reliable Democratic vote, either.