U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter said he's going to get his hair back and then he's going to get his job back.

"I'm really at the top of my game," the 78-year-old Republican senator said, acknowledging that he will run for a sixth term in 2010 and hopes eventually to become chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

"I'm pale and bald and thin, but that'll change," Specter said at the end of a wide-ranging interview with the New Era editorial board Tuesday morning.

Specter twice has battled Hodgkin's disease and recently completed a second session of chemotherapy to treat the cancer.

But he appeared hale and hearty as he spoke with customary deliberation about the presidential campaign, foreign wars and a proposed federal courthouse for Lancaster.

"The election's going to be decided in the campaign," he said, "and I think the debates are going to be a lot more important than usual."

Specter said U.S. Sen. John McCain, the probable Republican nominee for president, is "battle tested" and has an extensive background in the Department of Defense.

He said he does not underestimate U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, the likely Democratic nominee. "He's been a phenomenon on the campaign trail," he said, "but he's very inexperienced."

Specter said McCain "has an excellent chance to carry Pennsylvania," perhaps with former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge as his vice presidential running mate.

He said the economy will remain the election's top campaign issue.

"The economy is so skittish right now," he explained, "it would take a real crisis to knock it off the top of the agenda."

Specter talked at some length about the present crisis — the Russian invasion of Georgia. "The Russian bear looks for any opportunity to expand," he said.

It will be difficult to persuade the Russians to leave Georgia, he said, but he believes it might be useful to call for a U.N. Security Council resolution regarding the invasion "and make Russia veto it."

He said a possible nuclear-armed Iran is "the major threat in the world today."

And he said U.S. withdrawal from Iraq will be "a tricky matter."

"If we leave, we're more likely to have Iraq step forward and the people who don't like our presence will be mollified," he said, "but when we leave and there's a vacuum of power there, military action could be ignited again."

He also said he would like Iraq to use proceeds from oil sales to pay back some of the price of the American occupation.

Dressed in a traditional blue blazer with an American flag pin on its lapel, Specter addressed several other issues:

• He said he plans to bring a federal courthouse to Lancaster County within the next five years.

If he is re-elected in 2010, he will become the ranking Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, he noted, and if the Republicans take control of the Senate he will have "a lot more leverage on funding" the courthouse.

• To address the ongoing energy crisis, Specter said he would try to bring OPEC under U.S. antitrust laws to prevent a handful of men from affecting oil prices worldwide.

"And we should have been drilling on ANWR (the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) long ago," he said, calling the proposed project "environmentally safe."

• He said the FBI's handling of the anthrax case left "a lot of unanswered questions" that the Senate Judiciary Committee, on which he serves, plans to investigate.

• Specter said if Interstate 80 is turned into a toll road, Pennsylvanians should not have to pay tolls. Drivers passing through the state would account for 70 percent of all tolls, he noted.


Staff writer Jack Brubaker can be reached at jbrubaker@LNPnews.com or 291-8781.