Keane strategy

Can the memory of Paul Tsongas separate Tom Keane from the pack?

Politics by Yvonne Abraham

"Are you related to the Kennedy family?" Thomas M. Keane Jr., Boston city councilor and candidate for the Eighth Congressional District, stands outside the Mass Ave T station in the thick heat of a recent Tuesday afternoon, his sleeves rolled up, shaking hands. A small man and his sari-clad wife peer up at him, certain they're inches away from the newest scion of the nation's preeminent political dynasty.

Keane says no, makes a joke about "the plastic surgery," and seems awfully pleased by the whole thing. After all, a photograph of Joe Kennedy and his brothers, from the cover of a recent Esquire magazine, is pinned to a wall at Keane campaign headquarters.

In a race where just about every candidate is laying claim to Joe Kennedy's legacy, working mention of meetings with him into speeches, or loudly announcing that the congressman's former staffers have joined their teams, Keane's best connection is an accident of genetics (although he has a former Kennedy aide on staff, too). Keane, 42, is tall, with wavy dark hair and a toothy, earnest all-American-ness about him. He does look like a Kennedy, if a Kennedy of an earlier era -- a resemblance intensified by his lyrical, JFK-ish talk about the nobility of politics. No doubt he's hoping some of the magic will rub off, but he's not counting on it. He doesn't look that much like a Kennedy.

But to win like one on September 15, Democratic primary day, Keane is invoking another legendary political figure, one who reconciles his apparent contradictions and lends an air of integrity to his candidacy. When somebody asks Keane what he stands for, he has a well-worn mantra for them: "I'm a Paul Tsongas Democrat." Like the former US senator and 1992 presidential hopeful, Keane says, he's socially liberal but fiscally "realistic." That means, for example, pushing for Washington to pump more funds into education, but making sure the federal budget is still balanced. He talks constantly about the need to question traditional Democratic Party dogma. "Democratic policies have failed," he said at a recent press conference to announce his education platform. "Our hearts are in the right place, but we've solved little."

It's a curious approach to an electorate in which Democratic loyalty is so strong that Republicans need not apply.

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There are two schools of thought on this election. The first says it was all over on April 29, when former Boston mayor and Vatican ambassador Raymond Flynn dive-bombed in. According to this camp, Flynn's victory is a fait accompli, for all his publicly discussed frailties. His closest rival, say the polls, is former state legislator and talk-show host Marjorie Clapprood; loud and sassy even for Boston, she is the only other candidate in the race who can approach Flynn's celebrity (see "Clapprood Awakening."). The eight other Democratic candidates say the right things, but many of them say the same things. So they cancel each other out, sealing Flynn's ascendancy. After all, in a field this big, the winner only needs 20 percent.

The other school of thought -- one the other eight candidates are counting on -- is that, precisely because of the size of the field, this race ain't over till it's over. "We don't think anybody has made decisions about who they're voting for," says Brian Keane, Tom's brother and campaign manager. If all the victor needs is 20 percent at most, and turnout reaches, say, 80,000, then victory could well be a matter of just 16,000 votes, and most of the candidates are capable of getting close to that. Shake a few hundred hands here, charm a few hundred old ladies there, and come September, you could be the sleeper hit of the summer.

Or not. Cruel, this race.

Perhaps the only candidate with a natural geographic base in the Eighth is Mayor Mike Capuano of Somerville. Secretary of State William Galvin estimates that if turnout in September reaches the expected level of 80,000, about 15,000 of those voters will come from Somerville, making it possibly the most important ward in the district this time around. Cambridge, which is decidedly less stable than Somerville, will deliver an equal share of voters, but just about all of them are up for grabs. Watertown, the former state senate district of candidate George Bachrach, will turn out to the tune of about 5000 or 6000, Galvin estimates.

Keane's natural constituency -- his council district, which includes Mission Hill, Beacon Hill, Back Bay, Allston, Fenway, and Kenmore Square -- is not very reliable. Turnout is usually low to begin with, and because there are so many apartments in the neighborhoods he represents, there's no guarantee voters will be there from one election cycle to the next. In the last city council elections, 6000 residents voted in his district. A couple thousand more will probably join them for the congressional race. Not enough.

