Promises, promises

Will Marty Meehan's term-limits switcheroo put a chill on his white-hot career -- and on a possible run for governor?

by Michael Crowley

In all of Massachusetts, there may be no savvier politician than Marty Meehan. A humble Everyman on the surface, Meehan obsesses over the microstrategy of politics. It is what has made him one of the most successful young members of Congress. And evidently it is what has enabled him to survive the embarrassment of breaking his promise to serve no more than eight years in Congress. If politics has elevated promise-breaking to an art form, over the past weeks and months Marty Meehan has turned in a virtuoso performance.

"Marty's the kind of guy who has things figured out 20 steps down the road," says Democratic consultant Mary Anne Marsh. "And it's certainly clear that he did that with the term-limits thing."

No kidding. Meehan diminished the impact of his about-face by letting word of his second thoughts dribble out slowly, breaking up the story into dull slices to avoid screaming headlines. He wooed newspaper editorial boards. He met with constituents in feel-good town-hall meetings. His aides directed reporters to Chet Atkins, the Massachusetts Fifth Congressional District incumbent Meehan defeated in 1992, who maintains that term limits were a minor factor in the race. Meehan subjected himself to an appearance on The Howie Carr Show, just to show that he's not above taking some ribbing. And he made his official announcement on a Friday, guaranteeing low-impact weekend-news coverage. "The decision was telegraphed and handled as well as you could have expected," says a person close to Meehan.

It might seem like a pointless exercise to ask whether yet another politician will get away with breaking yet another brittle promise. But Meehan's is a particularly interesting case. He is an especially luminous member of Congress -- a noisy crusader against Big Tobacco, the Democratic sponsor of the House's lead campaign-finance-reform bill, and one of Bill Clinton's most visible defenders during the impeachment saga. He is also a potentially formidable candidate for Massachusetts governor in 2002.

And at the moment, it appears that Meehan has emerged from his switcheroo with surprisingly few bruises. His decision not to step down from Congress, officially announced on May 7, won editorial applause from most major newspapers in his district, and from both the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald. Urging Meehan to run again, the Lowell Sun called him "a national leader" and said the district "can't afford to risk losing [the] clout" that Meehan has acquired in Washington.

There were punishing shots, to be sure. Globe columnists Brian McGrory and Joan Vennochi thrashed Meehan as a hypocrite. The Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, a major paper in Meehan's district, deplored his decision as ONE MORE LIE.

It didn't help matters any when the state Republican committee unearthed the fact that Meehan had submitted an advance "resignation" back in 1995, asking that his name be stricken from the congressional rolls if he were still clinging to his seat by 2001. But to hear local political analysts tell it, Meehan's got little to worry about. "Nobody cares about this issue," says Democratic consultant Michael Goldman. "They care about whether there's food on the table, or whether our boys are going to get killed in Kosovo. Is anybody mad about Marty Meehan on the things that matter to them?"

"I don't think he'll suffer any damage with voters," says Marsh. "They don't vote on that stuff. People understand that politicians often make commitments they don't keep."

Adds GOP consultant Kevin Sowyrda: "If in this day and age we forgave Bill Clinton, who is going to throw out a congressman because he broke a term-limits pledge?"

"They'll let me know when I've been there too long," Meehan says of his constituents. "They'll throw me out, and they should make that decision."

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Meehan got himself into this mess in 1992, during his first campaign for elective office, when he challenged Democratic incumbent Atkins. It was an era of anti-incumbent politics that gave birth to a slew of simplistic gimmicks. Term limits, a bad idea that sought to meddle with the fundamental democratic process and had the potential to deliver a Congress of clueless amateurs, was one of them.

Meehan happily seized upon term limits to highlight the contrast between himself and the veteran Atkins, whom he ended up trouncing in the primary before squashing a weak Republican opponent.

Meehan and his allies have recently tried to suggest that his term-limits pledge was spontaneously blurted out in the heat of a campaign. But it should not be overlooked that Meehan has renounced only his own term limit. He has not concluded, as most serious people have, that the notion of term limits is deeply wrongheaded. Meehan's argument, as expressed to his constituents in a letter mailed last month, is that "with the failure of term-limits legislation nationally, to arbitrarily limit my own service puts the people I represent at a disadvantage."

Meehan contends that, as a young candidate, he didn't realize how important seniority is in the workings of Congress. But even after three years in the House, Meehan was still a passionate defender of this bad idea. "I have always been skeptical of the legislators who claim they are for term limits but have been in office for 15 or 20 years," Meehan said in a March 1995 floor speech. "The best test of any politician's credibility on term limits is whether they are willing to put their careers where their mouths are and limit their own service."

