Massachussets residents, what was the general statewide view of John Kerry

before he became the nominee, be honest. Was he seen as a lesser counterpart to Ted Kennedy or the ying-to-his-yang or some policy wonk that rarely visited his home district?

Also, regarding Ted Kennedy, is he viewed more as an elder statesman or the drunk uncle everybody loves? Reading Red Sox fan boards, it's sadly more of the latter.

the middle and lower classes.

My repub father-in-law said that he thinks that since one of his sisters is handicapped it always made the whole family more aware of the plight of those less fortunate.

He has done alot of great things, and his speechs are great.

I saw him arguing about the medicare bill and he was just thoughtful and brilliant.

...district that became Paul Tsongas' and later Marty Meehan's, because he wasn't from Lawrence/Lowell/Andover and he was carpetbagging--it was good practice for him though, and he got a real sense of how people in the Merrimack Valley feel about things, which contributed to his later success. But that's MA politics for ya--ya run for the open seat! I was fully prepared to support him as Senator, because he had a great deal of in-state name recognition and good works by then. He's done a damn fine job, and does us proud. I do not regard him as a lesser to Ted, more like a younger partner who learned at the foot of the master, or a son.

Ted is a goddamn LION. He may not have always put his pants on when he was shitfaced in Palm Beach, but who cares, because still and all, he is a LION. Ted would not be a good president, because he leads with his heart, and he lives large. His wife is doing a very good job of keeping him in line, because left to his own devices he would not take the best care of himself. Kerry, by contrast, is more cautious, though he has heart as well, and he is possessed of great DISCIPLINE, to say nothing of a very keen intelligence.

They are both great, they are different, and they have both different as well as similar strengths. I hope Barney Frank runs for JFK's seat--Barney is a pistol, and smart as a whip. We'd be well served!

It will be nice to have an adult in charge of the country again, even if we have to give up our Senator to make it happen!

Was dissapointed to show up in 02, to find Meehan in his place. (after redrawing, the line moved a bit south of my house) Meehan isn't bad, but I enjoyed giving Frank my vote. I think he would do well as senator.

Over his war vote. He sent me a THREE PAGE, personally written, lame explanation of his vote. I told him I wasn't buying it, but really, where the fuck was I gonna go? I am not going to vote for a Republican, and I know it. I did tell him he needed to listen to his goddamn constituency, or I'd challenge him in the next primary, just to hold his feet to the fire!!!

He's changed his tune since then. Personally, I like a politician who can actually READ the handwriting on the wall! Reading, after all, is FUNdamental!!

Kerry: except for one cabbie, I haven't heard anyone speak ill of him. He (unitl this year) used to ride in the annual cancer bicycle event, and did it without any noticable fanfare (I have been one of the bike mechanics for the past 10 years). Did run into him at various events, and my impressions were Tall and listened much more than I expected somone that talked for a living to do. One year, a halloween bike ride stopped by his house, Theresa was very gracious. The one time I had cause to visit his office in DC, it was a friday, and he was back in the state.

Kennedy: Well I am glad he is there. The general feeling is that he is someone that can be counted on to say what is needed, not what is fashionable. He has the office, until long after he would like to stop. Didn't find him as approcable as Kerry, but the time I met him, was a somewhat dragged out public hearing, where he was the guest of honor, and there were lots of local union officals that wanted his ear. (Early days of the RSI epidemic, before ergonomic became something you added to the packaging so you could charge more) He listened, and it seems like he got OSHA moving on the idea of regulation. Too bad that Newt, UPS, and a few others stomped it.

When I visited his office in DC (same friday as I hit Kerry's) he was also back instate. I did find his staff somewhat less than organized. (I was presenting them with a bit of civil disobedience, a t-shirt printed with a then "export-controlled munition" encryption algorithm, in the form of a barcode printed allong with the text. (text they couldn't regulate, but if it was machine readable....) It was particularly amusing, because you arent supposed to show it to foreign nationals, and the intern they had me talk to at first was not a US citizen (some sort of exchange deal). SO we had to be very silly about not letting him "peek" at the barcode.)

Don't forget that when he started out, he was really the guy in the #4 or #5 or #6 political slot in the state- no one paid much attention to him. Ted Kennedy and Tip O'Neill were the heavyweights sent to Washington, Dukakis and the Irish crowd (Moakley, White, the Bulgers, etc) and maybe Silvio Conte were the powers in the state.

