Obama gets key Pa. endorsement

Casey's salvo is latest in feud with Clintons

Barack Obama shared a laugh yesterday with Senator Bob Casey at the Soldiers & Sailors Military Museum and Memorial in Pittsburgh, where Casey endorsed Obama for president. (Alex Brandon/Associated Press)

PITTSBURGH - Senator Bob Casey, a champion of the working-class Catholic voters at the core of Hillary Clinton's Pennsylvania coalition, endorsed Barack Obama yesterday, the latest swipe between two warring dynasties whose battles have defined the Democratic Party's search for a modern identity.

"This is about all of us, of all ages, across this state and across America," Casey said at a rally with Obama, where he attributed his endorsement to the enthusiasm Obama's candidacy has generated among Casey's four daughters.

Casey's decision not only assuaged his children, but avenged slights against his father - a popular two-term governor Pennsylvania - at the hands of Bill Clinton, with whom he feuded throughout the 1990s as the two emerged as leaders of competing wings of a party in transition.

Casey, who set off after the endorsement with Obama for a six-day bus tour across the state, had said that he would remain neutral before Pennsylvania's April 22 primary. But, he told reporters, he had recently become convinced that he should take his private feelings public.

"I believe in this guy like I have never believed in a candidate in my life," Casey said. "Except my father; I campaigned hard for him."

His father, also named Bob Casey, an anti-abortion Catholic elected in 1986, rallied the blue-collar white ethnic voters - socially conservative, New Deal economic liberals - who became known as "Casey Democrats" to back him when he pursued both new limits on abortion and expanded state health insurance plans for children.

"It's going to be a little ironic that the people who are going to save Hillary in Pennsylvania are going to be the Casey Democrats and not Bill Clinton's traditional Democratic base in the large cities and rim counties," said Joe Vignola, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in 1988.

In 1992, as Bill Clinton was coasting to the party's nomination, Casey encouraged his party to dump the Arkansas governor and use the convention to pick a new nominee, citing "the character issue" around Clinton and his "tiny, fly speck of support." Casey, who had enacted tough state-level antiabortion laws then under review by the US Supreme Court, suggested that Clinton could have trouble winning the presidency because of his abortion-rights views.

When Pennsylvania held its primary days later, Clinton lost only two counties in the state: Casey's home of Lackawanna and neighboring Luzerne, both carried by former California governor Jerry Brown, who barely campaigned in the state.

Their fight continued through the party's nominating convention that year, when Clinton kept Casey from addressing the party about abortion and banished the governor's contingent to the rafters of Madison Square Garden.

After leaving office in 1995, Casey set out immediately to run in the following year's Democratic primaries as a challenger to Clinton, who Casey wrote in his memoir had failed to "identify with the basic values and economic interests of ordinary Americans."

Casey launched an exploratory committee for a campaign designed largely to legitimize an antiabortion agenda within the party, but abandoned the challenge after being rediagnosed with a genetic condition that had forced him earlier to undergo a heart-liver transplant.

Yet in his memoir, "Fighting for Life," Casey, who died in 2000, took credit for pushing Clinton toward a social conservatism that allowed him to win over working-class whites key to his 1996 reelection - and have become an essential constituency in his wife's campaign to derail Obama.

"That's all ancient history and has nothing to do with his decision to endorse," said Larry Smar, a spokesman for Senator Bob Casey. The Clintons have campaigned for Casey in his Pennsylvania races.

Hillary Clinton has tried to use her family's ties to Scranton, the northeastern Pennsylvania coal town home to the Casey political base, to emphasize a personal connection with the state's blue-collar voters.

Clinton, who is leading in most polls, badly needs to win Pennsylvania - with 158 delegates, the biggest prize left on the nomination calendar.

She has the endorsements of Governor Ed Rendell; Philadelphia's mayor, Michael Nutter; and Representative John P. Murtha, an antiwar stalwart.

In his statements yesterday, Casey repeatedly emphasized Obama's ability to unite his party and country, a subject one of the senator's seven siblings said was of special interest to the Casey family.

"We have a particular responsibility because we've been in the political arena for all our lives," said Margi Casey McGrath, who runs a printing company in Scranton.

"That's one of the things we learned from my father: If you could make a contribution to heal the party and unify people, we have that obligation," she said.

Sasha Issenberg can be reached at sissenberg@globe.com.