The Not So Favorite Son
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CALLIE SHELL/AURORA FOR TIME
WINNING THEM OVER: Kerry, with wife Teresa, at a rally in Boston last September |
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John Kerry's critics like to say he is not actually from Massachusetts. That's a quibble. Kerry has lived in the Boston area more than anywhere else for at least 41 of his 60 years. He is a direct descendant of the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His great-great-grandfather was a Massachusetts Senator. Kerry has represented the state for two decades, winning re-election three times — even when voters had attractive alternatives. Compared with Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, Kerry qualifies as a state mascot. The truth is, John Kerry is from Massachusetts — but he is not of Massachusetts.
It's an important distinction. And that's the lesson Kerry's hometown has to offer in this election, just as Arkansas and Texas contributed their stories of Slick Willie and Dubya. The conversation about Kerry in the restaurants and backyards around Boston is laced with disappointment in a man who has always preferred the national stage to the neighborhood pub. "People here like talkers. You go to any bar in the city, and it's full of b.s. artists," says Joe Keohane, editor of the Weekly Dig, an alternative newspaper in Boston. "I don't think he ever mastered the political dialect." Many people say they voted for Kerry, but he took up little space in their hearts. They already have their hometown family, and its name for four decades has been Kennedy.
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Still, conversations about Kerry often end with grudging respect, with an acknowledgment that the tenacious Senator has learned from the mistakes he has made in Massachusetts. "I'm getting to the point now where I respect the amount that he tries," says Paul Sullivan, a veteran political journalist at the Lowell Sun, the newspaper in the Boston suburb where Kerry got his political start. Kerry is not the most natural politician — in a state where politics is second nature. Says Sullivan: "Every day of his life, he puts on shoes that are too tight and not on the right feet." This is the story of Kerry's political apprenticeship.
Kerry's career as a politician began and almost ended in Lowell, a blue-collar city about an hour's drive northwest of Boston. Kerry moved to Lowell in 1972, three years after he returned to the U.S. from Vietnam. Back then Lowell "looked like Berlin after World War II," former mayor Robert Kennedy says. The mills were boarded up, and houses were burned out. In the overwhelmingly Italian and Irish community, people knew their neighbors and their neighbors' cousins twice removed. And nobody knew Kerry, who had parachuted into Lowell because it was part of the state's Fifth District and the congressional seat was open. Locals would later call the maneuver "Kerrymandering."
In a city with 12% unemployment, Kerry and his new wife Julia bought one of the nicest houses around. "It seemed at the time just ridiculous," says Sullivan. Then a teenager, Sullivan campaigned against Kerry outside the polls. Like most other Democrats, he expected state representative Paul Sheehy to win. Sheehy fit the part. His family had been in Lowell since the 1880s. He was one of seven children of a fire fighter. "Sheehy was the first to go to college. He was your basic Irish success story," Sullivan says.
Sheehy, who supports Kerry for President, has not forgotten Kerry's tone deafness back then. Sitting in his backyard in Lowell, he describes the perception of the young candidate. "He was not well received by anyone, being an outsider, telling people you don't have anyone smart enough to represent you here, bringing in [campaign] people who couldn't even vote here."
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