Contenders

Coming of age

Part 2

by Michael Crowley

That name brings with it fantastic advantages. Money, for starters. A deep pool of political savvy and talent. A vast group of cultural and political celebrities -- from Maria Shriver to the president -- who can be called on to swoop into campaign events. Pure name recognition. And things like the way Joe's decidedly unsexy editorial about heating oil landed on the New York Times op-ed page recently. (Think another Massachusetts Democrat -- say, Representative John Olver -- could have pulled that off?)

But in a society where Chappaquiddick is a household word, the Kennedy name is not all luster. The publishing world continues to churn out debasements of the family icons, such as Nigel Hamilton's JFK, Reckless Youth (Random House, 1992) and Joe McGinniss's The Last Brother (Simon & Schuster, 1993). The news media, led locally by an unforgiving Boston Herald, treat the family more as a source of comedy than inspiration. Even Mayor Quimby of The Simpsons -- as inept at governing as he is skilled at "polling the electorate" in motel rooms -- is a thinly veiled Kennedy, with a flip humor and a familiar, ah, way of, ah, speaking.

These circumstances make it harder for Joe to be taken seriously. But so have some episodes of flawed judgment.

There are the little things, such as his overheated rhetoric ("Do not lie about it on the House floor!"). Or his inopportune asides, such as the time when, at a press conference in support of health warnings for liquor ads, he joked about people having had "a pop or two" the night before (the Globe cheerily reported the anecdote the next day). A far more significant blunder came during Ted's 1994 Senate re-election race against Mitt Romney, in which Joe designated himself Ted's "pit bull." Joe blundered badly by questioning Romney's affiliation with the Mormon Church on the misinformed grounds that the church did not ordain black ministers.

Joe's penchant for screw-ups has been a fountain of amusement for his political opponents and for the press. It ensures one thing if he decides to run: he'll take a lot of crap. He already catches it regularly in the pages of the Herald, and on the radio, courtesy of Howie Carr. Carr, who dwells obsessively on Joe's garbled speech, calls him "the Wizard of Uhs," and actually has listeners call in to count the "uhs" from a Joe soundbite. Asked what else he has in store, Carr chuckles: "Let's just say we're prepared for the campaign."

The media's fascination with Joe's clumsy syntax, which recalls the coverage of Bob Dole's campaign speeches, has become almost pornographic. A case in point is this recent Herald transcript of Joe's comments about a botched fake punt by the New England Patriots:

Well, I was, I mean, I think that you know, uh, it seemed that, uh, it, uh, was an awful lot of risk to take, uh, for, for simply a first down. Be one thing to take risks like that if you thought you had, you had somethin' cookin' that you could take you into the end zone but to take that kind of risk when they when they, the uh uh, the downside of it was you're gonna turn the ball over you know for a sure field goal, uh uh, at best and a touchdown at worst seemed -- but listen it's, you know, here we are, it's that that in and of itself wouldn't I -- I don't think decided the end result of the game.

While he's getting whupped from below by wise guys like Carr, Joe also finds himself looked down upon by some of the elites in his district. During Joe's 1986 campaign, Martin Peretz, a lecturer in social studies at Harvard and a Cambridge resident who owns the New Republic, wrote a column calling him "a lout," and recounted how Joe had nearly decked him -- "[f]ace red, neck veins bulging" -- over a TNR article zinging him. "I do not think I have heard him deliver a sentence more syntactically complicated than `Nicetaseeya,' " wrote Peretz, who mocked Joe's attempts to stroke "the Cambridge academic crowd."

So Joe lacks the scholarly credentials of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and the seductive oratory of Mario Cuomo. Is that enough to stop him from becoming governor?

"That may fly in Newton and Brookline, and in Cambridge they may titter at his malapropisms," says Louis DiNatale, a senior fellow at UMass/Boston's McCormack Institute of Public Affairs, "or they may look askance at his UMass/Boston [degree]. But that'll play to his advantage with the middle class."

Even a GOP media consultant like Stuart Stevens, who believes Joe to be "completely out of step with the issues," agrees. "I think people resent that kind of attack. There's an implied arrogance."

Part 3

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley@phx.com.