Pennsylvania Politics -- Casey's Opening Salvo

For months now, while Ricky Santorum has been flailing and falling in the polls, "Junior" Casey has kept mum. Now, with Santorum temporarily out of the national spotlight, Casey has opened up his first line of attack.

The Inky [that's the Philadelphia Inquirer for you out-of-staters] reports:

U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum's leading Democratic opponent, state Treasurer Robert P. Casey Jr., accused the senator this week of remaining silent while the U.S. death toll in Iraq rises.

After months of maintaining a low profile, Casey said the Republican senator was being too focused on "partisanship and ideology" to go after President Bush with the fervor he showed during the 1999 U.S.-led raids of Kosovo under President Bill Clinton.

So Bobby is hoping to ride an anti-war surge in opinion polls for a while. The charge that Santorum has a double standard -- a greater willingness to criticize Democrats than Republicans -- isn't meaningful. As one political analyst put it,

"That is a politician calling another politician a politician".

Read the article here.

What we have here is a series of exploratory jabs, testing the political climate to see what the public response will be. The campaign hasn't really begun in earnest and, depending on what happens in Iraq, the anti-war theme might become important or be dropped entirely.

Santorum is in a bind. To a great extent his fortunes in the coming election depend on how Bush does in the next year, and Bush isn't running for anything and therefore has little incentive to trim his actions to suit political purposes.

The game is just getting started -- it's gonna be fun!

Stay tuned....