Arlen Specter Face Math. More Complicated Than You'd Think

So, the big news yesterday out of Washington, D.C. was that Senator Arlen Specter has switched parties from the Republicans to the Democrats.  Some people are calling him two faced.  But does this really add up?  Specter has always been a fairly moderate senator; he was one of three Republicans to vote for the stimulus bill.  So how do you quantify his face?  Well, I think we can all agree that everyone starts out with one.

Is face really constant?  People lose and gain face all the time.  Their actions change how much face they have.  But this really doesn't help us when you want to analyze Specter's face.  We wanted to know just how "Republican" Specter was.  So we went to GovTrack and decided to look how he compared to your "average" Republican senator.  (We chose senator, not general congressman since one: the senate tends to contain more stable individuals and you don't have nutcases and two: they don't vote on the same things.)  However, there are 40 other Republican senators with 172 votes each from 2009 to add up.  We instead decided to pick John Cornyn of Texas because he seemed really indignant over the Specter switch, he's in what looks to be the center of the Republicans in this chart, and finally he's in charge of winning seats for Republicans in 2010.

When we looked at the votes, Specter differed from Cornyn on 73 of 172 votes in 2009.  So in essence Specter had 57.5% of a Republican face.  When he switched parties, he lost 0.575 face.

But wait!  He gained face with respect to Democrats!  He only lost Republican face.  His 2009 voting record shows he's not with John "Average" Cornyn 42.5% of the time.  So he gained 0.452 Democrat face.  So the new calculation of his face is:

How do we tell what is a Republican Face and what is a Democrat Face?  Well, that sounds much more complicated.  What parts of his face are Democrat and what parts are Republican?  If we were the Democrats, we'd call the best parts, but being not the most attractive man, this is a difficult call.  Each party's face must be some function of the total face so Arlen Specter's face function looks closer to this:

At this point Arlen Specter's face is a differential equation!  Arlen is a very complex man.  Geez, at this point, can't we all agree that Arlen just switched parties because he in the middle and his party is really just a toss up anyway and he's more electable in Pennsylvania as a Democrat?