J.D. Cavrich, Associated Press
	Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Bob Casey Jr. makes his point during a campaign stop in Altoona, Pa., last month.

Rushing away from the Labor Day parade, Bob Casey had just crossed Stanwix Street when a woman grabbed his hand, looked him in the eye, and said vigorously, "Keep after him; you've got to beat that guy."

Moments later, a car's horn beeped, and its driver poked his head out of the window. "Good Luck, Bob. You've got to beat that Sanitation guy," the man said.

"I keep getting these directives," a bemused Mr. Casey observed as he walked on. " 'You HAVE to ...' "

To his challenge to incumbent Republican Sen. Rick Santorum, Mr. Casey brings a golden name in Pennsylvania politics and the hopes of a Democratic Party hungry for victory against a polarizing figure with a record of frustrating their partisan hopes.

The imperative of defeating Mr. Santorum was the chief reason party leaders turned to Mr. Casey in the days after he won his term as state treasurer with the largest vote total of any candidate for any office in Pennsylvania history. It was the reason that Gov. Ed Rendell, the brunt of tough Casey attacks in their primary for governor four years ago, helped clear the field of serious opposition for him in this year's primary. It was the reason that many liberal Democrats overcame their objections to conservative positions on social issues. In a state where no Democrat has won a full Senate term since 1962, Bob Casey offers the promise of victory -- or so they hope.

"Sometimes Democrats ... we've forgotten that the objective of every election is to win," Mr. Casey said as he recalled the deliberations that brought him to the race.

But as the admonitions that followed him on Labor Day and throughout the campaign attest, the strongest passions in this campaign are generated not by this champion vote-getter, but by his opponent. The incumbent has devoted followers. He also generates antipathy unusual even in this increasingly polarized climate.

So for Mr. Casey, is it enough to be the anti-Santorum?

"No, it's not," he insisted on a holiday weekend as he rode through Westmoreland County. His campaign, he says, offers a positive choice, not just a chance to vote against someone. Buttressing his argument, he points to his record as auditor general and treasurer, the state offices he has occupied for the last decade after a political apprenticeship at the feet of his father, the late governor.

As auditor general, the post that first made his father's name as well, Mr. Casey won generally positive headlines for spotlighting abuses in areas such as nursing home supervision, child care policies and the follow-through on Megan's law.

Discussing that record, he said, "I think nursing homes and child care were the most significant, because they led to real change."

The nursing home audit prodded the administration of former Gov. Tom Ridge to increase spending and change procedures for the monitoring of the state's institutions for the elderly. On child care, Mr. Casey's office successfully fought a proposal to increase co-payments for lower-income working mothers.

The issues he cites were substantive, but they also point to a tactical advantage he holds in this race, conferred by the nature of candidates' different political paths. Over 16 years in the House and Senate, Mr. Santorum has cast votes on hundreds of issues, many of them difficult. Savvy opposition researchers have each of them archived, ready to be retrieved to fuel efforts to place him on the defensive.

Mr. Casey has dealt with tough, substantive issues, but for the most part, they've been issues of his choosing. In contrast to a legislator or a governor, he has not had issues thrust upon him. So far in this campaign, Mr. Santorum has attempted to raise questions about Mr. Casey's work habits and attendance record in his state posts, but he's yet to challenge any policy choices.

For months, the Republican campaign has asserted that Mr. Casey is too content to be the anti-Santorum, that he has no positions and won't discuss issues. As an overall statement, that's not accurate. Mr. Casey has clear and well-known positions on a variety of issues, some of them controversial within his own party.

He supports the rights of gun owners and he opposes abortion. Those positions are seen by Democratic strategist as keys to muting issues that have allowed Republicans such as Mr. Santorum to harvest votes from more conservative Democrats. Mr. Casey and Mr. Santorum are both observant Roman Catholics, but they differ on the legal grounding of their opposition to abortion.

Mr. Santorum argues that a whole line of Supreme Court cases, starting with the Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 decision that struck down a Connecticut ban on contraceptives, were wrongly decided in that they found an implicit right to privacy within the Constitution. While Mr. Casey would like to see Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case, overturned, he said, "I don't think there's any question that there's a right to privacy. I disagree with a lot of Democrats that that right should be the foundation of a right to abortion."

Flouting the tax hike taboo that rose with the Republican revolution of 1994, Mr. Casey has called for a repeal of the Bush tax cuts for those earning more than $200,000 a year. Taking pages from the moderate playbook of the Democratic Leadership Council, he has endorsed legislative proposals to provide health insurance for children and help small businesses provide health insurance for their employees. He has also embraced a call issued by lawmakers including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for a corporate welfare commission to root out tax breaks and budget pork.

