Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey endorsed Barack Obama, at the Soldiers and Sailors Museum and Memorial in Pittsburgh, Pa., Friday. (Associated Press)

One superdelegate who is getting a lot of attention all of a sudden is Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, who surprised the political world by dropping his pledge of neutrality and endorsing Sen. Barack Obama a few days ago. NBC’s Ken Strickland looks at why Casey changed his mind. “A source close to Casey said the senator’s ‘enough is enough’ attitude regarding the recent party infighting between Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton led to his change of heart,” Strickland writes.

But that may not have been the only reason. The roots of the decision, Strickland says, may lie in lingering bitterness toward Bill Clinton and Sen. Clinton over the treatment of Casey’s father at the 1992 Democratic convention where Bill Clinton was nominated for president. “At the time, Casey’s father was the state’s pro-life governor, a position held by a small minority of elected Democrats. That stance is widely believed to be the rationale that led then-nominee Bill Clinton to deny the elder Casey a speaking role during the convention.” The elder Casey was “beyond incensed,” said Terry Madonna, the Director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College.

Obama has been altering his campaigning to beef up popularity among working-class whites, as evidenced by his tour of bowling alleys, hot dog stands, etc. this weekend, writes Salon.com’s Mike Madden. He is sacrificing campaign rallies for Q&As in high-school gyms and shortening his speeches to make time for more audience questions. “But will blue-collar workers really buy it? This is a candidate who went to a ritzy private high school in Hawaii before going on to Columbia University and Harvard Law School,” Madden notes. “Obama carries himself with a hip, ironic kind of coolness, but it’s not clear whether that will play as well in steel towns as it does in college towns. His style isn’t quite your father’s populism.” While Clinton is ahead in Pennsylvania, Obama still leads in delegates. But just tightening the race in the blue-collar state could help him going forward.

For the Republicans, Sen. John McCain took up the issue of foreign policy last week and laid out plans that diverge both from President Bush and from some of McCain’s own previously held views, the Washington Post’s David Broder writes. McCain spoke out again torture and said he wanted to close Guantanamo and noted that “the United States cannot lead by virtue of its power alone.” McCain continued to show “not just a break with Bush but an abandonment of his own past preference for strongmen such as Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf by saying that time has run out on the U.S. ’strategy of relying on autocrats to provide order and stability’ in the greater Middle East.”

McCain’s views in Iraq are far different from both Obama’s and Clinton’s, and the foreign policy issue “has the makings of a great debate, and we now know that both sides are intellectually and politically ready for the battle.”

source: the wall street journal