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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
As Democrats regrouped after last year's elections, Senator Charles Schumer, of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, took up the task of preventing further Republican gains in 2006. The Democrats' cause had been reduced to forty-five votes in the Senate, the Party's smallest share in more than sixty years; losing just a few additional seats would give Republicans a filibuster-proof majority.
Schumer had to find money for Democratic incumbents whose seats were at risk and to recruit and fund candidates who might be capable of defeating targeted Republicans. Last winter, as he got started, he almost immediately identified the prize he most coveted. "Both on the substance and on the politics," Schumer recalls, "when we sat down and looked at the map we said our No. 1 take-back seat would be Pennsylvania"--the seat now held by the state's junior senator, Rick Santorum. A fiercely partisan religious conservative, Santorum is to the Democrats the very embodiment of the scary right; his aspirations for national office only heighten the allure of defeating him.
Schumer solicited the advice of Edward G. Rendell, the governor of Pennsylvania and the former head of the national Party: "I said, 'Governor, who can beat Santorum? Is he vulnerable, and who can beat him?' "
Rendell had already gamed out the field. "There's only one guy who can beat him," Rendell said, according to Schumer. "But he doesn't want to run, and you guys wouldn't want him even if he did."
"If he could win, why wouldn't we want him?"
"Well, he's not pro-choice."
Rendell's ideal candidate was Robert Casey, Jr., who had just been elected state treasurer, receiving the largest number of votes in Pennsylvania's history. Rendell did not need to explain why Casey might have been hesitant to run for any office that required the acquiescence of the national Party. Schumer knew what had happened at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, in New York City.
Casey is a legacy politician in Pennsylvania, the son of Robert P. Casey, Sr., who for most of thirty-five years, starting in the early nineteen-sixties, seemed always to be running for one statewide office or another. The senior Casey was an Irish Democrat pol of the old school, the son and grandson of miners, who championed labor and believed in government as a beneficent force. In a state that reveres deer-hunting, he was gun-friendly. He was also pro-life.
In 1992, Casey was at the summit of his political career. He had won a second term as governor by carrying all but one of Pennsylvania's sixty-seven counties. His programs had forced insurance companies to pay for mammograms for middle-aged women, and had brought full-day child-care services to working parents and health insurance to children whose parents were above the poverty line but too poor to pay medical bills. But Casey was at least equally well known as the defendant in a legal case that had gone to the United States Supreme Court. In his first term, he had fostered and signed into law the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act, which placed significant limitations on abortion, including the notification of parents of minors, a twenty-four-hour waiting period, and a ban on partial-birth procedures except in cases of risk to the mother's life. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania sued the state, with Casey as the named defendant, asserting that several provisions of the law violated the right to privacy established by Roe v. Wade. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in April, 1992--occasioning an enormous pro-choice march in Washington. The Court decided Planned Parenthood v. Casey on June 29th, upholding all of Pennsylvania's contested restrictions but one (a requirement for spousal notification) and affirming the right of states to restrict abortions.
Two weeks later, the Democratic Convention began. As the head of the Pennsylvania delegation, Casey hoped to make a grand gesture from the podium on behalf of the pro-life position. He imagined himself in the role of passionate dissenter, as the young Hubert Humphrey had been when he spoke for civil rights at the 1948 Convention. Casey had written to Ron Brown, the chairman of the national Party, asking for the chance to share his often expressed view that "young mothers and their children were the natural constituency of the Party," and that "abortion-on-demand was no solution," for women or for the Party. But Casey had chosen the wrong occasion for speaking out. Democrats had been out of power for a dozen years, and, sensing victory with Bill Clinton (who had not received Casey's endorsement), they staged the most disciplined Convention in Party history. Dissent on any subject--especially on the Party's core position on choice--was strictly written out of the program. Brown never responded to Casey's request. At the Convention, Casey presented another plea, in a letter hand-delivered to Ann Richards, the Convention's chairwoman. She didn't respond directly, either. Instead, Casey was copied...
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