WELCOME TO Boston, still Hub of the Universe. The lack of local interest in the Condit story harks back to the days when Oliver Wendell Holmes described our gold-domed State House as " the hub of the solar system. " For Bostonians, the Condit story is like some asteroid circling Pluto. This summer many of the big stories have been about State House players — Senate president Tom Birmingham, House Speaker Tom Finneran, and, most of all, Governor Jane Swift. The city’s remaining political energy is going into the race to replace Moakley, who died on Memorial Day. For other cities around the country — with languid and undeveloped local politics — the Condit story might be the hottest ticket in town. In Boston, it’s akin to getting seats to see the Rick Pitino–era Celtics.

" Boston is its own empire and has its own political obsessions, " says William Schneider, who as CNN’s senior political analyst has done his share of talking about Condit. Schneider also knows Boston: he taught political science at Boston College for five years and will teach at Brandeis as a visiting professor in January. " Boston is one of a handful of cities I know — [along with] San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago — that is obsessively interested in its own politics, " he says.

And those local politics have sucked away all the air that could have breathed life into the Condit story here. Levy’s disappearance in early May took place when Boston was preoccupied with the Kennedy family in general and Maxwell Taylor Kennedy in particular. So when the national media started circling Condit, local news outlets were doggedly covering Kennedy’s flirtation with a run in the Ninth District. Of course, the story wasn’t just a Boston obsession, especially given the way a hot Kennedy story can propel a lucky journalist into the spotlight. (The prospect of a Kennedy in the race seemed so inviting that Newsweek scribe Matt Bai persuaded his editors to give him a leave of absence so that he could chronicle the rise to power of Robert F. Kennedy’s son. Bai might have dreamed of being this generation’s William Manchester or Arthur Schlesinger Jr., both of whom were given access to the family in exchange for lionizing accounts.) When Kennedy bungled a speech to the Robert F. Kennedy Children’s Action Corps on May 17, the debacle — reported in both the Globe and the Herald — made national news.

Soon after Moakley’s death, Kennedy decided not to run after all, and the story was quickly replaced with obsessive coverage of Moakley’s funeral — an event which proved that the city is still, in many ways, the center of the political universe. President George W. Bush and former president Bill Clinton, former vice-president Al Gore, and numerous other dignitaries squeezed into St. Brigid’s Roman Catholic Church in South Boston. The national press corps, the cable networks — everyone — sat solemnly while former Senate president William Bulger eulogized Moakley. Who needed a little-known California congressman when the existing political universe had come to Broadway? (The real Broadway, that is, not the zigzagging thoroughfare in Manhattan.) After Moakley’s funeral, the race to replace him in Congress filled the local political air.

In this environment, it’s fitting that one of the summer’s biggest stories — a controversial congressional-redistricting plan — involved a mighty player on the local political scene, Finneran, administering comeuppance to a popular figure on the national political scene, Congressman Martin Meehan of Lowell. Finneran’s plan involved an unusual element — eliminating Meehan’s Fifth Congressional District to create a new district in the southern part of the state. The plan generated a storm of coverage, including column inches in both the Washington Post and the New York Times. Nobody had ever heard of a Democrat-controlled legislature eviscerating the district of a fellow Democrat in a state that wasn’t scheduled to lose a seat in the House. The controversy even engaged the interest of the Times editorial page, in a piece titled " Family Feuds in Massachusetts. " Here’s a bet: if Finneran changes his mind about the Fifth, it won’t be as a result of editorials in the New York Times. Indeed, the interest of a national publication might even cause Finneran to harden his position. The New York Times Company may own the Boston Globe, but its daily paper in Manhattan doesn’t count for much in Finneran’s Dorchester district.

If Bostonians wanted to nosh on a summer tale involving marriage and deceit, moreover, they didn’t need to go as far west as Modesto for the sordid details. They had only to look across the state to Williamstown. Thanks to the governor’s adult stepson, the Commonwealth learned that the governor’s husband, Chuck Hunt, had been married three times before meeting Swift at the altar — not once, as the couple had claimed (even on their marriage certificate). The story captured the lowbrow market around here for days and proved much more entertaining than anything the Condit saga had to offer.

" We’re much more parochial, " says Democratic political strategist Mary Anne Marsh. " We always have been. "