Party poopers

Kerry and Weld's disdain for partisan labels has drained the Senate race of passion

by Dan Kennedy

The sports clichés and mangled metaphors flowed like amber-colored liquid nearly 11 months ago, when Governor Bill Weld announced his challenge to US Senator John Kerry. It was the Yankees versus the Red Sox. Muhammad Ali versus Joe Frazier. Harvard versus Yale. Two well-mannered bluebloods at the top of their games battling it out for all the marbles. It was to be the biggest political clash since -- well, since those two or three weeks in 1994 when it looked like Mitt Romney might actually beat Ted Kennedy.

So who would have thought the Kerry-Weld contest would turn out to be rather . . . dull?

In some respects, the race has lived up to expectations. It is remarkably tight, with the two men in a statistical dead heat only two and a half weeks before Election Day. It's also among the most closely watched races in the country -- not only is a Kerry victory a key to Democratic hopes of recapturing the Senate, but the national media, from GQ to 60 Minutes to the New York Times to the Washington Post, can't get enough of the jousting-gentlemen angle.

Still, there's a palpable sense that the race hasn't quite delivered on its early promise. Voters already disdainful of politics have found little in the Senate battle to kindle their interest.

"I don't hear anybody talking about this race anywhere I go," says Lou DiNatale, a senior fellow at UMass/Boston's McCormack Institute of Public Affairs.

In part, the candidates have been too much with us. This past Tuesday, they met for the sixth of their seven televised debates, a not-so-dramatic miniseries that debuted all the way back in April. "It has been so drawn out," says a Democratic politico. "It's hard to maintain fever-pitch excitement when you've been running a low-grade fever for 10 months."

In part, the candidates' personalities have prevented the race from taking off. Both are wonkish, cerebral sorts who can -- and have -- argued endlessly over the true meaning of roll-call votes on amendments to amendments. Though the race hasn't been quite as polite as it's been portrayed in the national media, it has remained focused on a narrow range of issues -- principally taxes, welfare, and crime, with Weld aggressively touting his credentials and Kerry lugubriously trying to suggest that Weld's record is fraudulent.

By far the most important reason this campaign has remained stuck in neutral, though, is that neither Weld nor Kerry has been able to make a convincing case that the race involves anything more compelling than his personal ambitions. And that's because both are running as virtual independents -- as men without parties.

Kerry's identification as a Democrat and Weld's as a Republican are little more than labels -- useful as guides to some of their positions, but nothing more. There is no sense that either candidate is part of any movement greater than himself; no sense that either holds fast to any principle higher than his ego-driven need to remain in office. This impression stands in stark contrast to the situation in 1994, when Ted Kennedy's sagging poll numbers sparked an outpouring of support. Although Kennedy may have owed much of his comeback to nostalgia and family ties, a good deal of it was based on Kennedy's frankly partisan appeal as the biggest, baddest Democrat of them all.

Unlike Kennedy, but very much like other '90s candidates, Weld and Kerry have been elbowing each other primarily for the right to occupy the political center. Weld, especially, is fond of pointing out that he is married to a Democrat and Kerry to a Republican. What that has come to suggest, though, is not ideological broadmindedness on the candidates' parts so much as a disdain for the notion that party affiliation matters at all -- except on those occasions when it helps win votes.

"There is clearly a long-term decline in partisanship," says UMass journalism professor Ralph Whitehead. "It's an enormously fluid and confusing time. Each of these guys has one foot in his party and one foot reaching beyond his party. The problem is that no one knows whether that foot is heading up the ladder or stepping off a cliff."

Weld has used his support for choice and for gay rights to finesse his extremely conservative views on the role of government, thus allowing him to play down his party affiliation in a state where Republicans, despite gains in recent years, remain an endangered species. It's a game Weld has excelled at since 1990, when anti-choice Republicans booed and heckled him at his party's convention -- only to be outnumbered by suburban independents who took Republican ballots on Primary Day because they liked Weld's socially moderate, fiscally conservative approach.

During his nearly six years in office, Weld has raised more than a few eyebrows because of his close, friendly working relationship with the very Democrats he singled out for scorn in 1990 -- none more so than Massachusetts Senate president Bill Bulger, whom he had earlier attacked as a corrupt hack straight out of The Last Hurrah.

Once Weld was in office, he reversed course and went along with controversial initiatives such as a legislative pay raise. He also appeared with Bulger on the campaign trail, and, finally, appointed Bulger to the presidency of the University of Massachusetts.

Although Weld supporters suggest that such relationships have enabled him to get things done and have thus boosted his popularity, a number of Republicans complain that Weld's disdain for party-building activities could come back to haunt him. Some conservative Republicans may vote for Buchananite independent Senate candidate Susan Gallagher, who is running about two to three percent in polls; others may not bother to vote at all.

"With Bob Dole going down in screaming flames, the Republican base becomes critical," says Republican political consultant Ron Mills, who's not aligned with Weld. "Every dispirited Republican who stays home is a serious threat to Bill Weld, because the margin is so close."

Kerry's independence from the Democratic Party isn't as clear-cut as Weld's from the GOP. That has more to do with tone than with substance. Kerry's voting record, for instance, is not much different from that of liberal Democratic icon Ted Kennedy. In 1992, though, Kerry challenged liberal orthodoxy on affirmative action in a speech at Yale (he's since backed down). In 1994, after the Republican takeover of Congress, Kerry blamed "screw-ups" by President Bill Clinton and other Democrats, and said he was "delighted by the shake-up of the Congress." This year he voted for the draconian welfare-reform bill, which may show that he's in step with the triangulating Clinton, but which also puts him at odds with stalwart Democrats such as Kennedy, who voted against it.

The welfare vote alone guaranteed that party would play little role in this race. By tagging along with the majority, Kerry passed up a chance to excite the Democratic base, and the result has been a perception that the outcome of the Weld-Kerry race will have an imperceptibly small effect on public policy.

"I think the key to this race is the Kerry vote on the welfare bill," says Jack Beatty, author of The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley (1992). "There's no way he can think this is a good bill. There's no way he can be proud of that. The only thing that the Democrats have going for them morally is that they'll protect the poor. He stood apart from the passion in his own party. I think if he loses this race, that's the decisive thing."

Beatty points to the example of US Senator Paul Wellstone, a Minnesota Democrat and the only senator up for re-election who voted against the bill. "He showed some principle. People like that," Beatty says.

Indeed, Kerry has tried to have it both ways, insisting, like Clinton, that the welfare bill he voted for needs to be modified, and castigating Weld for his public admiration of House Speaker Newt Gingrich. But if Kerry is going to vote with Gingrich on a welfare package that critics say could throw a million children into poverty, why should anyone care if Weld likes Newt?

"There's a lack of party passion on both sides," says Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman, who is not working for Kerry. "Great races have ideological opposites bashing each other. The more they meld together, the less exciting it is."

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.