Tip and Ted were hard at work in the '80s stalling the Reagan/Bush crowd from ramming through their agenda, judges, etc. Control of the Senate depended on stodgy conservative Democrats like Sam Nunn and the rest of the aging Southern Democratic contingent who, on their seniority and due to their age, hogged the major Committee jobs (Ways and Means, Armed Forces) mostly for the pork barreling and vanity and moving jobs to their states. None of them wanted to do the hard messy work of pursuing investigations, and their reelections weren't all that safe bets, so Kerry was the man best placed (the Reagan people hated Massachusetts and vice versa) by experience as prosecutor and soft home state competition and being relatively young and with deep integrity and fight in him to do the hard work against the Reagan crowd- Senate investigations.

It was hard work and risky and not well rewarded - but Kerry and the others got Iran-Contra and S&L and BCCI far enough to endanger the Reagan and Bush principals, as intended. Watergate is always in the room in Senate investigations- but O'Neill and Mitchell and such realized that getting Reagan or Bush impeached was not the kind of political move needed in those painfully reactionary times in the electorate. Gutting the Administration hard core for Nixon aide types of violations was the strategy.

Kerry was in Kennedy's shadow (and the rest of that older generation of Senators) most of the time in the Washington game. As a Brahmin family scion he wasn't quite part of and with a certain amount of disdain (some say snobbery) stayed out of the Irish political fray in Boston, got along pretty badly with that crowd over time, really. But Dukakis was finished after the '88 election, Tip O'Neill retired, 1990-94 cleared out most of the Southern conservative Democratic Senators and Ted Kennedy lost his role legislative/Committee chair roles with the Senate majority. The three Republican governors were elected largely in order to do battle with the increasing hackery and patronage of the Irish state politicos in the state legislature, starting in 1990 with Bill Weld and probably ending now that Romney has knocked out Billy Bulger (who was actually doing a surprisingly good job fundraising for the UMass system) and Tom Finneran.

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Kerry is, in a way, a standard Brahmin, most easily compared to Bill Weld really. He's not all that interested in particular things- and not personally all that imaginative- but he'll learn all the important detail and is an excellent manager and delegator- great at picking people-, and he demands of himself to live up to what he expects of others. I think what motivates him is the belief that the Texas/Nixon-redux crowd is a corruption of, a perverse indulgence and arrogant failure to recognize, what the American upper crust historically represents in the world: a skeptical yet energetic, but patient, force for real progress. The particular issues rarely matter to him very much, as they don't to any real politician- anyone who's had dealings with him can tell you as much- but he has a pretty good instinct of which one is a relevant bottleneck or a trap in the big picture. Be it to himself, or his opposition. And he goes after fixing his own and worsening his opposition's relentlessly- Bush has fought and fought, yielded ground copiously and exploited every inherent advantage, but Kerry has been pretty efficient. The logic of removing Bush is that Bush represents a perversion of American destiny, a reign of clever idiocy, that will soon endanger the genuine substance and the earnests of American life. To be a liberal is to recognize what is significant, actually worth defending and worth creating and worth fixing, and to do it, and not to do or impose all these insightless, vain, selfserving things that the other side does - that's Kerry's liberalism. An argument about human dignity. It pisses off the ideological until they see that it matches the ends they seek, even if it is a different- sometimes slower, sometimes faster- road to them.

But people don't like to think of him that way. A strategic planner is not the way workers like to imagine their boss- as a schemer- and a man of some real wisdom is utterly beyond ken to average people, acceptable only in form of a blundering or lucky or at times insightful situational tactician. That's been exploited by the Bush team to the extent possible- with the flaw that their boy has demonstrated complete strategic failure in all he's really done in office, and his "wisdom" is a matter of 'faith'. So people take a while to 'get' John Kerry's politics and 'get' John Kerry as a political and private person, but when they do there's either a dignified agreement with the aggregate or a violence that emanates from their vanity. (Check out the various responses around here and then the Republican responses to him.)

Ted Kennedy is hanging on in office in the hope of doing a little more to make the U.S. a country where civilized people can live in peace. With Republican majorities in the Senate there isn't much overtly to show for his efforts- a few fillibusters upheld, some great work in constituent services- in recent years. He got conned and burned on the Medicare prescription drug benefit, as we all know. But 2006 should roll around with him running for office one more time- and IMHO we'll have a Democratic Congress starting in '07, and Kerry in office, and there will be a good amount he'll get done on that last lap around the track.

Talk to the chief of police in Lowell (which used to have the highest crime rate in the US for cities it's size, but now is on the bottom half of the list). It was thanks to Kerry's effort to put more cops on the street that this was possible. The folks in Lowell certainly dig Kerry :).