Pennsylvania Politics -- Moving Into the Stretch

Less than 100 days out from the election and Rick Santorum is still about ten points down -- and he doesn't seem to be closing the gap.

Rick's campaign just doesn't seem to have much fire to it. He keeps hammering his basic themes -- he has seniority, experience, and accomplishment; his opponent is just a name -- but that isn't going to get the job done., and in fact sounds sorta whiney. All Casey has to do, and has so far done successfully, is to make himself look like a plausible, more moderate, alternative to Rick. Either Rick has to change that perception, and without any major debates in the future that seems unlikely, or he has to shake up things dramatically. [here]

Rick's latest ploy has been to support the emergence of a candidate of the left, hoping that a pro-choice figure will draw off some votes from Casey's total. There had been some hope that this would happen earlier, but all serious candidates declined to run, knowing that all they could accomplish would be to split the Democrat vote. Now Rick is trying to manufacture one, but even that effort is being screwed up. The Inky reports:

When Sen. Rick Santorum (R., Pa.) encouraged everyone in state politics to help the Green Party earn a spot on the November ballot, at least one group answered the call: Santorum donors.

Fourteen Santorum supporters gave $40,000 to fund a petition drive that has allowed Carl Romanelli to collect about 100,000 voter signatures to qualify for the Senate race. That's 33,000 more signatures than required, and double what independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader gathered here in 2004.

But Romanelli and the Green Party of Luzerne County, which collected the money, might have violated federal election law in the process.

In his latest campaign-finance reports, Romanelli listed $66,000 as an in-kind contribution from the Green Party. Such donations cannot exceed $5,000, said Ian Stirton, a Federal Election Commission spokesman, who spoke generally about election law and not about this specific case.

Romanelli said if he and the Green Party didn't follow federal rules, it wasn't intentional.

"Do I have a team of lawyers at my disposal? No," Romanelli said last night as he drove to Philadelphia to collect petitions to submit by today's deadline. "We were trying to honestly disclose where our help came from when, in fact, it was activity of the party and didn't need to be disclosed on the Senate side."

Romanelli made no excuses for Santorum's donor support, but denied coordination.

Read it here.

Meanwhile, Casey is tending to the nuts and bolts of campaign turnout -- which in an off-year election is the name of the game. The Morning Call reports [here] that the Casey campaign is organizing pastors across the State to turn out their congregations on election day -- shades of the old Christian Coalition! I wonder if the Lefties will denounce this politicization of religion the way they did back when Ralph Reed was doing the same thing for Republicans.

One thing is sure -- the abortion issue just doesn't have much play these days and the big boost that Republicans, including Rick, got from opposing it is not going to be there this time. Running as a porkmeister isn't going to get it done either. Immigration also seems to be a dying issue for this election cycle, at least here in the northeast. And no Republican has a credible response to the unpopularity of the Mideast War.

Of course, all that could change in a heartbeat, but Rick is running out of time. Things don't look good for him at this point.

UPDATE:

The left wing of the blogosphere is incandescent over Romanelli's candidacy. [here] [here] and [here]

Apparently they think it's something to worry about, or are they still POed about Ralph Nader?

If nothing else, Romanelli's cynicism will help to completely discredit the Green political movement even in the left wing lunasphere, and that, to quote a famous criminal mastermind, is a "good thing."