To Democrats Hungry for Power, a Pennsylvania Seat Looks Ripe

This is from The New York Times:

BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate leadership, sums up his race for re-election this year with a perverse pride: "The other side of the aisle wants to beat me more than anything you can possibly imagine," he told the Greater Lehigh Valley Auto Dealers Association not long ago.

Mr. Santorum is almost certainly right. No other race in the nation has so focused the Democratic Party's energy, resources or raw hunger to return to power on Capitol Hill. No other race so captures the Republican Party's vulnerabilities this year, with some public opinion polls consistently showing Mr. Santorum trailing his Democratic opponent, State Treasurer Bob Casey Jr.

Mr. Santorum, 47, has been a brash symbol of the conservative ascendancy since his election to the Senate in 1994, leading the charge on issues like the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act and the partial privatization of Social Security — enraging liberals all the while. He says he relishes a come-from-behind fight against Mr. Casey, but acknowledges that "it's not easy being me" in the current political climate, with a president whose approval ratings are stuck in the 30's.

Sen. Rick Santorum R-PA. NY Times File Photo.

Mr. Casey, 45, is an experienced statewide candidate, the son of a popular former governor, and in some ways the symbol of a new pragmatism in the Democratic Party. National party leaders heavily recruited Mr. Casey to enter this race, despite his long opposition to abortion rights, because, quite simply, they thought he could win.

In this demographically older, economically anxious state, Mr. Casey is casting Mr. Santorum as a "rubber stamp" for Bush administration policies, citing budget cuts on education and Medicare, tax breaks for the rich and substantial budget deficits. "We're on the wrong road," he said.

This is a big race — expected to cost more than $50 million and to attract strategists and advocacy groups from around the country. It is also expected to join the likes of marquee Senate campaigns like Jim Hunt vs. Jesse Helms in North Carolina in 1984, or, more recently, John Thune vs. Tom Daschle, then the Democratic leader, in South Dakota in 2004.

Bob Casey Jr. NY Times File Photo.

As the number three man in the Senate, Santorum is a vulnerable high profile candidate. He is an extreme conservative, who has sided with the religious right wingnut base of the Republican Party. Consider this from the Times:

G. Terry Madonna, director of the Keystone Poll and a political scientist at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., said that Mr. Casey was a threat to Mr. Santorum because he cut into Mr. Santorum's strength among traditional blue-collar voters in Western Pennsylvania and the more socially moderate voters of the Philadelphia suburbs.

"Those suburban voters are more upset with Santorum than they are 'for' Casey," Mr. Madonna said.

He attributed the suburban disaffection, in large part, to Mr. Santorum's high profile on hot-button cultural issues, including abortion, gay marriage and the intervention of Republican Congressional leaders in the right-to-die case of Terri Schiavo.

Mr. Santorum also made headlines last year with his book, "It Takes a Family," which includes a defense of stay-at-home mothers. And Democrats are working hard to tie Mr. Santorum to his party's ethical difficulties.

Santorum has allied himself both with President Bush, and with the religious right wing-nuts. And the Democrats are exploiting those ties. Whatever distancing Santorum is trying to make now, he still has to answer to the issues of gay marriage, abortion, intelligent design, Social Security privatization, and Terry Schiavo. If he claims he's moderated his views on these hot-buttoned issues, then that makes him appear hypocritical--saying one thing during an election year, while doing another thing after the election. Santorum is already becoming embroiled in some ethics scandals. Consider this from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

WASHINGTON - Sen. Rick Santorum's charity donated about 40 percent of the $1.25 million it spent during a four-year period - well below Better Business Bureau standards - paying out the rest for overhead, including several hundred thousand dollars to campaign aides on the charity payroll, records show.

The charity, Operation Good Neighbor, provides grants to small nonprofit groups, many of them religious.

The Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance says charitable organizations should spend at least 65 percent of their total expenses on program activities.

Operation Good Neighbor is based at the same address as Santorum's campaign office in West Conshohocken, and some of the same people who have worked on his campaign are working for his charity and collecting money from it, records show.

Among them is Maria Diesel, who has been paid fund-raising fees by the campaign. She is listed as the charity's finance director; filings show she has received $192,958 since 2001 in professional fund-raising fees from Operation Good Neighbor.

Robert Bickhart, who has also been involved in raising campaign funds for Santorum, is listed as the charity's executive director. Filings show that he has earned $75,000 in salary from the charity since 2001 and that his business, Capitol Resource Group, rents the office space to the charity. The charity has paid $20,437 in occupancy fees, filings show.

In other words, Santorum's "charity" is a front for collecting political campaign contributions.

These are the liabilities that Santorum has, and this is certainly reflected in Santorum's low poll numbers. Now Santorum may believe that his low poll numbers simply reflects Pennsylvanian voters' unhappy mood, and that once they listen to Santorum touting his successes of welfare reform and tax cuts, they will re-elect him. I'm not so sure. If the economy and the war in Iraq continue to remain a big worry to the Pennsylvanian voter, or if the economy starts heading south with slower growth and higher jobless claims, then Santorum is going to have a lot to answer for.

This race is certainly getting interesting.