Of course, that statement came before Meehan had done much of his laudable work on the issues of tobacco and campaign-finance reform. Meehan was denouncing Big Tobacco and its patrons in Congress years before thousands of other politicians began flocking to the issue. And he was the lead Democratic sponsor of a major campaign-finance-reform bill that actually passed the House last year -- only to die later in the Senate. (At press time, Meehan was trying to enlist just a few more Republican supporters to bring the bill to a vote, against the wishes of the House Republican leadership.)

Still, Meehan's critics say the issue isn't his effectiveness. It's his credibility. "Term limits may not be as hot an issue as back in 1992," says state Republican Party executive director John Brockelman. "But the real issue here is whether you can trust Marty Meehan. He made a pledge to the voters and he's broken it. It's very simple and easy for voters to understand."

Or so hope the state Republicans, who have been trying to dredge up one of their own to run against Meehan next year. Brockelman says the state GOP has already been talking to potential Meehan challengers for the 2000 elections, although he won't name names. (US Term Limits spokesman Jason Miller, whose group plans to spend $20 million in the 2000 election cycle, adds that although his group has no immediate plans to run potentially embarrassing ads in Meehan's district, "we're keeping a very, very close eye on" the GOP's recruitment efforts.)

Democrats, however, laugh at the notion that the state's feeble Republican Party could come up with a serious opponent for Meehan, whose campaign has an account balance of around $1.5 million. Even Sowyrda, a GOP partisan, says the notion of defeating Meehan is "a bunch of gobbledygook."

But Meehan is interested in far bigger things than one re-election. He will soon have to decide which way to steer his quickly accelerating political career. Down one road lies a potentially long and successful stay in Congress, perhaps culminating, in some far-off, post-Ted Kennedy era, with a Senate seat. Down another is a prize in which Meehan has shown interest: the governorship.

It's well known that Meehan is considering a run for the state's top office; he even flirted with the possibility when Joe Kennedy dropped out of the 1998 governor's race. Making the assumption that Meehan would like to be governor, some allies have counseled him to abide by his term-limits pledge. He could walk away from Congress a hero, they argue, a real Honest Man -- the stuff of political lore. Then, after a couple of years spent hanging out in the private sector, he could make his run.

Democrats see incumbent governor Paul Cellucci as being eminently beatable by a strong candidate. But to some, Meehan's decision to seek re-election suggests he's not leaving Washington anytime soon. "I do not believe he runs for governor," says Michael Goldman. "I have to assume that if he was going to run for governor he would not have done this."

People closer to Meehan, however, say he has yet to make up his mind. "If he was committed to running for governor, he would have gotten out," says one person close to Meehan. "The fact that he didn't means he's keeping his options open."

A potentially decisive factor is whether former congressman Joe Kennedy, who made an abortive run for governor in 1998, will try again. Democratic insiders and friends of Meehan say it's impossible to imagine him taking on Kennedy.

Meehan friend and adviser Bill Cunningham says he thinks the odds of Meehan's running for governor are "50-50," but that he'd be the early favorite in what could be one of the most crowded Democratic gubernatorial fields in recent memory. The list of Democrats actively eyeing the governorship has swollen to about a dozen. The list of potential candidates includes some of the top names at the State House, including House Speaker Tom Finneran, Senate president Tom Birmingham, Secretary of State William Galvin, and possibly even State Treasurer Shannon O'Brien. Former Democratic National Committee chair Stephen Grossman is making his interest clear among party regulars. So are 1998 also-rans Scott Harshbarger and Patricia McGovern. Even former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has been meeting with political insiders to talk about a possible run.

Should Kennedy decide not to run, there would be no clear party favorite in this race. But Marty Meehan would be a formidable candidate. He is well known, well funded, and still something of a fresh face. Meehan also got a valuable taste of how a statewide campaign works last year, when his long-time ally Tom Reilly made a winning bid for state attorney general. Meehan was closely involved with Reilly's campaign; his chief of staff, Will Keyser, even took over as Reilly's campaign manager.

Before deciding whether to run for governor, Meehan will also wait to see if Democrats can regain control of Congress next year. If they do, Meehan will be an influential member of the majority party, and will most likely become chairman of the House National Security Subcommittee on Military Research and Development. "If the House goes back to the Democrats, I think he'll be more intent on staying where he is," says Cunningham. "However, I don't think he'll rule out being governor."

Of course, a run for governor could reopen the whole embarrassing matter of broken promises. "Why won't he say that he's not going to run for governor in 2002, and stay for the next decade?" says US Term Limits' Jason Miller. "He's just giving another faulty excuse, and he's going to turn his back on his constituents in another two years."

So what does Meehan himself say about all this? Well, he's obviously learned his lesson. "My experience has taught me," Meehan says with a self-deprecating chuckle, "that I shouldn't make blanket statements like that about the future."

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.