LEWISTON – Howard Dean was honored to stand where John F. Kennedy stood in 1960, he said Friday as he urged local Democrats to help Barack Obama win the White House.

The chairman of the Democratic National Party, speaking from the gazebo in Kennedy Park, said Obama’s win would depend on a high voter turnout.

“This is a serious state for us,” Dean said. “Sen. Obama needs Maine to become president of the United States.”

He also urged Lewiston voters to support U.S. Rep. Tom Allen, a Maine Democrat who is challenging U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, for her Senate seat.

“Lewiston is going to make the difference there. If you get a big turnout in Lewiston, Tom Allen will become the next United States senator,” Dean said.

He said Lewiston’s base of blue-collar voters has “always been a linchpin for every single Democrat who ever ran for anything in Maine.”

The national campaign will send a fair number of people to Lewiston and to Maine to campaign for Allen and Obama, Dean said. He asked people with spare bedrooms to house campaign workers. The party would rather spend money persuading voters than on motels rooms, he said.

Dean, a 2004 presidential candidate and the former governor of Vermont, also outlined his party’s view of the differences between Obama and Republican presidential candidate John McCain:

Obama wants to get the country out of Iraq; McCain wants to stay 100 years.

McCain would continue the course set by President George W. Bush.

Obama would build universal health care, heal the political rift between liberals and conservatives and restore the country’s moral authority

“You can’t bring people together if they don’t respect you,” Dean said, adding that much of the world lost respect for the United States when the Bush administration invaded Iraq.

Maine Republican Party Chairman Mark Ellis called Dean’s criticism of McCain “negative” and misguided.

“John McCain and Maine Republicans have real solutions to the very real problems that are making it more and more difficult for Maine families and small businesses to make ends meet,” Ellis said in a prepared statement.

“The kind of ‘change’ Barack Obama and his surrogates propose involves costly policies and tax increases that will further burden Mainers at a time when they can least afford it,” Ellis said.