Battle of the bluebloods - Massachusetts battle for US Senate seat

National Review, Oct 14, 1996 by Jeff Jacoby

THE voters of Massachusetts haven't turned an incumbent Democrat out of the U.S. Senate since 1946, when David I. Walsh was beaten by a blueblooded Republican named Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Fifty years later, is another Democrat about to be pushed out of the Senate by a patrician Republican?

Sen. John F. Kerry fervently hopes the answer is no. But as his year-long race with Gov. William F. Weld enters the home stretch, the odds are close to 50 - 50. Every statewide opinion poll for months has placed Kerry and Weld within single digits of each other, while the percentage of respondents who agree that Kerry "deserves to be re-elected" has dropped from 49 per cent last fall to just 35 per cent earlier this month.

It is clear that Kerry is struggling. It isn't clear why.

This is the state, after all, whose senior senator is Ted Kennedy. It is one of the few states where Bill Clinton's popularity has never flagged. Registered Republicans account for a scant 14 per cent of the Massachusetts electorate; the 1994 GOP tidal wave didn't even splash the Bay State's shores. Kerry has run statewide three times before (for lieutenant governor in 1982 and for the Senate in 1984 and 1990), and has always won decisively. Money isn't a problem: his 1995 marriage to Teresa Heinz (widow of the late Sen. John Heinz, a Pennsylvania Republican) made him America's richest senator. He was decorated for valor in Vietnam, is a poised and polished speaker, and has not been bruised by scandal.

So what is John Kerry's problem? Why isn't his re-election a sure thing?

One factor is personality: Weld's is better. Loose, impish, self-confident, his disposition is worlds apart from Kerry's unctuous and self-righteous uptightness. Weld keeps a stuffed armadillo on his desk and a portrait of the corrupt and roguish James Michael Curley -- former governor, congressman, Boston mayor, and prison inmate -- on his wall. He got merrily inebriated at his second inaugural ball in 1995, and he dived -- fully clothed --into the Charles River during a news conference in August.

It is impossible to imagine Kerry doing any of those things. "I'm very well aware," he said during a televised debate with Weld last month, "that when God made me, one of the debits he gave was sort of an over-level of intensity, maybe an over-level of earnestness." In the past, facing unknown or inexperienced challengers, it was a debit easily compensated for. Now, in the fight of his life against a well-known, well-liked governor, Kerry's tiresome personality is doing him no good.

Neither is his campaign strategy, which boils down to: Attack Gingrich.

No sooner had Weld announced his candidacy last November than Kerry began hammering the theme that a vote for Weld would be a vote for the Speaker of the House. "This election will contrast cherished American values with the extreme agenda of someone who calls Newt Gingrich his 'ideological soulmate,"' Kerry intoned. It is an argument he has pressed ever since.

The truth is, Weld did call himself Gingrich's "ideological soulmate" in the heady days after the 1994 election -- just as he hailed the new speaker as "the Sam Adams of our day" and boasted that he and Gingrich were going to write a book together.

But as Gingrich's popularity waned, so did Weld's enthusiasm. "Hey, there's only two podiums in here," he admonished Kerry during one encounter. "I know you want to run against Newtie, but that's not in the cards this year." In July, asked by a reporter how he would rate Gingrich, Weld refused to answer. When pressed, he allowed as how he admired "his efforts to balance the budget." No, the reporter insisted, how do you rate Gingrich as Speaker? "Oh, he's a good public speaker," Weld smirked, ducking back into his office.

Weld's fair-weather friendship, which echoes his very public 1988 departure from the Reagan Justice Department -- a "resignation of conscience," he called it -- illustrates his ability to prance lightly from conviction to counter-conviction. Once pro-life, he is now pro-choice; once against gay-rights laws, he is now for them; once anti-gun-control, he now embraces it; once in favor of shrinking the state's budget, he is now in favor of increasing it. But it also illustrated that he is no Gingrich "soulmate." Not that voters ever thought he was -- a Boston Herald poll in April found only 28 per cent of the public agreeing with Kerry's characterization of Weld; 58 per cent disagreed.

Kerry has wrapped his re-election campaign around the proposition that Weld has been a bad governor and that voters shouldn't like him. But in comparison with his predecessor, Weld has been a stellar governor. It has been less than six years since Michael Dukakis retired from office, leaving Massachusetts a fiscal wreck -- its bond rating the nation's lowest, its taxes among the nation's highest, its unemployment rate soaring, and its operating budget $800 million in the red. Weld, whatever his faults, is the governor who stanched the bleeding, balanced the budget, and resisted every call to raise taxes.