AmSpirit,
The polls are all over the place--I saw one few hrs ago that put 1-Kerry, 2-Dean, 3-Lieberman.
Where's a Harry Truman when you really need one?:
THE KERRY PEDIGREE
Old questions arise on patrician roots
By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff, 1/25/2004
NASHUA -- Minutes after Senator John Forbes Kerry delivered a fiery speech in front of a banner that said "Fighting for us," he faced a question that has dogged him all of his political life: How could he relate to Massachusetts working people, a television reporter asked him, as a man who "was born with a silver spoon in your mouth?"
While Kerry gave his usual response -- that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy also had come from a privileged background -- the issue has once again become a focal point for a descendant of the Winthrop and Forbes families.
Senator John Edwards runs advertisements touting his working-class roots, and retired Army General Wesley K. Clark says in a biographical film that at one time he could barely afford to take his family out to McDonald's.
Even Howard Dean, who was raised on Park Avenue, makes an implicit contrast to Kerry by saying in New Hampshire that he wears "cheap suits" and that he doesn't have blow-dried hair.
There may be no greater tightrope act for this New Hampshire primary than Kerry's effort to be a sort of patrician populist. While Kerry is the only candidate to have lived in New Hampshire before the primaries, he rarely mentions the five years he spent at St. Paul's School, the elite boarding school in Concord, where his dream of running for president began to take shape four decades ago.
While these were the formative years of Kerry's life, the isolated existence among the Elizabethan-style halls does not readily relate to the lives of most New Hampshire voters.
Herbert Church, 81, who taught English to Kerry at St. Paul's, said that the school was "a closed society" in those days, and that he realizes that talking about St. Paul's is not likely to help the senator's case.
"Talking about going to St. Paul's is not exactly crowd-getting," Church said. "It is not a turn-on." But Church, like others who knew Kerry from the time, said that the candidate on the campaign trail is not so different from the serious young man whom he taught so many years ago. Kerry "is the young man I knew, somewhat older, but the same guy," said Church, who still lives in Concord and who has watched Kerry at rallies.
On most campaign days, Kerry stays far away from his St. Paul's silver-spoon background. Yesterday he provided an example, by suiting up for a hockey game at Manchester's venerable John Fitzgerald Kennedy hockey arena.
Looking more Bruin than Brahmin, Kerry showed off the technique of his years playing on Turkey Pond at St. Paul's.
Skating side by side with such Boston Bruins legends as Ray Bourque, Kerry, wearing the campaign-inspired number "04," lived out a dream of many New Englanders as he scored two goals.
"He seems like a more down-to-earth person than I imagined," said Mike Dalaker of New Boston.
At the debate on Thursday, Kerry presented himself as the candidate who best understands the problems of average people.
He said: "We deserve a president who understands what's really happening to people all across the country. The outsourcing of jobs: One-fifth of the manufacturing jobs in New Hampshire have been lost. Countless numbers of people can't get insurance."
Aside from a brief postdivorce period when he was sleeping on a friend's couch, Kerry -- now married to one of the nation's wealthiest women, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who has loaned his campaign $6 million in personal funds -- has hardly known hardship.
But Kerry's sales pitch relies on other parts of his biography, most notably his service in Vietnam.
Kerry doesn't entirely walk away from his background. When he spoke at a Town Hall meeting last week at Phillips Exeter Academy, the cross-state rival, he said: "I'm going to start out with a little truth in packaging. I want you to get all of your hostility out right away . . . my father went to Andover, my brother went to Andover. I went to St. Paul's."
As the crowd hooted, Kerry noted that he has had the "wisdom" to hire an Exeter grad as his chief of staff and to marry a woman who had been on Exeter's Board of Trustees.
The townspeople who attended the meeting, meantime, were given copies of Windsurfer magazine, which featured Kerry on the cover as a fun-loving sportsman.
Many of Kerry's supporters did not seem bothered by his history; some say it's a plus. "I like his background," said Jayson Gunter, 27, a pilot who lives in Nashua. "I like the fact that he served in Vietnam, where a lot of politicians have gotten out of it."
Others seem to have a visceral disdain for Kerry. As the candidate prepared to deliver his oratory against special interests at Daniel Webster College in Nashua, Lloyd Abrams, an employee of a nearby gas station, said: "I wouldn't vote for John Kerry if he was the last person on Earth."
Abrams said he plans to vote for John Edwards on Tuesday. The reason, he said, is that he didn't think Kerry cared for working people, and that he was familiar with Kerry's background.
Kerry, whose Forbes and Winthrop ancestors include the founders of the Boston-China trade and the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, has heard questions about his Brahmin background from his first days as a candidate. He has replied by telling voters not to measure where he is from, but what he stands for.
Richard Killion, a former Massachusetts resident who now is director of the Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communications at Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, said Kerry has worked to overcome perceptions. "He is surrounded by firefighters. He has chili feeds," Killion said, adding that Kerry's skate was a perfect primary setup. |
