The Not So Favorite Son

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Last year, after a police officer's widow in Reinstein's district had packed all her belongings, she was told she could not move into federally subsidized housing because she made $38 more than the maximum allowed. Reinstein asked Kerry's office for help. A staff member immediately called the woman and her son, Reinstein remembers. "The son called me in tears ... All of a sudden, [he's] getting calls from Senator Kerry's office. You don't understand how much that means." The woman was accepted into the housing complex. Today, whenever Reinstein sees Kerry, he always remembers her name.

Even in Lowell, where old-timers still resent Kerry's opportunistic first campaign so long ago, they give him credit for improving his human relations. "A lot of people thought he was aloof," says current mayor Armand P. Mercier. "But his staff was always there for us. He didn't let Lowell's needs go by the wayside." During the 1972 race, Mercier was head of the Lowell Housing Authority. Kerry, struggling for local credibility, asked to meet with him. Kerry arrived at Mercier's office more than an hour late, Mercier says, and the first thing he did was ask to use the phone. "I said, 'Actually, I do mind. I've been waiting an hour and a half,'" Mercier remembers. Fourteen years later, he saw Kerry again, at an event in Lowell. "He came right over to me and said, 'I'm on time, Armand.'"

Kerry will get Mercier's vote in November and, according to a recent poll that shows him 29 percentage points ahead of President Bush, enough others to carry the traditionally Democratic state. Says Mary Ann Richards of Lowell, speaking for so many others: "He doesn't spin my wheels, but I'm voting Kerry."

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