So he has to pick up support all over the city. To help him do that, Keane has assembled one of the best organizations in the race. He may not have as much money as the rich guys (his last campaign finance report showed receipts of $264,000), but he does have good connections in the city from his years as a city councilor. His operation is a polished affair, with a healthy bank account and several hundred volunteers (including Tom's 10 siblings and his parents).

To get to the minority community, he's enlisted Kevin Peterson, formerly of the voter registration group Part of the Solution, who managed Charles Yancey's challenge to Joe Kennedy in 1992. Keane, like other candidates, has been making his way down to Roxbury and Mattapan regularly. For two months now, he's also been attending black churches.

"I don't think the black and Latino communities are monolithic, that they vote for the black and Latino candidates," says Peterson. "Message is the most important thing."

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Keane's challenge is everybody's challenge. To win the thing, he has to separate himself from the second-tier candidates and then take on whoever happens to be the front-runner when he breaks free -- Flynn, most likely. Using the Tsongas aura as a wedge with which to extricate himself, Keane is aiming to match the other candidates on social issues, and trying to stake out his own territory to the right of them on the fiscal front.

Keane's political philosophy has in fact been fairly consistent since he first ran for city council in 1993, challenging the scandal-besieged five-term incumbent David Scondras for his district seat. At the time, the Harvard College and University of Virginia Law School graduate had been a business consultant and entrepreneur. Keane says he got into the council race because he was "furious" that city politicians seemed to be doing nothing to stanch the bleed of middle-class residents to the suburbs. It was an unusual position for a Democrat to take -- especially in late 1993, when the memory of bleeding-heart liberal Ray Flynn was still fresh. Back then, Keane's shorthand was to call himself a "New Republic Democrat," because the magazine at the time had a conscience but not a knee-jerk liberalism. The phrase tidily summed up and, more important, legitimized Keane's position.

The race shook out as a contest between Scondras's platform of concern for the disenfranchised and Keane's regard for the middle class. Campaigning as a dogged advocate of constituent services, Keane won by just 27 votes. (Subsequent victories have proved more decisive: he was unopposed in 1995, and he trounced opponent Lynda McNally last year with 2176 votes to her 763.)

As a councilor, Keane has earned a reputation for being smarter than the average city pol. The buzz around him has always been of the why-is-he-here-and-where-is-he-going-to-go-after-this variety. He seems to have little patience for the favor-mongering that gets things done, and he isn't part of any automatic alliances. "He's an unreliable vote," says fellow councilor Yancey, who is also running for the Eighth. "What he does depends on what's happening in the weather or something." Keane has repeatedly criticized Clapprood for her I'm-gonna-get-Gingrich rhetoric, arguing that she'll be useless in Congress if she can't build alliances. Yancey makes that criticism of Keane, too.

Yancey's animus against his competitor is perhaps predictable. But even colleagues who admire him say Keane is not a natural bridge-builder. "One thing you have to do in politics is get along with people and make coalitions," says one. "He's a little bit of a maverick. Some people won't give you anything if they don't get anything. He doesn't trade off. That's good in some ways, but it doesn't engender any loyalty." Keane has challenged Jim Kelly for the council presidency several times, without success. He couldn't get enough backing from other councilors.

Keane rejects out of hand the claim that he can't build alliances. "I'm going to be introducing a piece of legislation trying to cap property-tax increases tomorrow, and it's cosponsored by Jim Kelly," he said this past Tuesday. "I've tried to take away Jim Kelly's job every single year, but we can work on stuff together. The domestic-partners legislation [extending benefits to partners of gay municipal employees], I got passed with nine votes. They'd never been able to do that on previous attempts."

But while reviews inside City Hall may be mixed, Keane has made plenty of fans in the district for his focus on constituent services. "No matter how mundane the issue, Keane always follows through," says Joe Sullivan, a Mission Hill activist who once worked for Scondras.