But the charges of vagueness ring truer on some of the more important issues facing the Senate and the country. While sharply criticizing the incumbent's call for private accounts for younger workers to transform the current Social Security system, Mr. Casey has not offered any specific alternative to its looming solvency problems. He calls Social Security a problem, not a crisis.

He notes that other entitlement problems, notably Medicare, represent a much greater threat to the overall federal budget. Mr. Casey advocates a change in the Medicare Part D legislation to allow government to negotiate lower drug prices but acknowledges that is just one part of any overall solution to the financial burden promised with the retirement of the Baby Boom generation.

Budget arithmetic questions
The steps he has advocated on the budget deficit, including the tax increase, add up, by his calculation, to about $1.3 trillion over 10 years. But, as his exchanges with Tim Russert on last week's edition of NBC's "Meet the Press" underscored, that number is less than half way to the deficit remedy he has called for. Neither in answer to Mr. Russert nor elsewhere in the campaign has he recommended specific programs to be eliminated from the budget. And he has advocated a variety of significant spending increases, such as making Veterans Administration health care a virtual entitlement for veterans that, while arguably worthwhile in isolation, would add many billions to federal spending. The new direction he advocates on the budget, Mr. Casey said, "is not an easy path, it's not a smooth road; it's not the path of least resistance. It's going to be difficult to reduce the deficit but we have to do it.''

When pressed on the budget arithmetic, Mr. Casey continues his call for tough measures, but still largely begs the question of specifics.

"It's more than saying we can cut here; we can move this money there. A lot of it has to do with fiscal discipline over time," he said. "When you have that fiscal discipline as a regular part of how you do your budgeting, it has a disciplining effect.''

Mr. Casey argues further that demands he provide a complete blueprint for deficit elimination amount to a double standard when he is running against a candidate whose party has presided over a hemorrhage of federal red ink.

"I'm still waiting for Rick Santorum to come up with $1.3 trillion,'' he said. "He's been there for 12 years; where's his plan. ... You can't support the case for deficit reduction and support the tax cuts for the top 1 percent; [he] has a maniacal obsession with the top 1 percent."

'New strategy' on Iraq
On the Iraq war, he has offered specifics in one sense, calling for the firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He said, "We need a new strategy and that means completely new leadership if we are going to avoid a civil war, and a lot of people think it's been moving in that direction."

He has resisted the calls of some fellow Democrats for a withdrawal or a timetable for disengagement. Asked what he would do if it became clear that a civil war had emerged, he employs a typical tactical segue, deflecting the answer into an attack on his opponent, "You've got to have a long and well-informed debate in Congress. ... In the weeks leading up to the war, there were no questions. ... It was breathtaking.''

The Santorum campaign constantly refers to their challenger as "Bobby Casey Jr." Using the diminutive is meant to remind voters that Mr. Casey's political career is a function of the fact that he is the son of the late governor. While it may represent an attack for some, it's one that Mr. Casey is eager to embrace. He regularly reminds audiences of his father's legacy.

"If I can be half as good as my dad, I'll be one of the best,'' he told a well-wisher at a union picnic who praised the former governor.

Such references are always warmly received by Democratic audiences, a fact that yields some irony given the late governor's relations with his party in his later years. All the Caseys long remembered what they saw as a deliberate snub when the governor was denied a speaking spot at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. While an unreconstructed New Dealer on economic issues, the elder Casey considered his party's drift to the left on social issues a mistake, in the case of abortion, on both moral and tactical grounds.

Reflecting on the calls he received from national Democrats courting his candidacy for this race, Mr. Casey said he thought it showed that Democrats were ready to learn a lesson from his father.

"I think it showed that some national leaders were interested in broadening the perspective of the party,'' he said.

Smiling, he said of his father, "I wish he was around to hear about those calls.''

Mr. Santorum charged in the "Meet the Press" debate that the elder Mr. Casey would be upset by his son's endorsement of a recent Federal Drug Administration decision to allow over-the-counter sales of the Plan B contraception pill.

The day after their face-off, Mr. Casey, who characterizes the pill as contraception rather than abortion, expressed anger at his opponent's reference to his father.

"I had a feeling that, at some point in this campaign, he would use that," Mr. Casey said. "But I thought it would be at a point when he was getting particularly desperate; and I think, for whatever reason, he reached that point yesterday."

But Mr. Casey is not surprised that the race is turning tougher as the election gets closer.

A few week earlier, he stood beside the demolition derby pit at the Big Butler Fair. Minutes later a car emblazoned with his name would meet a brave but ignominious end, going down at the first blow, faster than Liston against Ali. Mr Casey, naturally, didn't dwell on the fate of his namesake. To the suggestion that he and Mr. Santorum could save a lot of time and money by getting behind the wheel themselves and settling their battle amid this cacophony of collisions, Mr. Casey gestured over his shoulder and said, "It'll be worse than this before it's over.''

A profile of Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., appeared in last Sunday's editions