The party chairman criticized the Pa. senator on issues of honesty. He also urged a focus on attacking the
President's Social Security plan.
Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean ripped into U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum at a party fund-raiser in Old
City last night.
Dean, a former Vermont governor and former Democratic presidential candidate, called Santorum, a Republican
who is up for reelection in Pennsylvania in 2006, a "liar" and "right-winger" who actually lives in Virginia.
"He doesn't tell the truth," Dean told a gathering of about 150 at Bluezette on Market Street.
Dean said Santorum had voted to kill Amtrak, an important service in Pennsylvania, and had then turned around
and written a piece for The Inquirer saying he supported Amtrak.
He said that Santorum should return the more than $100,000 that Santorum's declared home school district,
the Penn Hills School District in Allegheny County, paid over the last few years to educate his children at the Pennsylvania
Cyber Charter School.
While attending the school online, Santorum's children actually lived at his house in the Virginia suburbs
of Washington. The charter school and the Penn Hills district are in a dispute over payments for Santorum's children. Santorum
has maintained that he has followed the law.
Dean joked that Santorum should "stay in Virginia," although he added that the senator was "too much of
a right-winger for Virginia. How about Venezuela?"
Dean, whose defeat in the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries was attributed to the belief that he was
too liberal to defeat President Bush in the general election, appeared to be trying to reassure the party activists gathered
at Bluezette that he had learned his lesson.
He called on them to use less confrontational language with those socially conservative Democrats who deserted
the party last year to vote for Bush.
"We are not the pro-abortion party," Dean said, repeating the old Bill Clinton line that "abortion should
be safe, legal and rare."
"We need to organize," Dean said. "We can't run a campaign for president in 20 states and be a national
party."
The party chairman said Democrats need "message discipline." He said they should ... focus on attacking
Bush's plan to create private Social Security accounts...