Sometimes, however, the identity of that constituency has been construed rather narrowly. In the council, many of Keane's legislative initiatives have been consistent with the preserve-Boston's-middle-class rhetoric that he voiced in 1993. Bills to crack down on news boxes, graffiti, aggressive panhandling, skateboarding in public parks, and prostitution have played well with gray-haired Back Bay matrons active in powerful, and flush, neighborhood groups. But some of these issues raise serious questions about who owns the city: the narrow group that elects its government, or all of its residents -- the folks who might not vote or wield power, but for whom there should also be a place.

Lately, Keane has been known for more than quality-of-life issues. Last year, he was the lone holdout on a bill to establish a living wage for companies doing business with the city, arguing that some of the law's provisions would be a disincentive for businesses. For that, the unions despise Keane and have cast him as antilabor. (He sees the fact that City Hall held back some portions of the bill for reconsideration as vindication of his view.)

Yet, for this relatively conservative stance, there's an equally liberal one to counterbalance it. Keane authored the domestic-partners bill that is currently before the State House. That has sealed his credibility as a social liberal and endeared him to gay and lesbian groups, which, like minority voters, may prove crucial in the showdown.

But the centerpiece of Keane's congressional run is his education policy. He is calling for increased federal funding for schools, with strings attached demanding innovation and accountability from the recipients. Keane, whose own children attend private school ("As a parent, my obligation is not to my political career but to my kids"), maintains that the Democratic Party's approach to the country's problems has so far been misguided. "Johnson's war on poverty, while noble, was flawed," Keane said at a press conference.

It's a delicate balancing act Keane has: advocating both for more spending and more responsibility, for pro-business policies and compassion for the poor. It's not that these things necessarily conflict: it's just that they don't sit very well together in a liberal district like the Eighth.

Enter Paul Tsongas. Brian Keane says Tsongas, who died last year, has been popular in the Keane household since one of his sisters brought home a copy of the former senator's Heading Home, about his battle with cancer. Brian -- at Tom's prompting, he says -- was heavily involved in Tsongas's presidential bid in 1992. "He was honest and straightforward, fiscally responsible and socially liberal," says Brian.

The idea is to have the late statesman's beatific glow illuminate Tom Keane's long-shot candidacy. It's an excellent strategy -- who's going to speak ill of Tsongas, after all? -- so long as Keane can get it out there.

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But this is a claustrophobic race. Almost everywhere Keane goes, he has company. On gay rights, he is unassailable, but he's not the only one. In a May straw poll by the Bay State Gay and Lesbian Democrats, Keane finished third, after Clapprood and the recently uncloseted Susan Tracy. On the environment, he competes with activist John O'Connor. On the bread-and-butter, all-politics-is-local front, he competes with Capuano, Tracy, Bachrach, and, to a lesser degree, Flynn. And thanks to Charles Yancey's inexplicably passive, low-key candidacy, Keane is not even the only city councilor in the race.

But it's Chris Gabrieli, the millionaire who's already spent wads of cash getting his face all over television, who crowds Keane the most. Both have been successful entrepreneurs and are staunchly pro-business and in favor of NAFTA; both have tried to position themselves as contemplative candidates; both are big on education, including charter schools.

However, Gabrieli's fortunes have fallen some in recent weeks, with a couple of unflattering news stories and an unsuccessful rally on the State House steps. Keane is now convinced there's one less candidate feeding at his trough. Perhaps now his Tsongas-like nuances will be appreciated.

Then again, this is a race where Ray Flynn -- a man who has so far demonstrated little command of the district's current issues beyond rhetorical pap and appeals to history (mostly his own) -- is the man to beat. Such a state of affairs necessarily raises questions about this market's ability to support subtlety, even of the Keane-as-Tsongas variety.

Still, there are signs of a sort that Keane has been making headway: several of his opponents' campaigns, while steadfastly maintaining that Keane is but a blip on their screens, have nonetheless been circulating unflattering stories about him. That he didn't even support Tsongas in '92, that he hasn't been living in the district long enough to represent it, and that a health care facility he owned shortchanged vendors. Keane vehemently denies those assertions, bristling at their mention. But in the through-the-looking-glass world of political campaigns, the fact that anybody is taking the trouble to cast aspersions on his character means Keane still counts. In politics, such insults are the sincerest form of flattery.

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham[a]phx.com.