KENNEDY ENVY
By HOWIE CARR
February 20, 2004 -- BOSTON
BACK in the mid-'80s, when Sen. Ted Kennedy bought a Chrysler LeBaron convertible, Sen. John Kerry suddenly decided to make an impulse purchase of his own.
He bought a Chrysler LeBaron convertible, too.
Sen. Kerry votes in the Senate the same way he buys car: If Ted goes for it, he goes for it too. By now you know about the almost identical voting records of the two Massachusetts Democrats. You've read on this editorial page how Kerry's lifetime voting record, as compiled by the liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), is 93 percent, compared to Ted's 88. The two Massachusetts Democrats vote the same way 93 percent of the time. If Kerry served in the state legislature here, his nickname would be "Ditto."
Occasionally in the past, the likely Democratic nominee for president has gingerly stepped off the orthodox liberal reservation - on affirmative action in '92, on Iraq in '02. But always Kerry quickly tip-toes back, chastened, when he sees how badly his feints to the center are playing among his party's core constituencies.
Despite the spinning, however, the reality is that if you like Ted Kennedy's voting record, you'll love John Kerry's. But the connections between the boys from Boston are deeper than that.
Not that they've ever been the best of friends. Ted initially backed Kerry in the White House race for the same reason that his son Patrick, the Rhode Island congressman, got behind Dick Gephardt - professional courtesy.
But for years, Kerry and Kennedy were rivals of a sort, big fish in a small pond. Their staffs would race to get out the first press release taking credit for minor federal grants back home in Massachusetts.
In at least two instances, Kennedy's staffers dropped dimes to the Boston papers about the junior senator's self-serving behavior - once, when he was parking his car in a handicapped parking spot at the Russell Office Building. And again after he denounced the role of "special interests" in American life, and then two nights later relieved D.C. lobbyists of $250,000 at his wife's Georgetown mansion.
Kerry is now much closer to the presidency than Ted ever was, but at some level, the junior senator still yearns to be a Kennedy. It goes beyond the LeBaron, or the JFK monograms he used to have sewn onto his shirt, or his signature, slavishly modeled after the first JFK's.
The most interesting bit of Kerry's victory speech Tuesday night in Milwaukee came right at the end, when he veered off his prepared text and began talking about his ketchup-heiress spouse: "I'm getting to be the guy who accompanies Teresa around the United States of America," he said, "which is just fine by me."
Standard gigolo flattery, perhaps. But it was also almost a direct lift of a once-famous quip by JFK in France on June 2, 1961: "I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it."
Kerry didn't acknowledge the steal, just as he never credits Edwards or Howard Dean for material he's appropriated from their stump speeches. Perhaps he didn't even realize what he was doing.
As a teenager in the early 1960s, Kerry had his photograph taken with JFK, just as Bill Clinton did. Kerry was that odd case - the blue-blood poor boy, awkwardly hanging out on the fringes with all the swells, going to the best schools as a legacy, but penniless nonetheless.
Now, years later, he's married money - twice - and as much as he craves the approval of his hero JFK's sole surviving brother, sometimes it seems as if Kerry is using his second wife's inherited millions to show Ted that the tables have finally turned.
Kennedy owns a locally famous sailboat, the Maya, so Kerry bought a custom powerboat - a stinkpot, as his Yankee ancestors would have derisively described the Scaramouche.
Ted inherited a compound on the water in very upscale Hyannisport. Kerry's wife owns a mansion on the water in even more affluent Nantucket. Ted skies in Aspen, which is nice. Kerry skies in Sun Valley, which is nicer.
Ted buys a house on Marlborough Street in the fashionable Back Bay of Boston. Kerry's wife buys a house for him on Louisburg Square at the top of Beacon Hill. Same neighborhood, different league.
Kennedy and Kerry. It's like a novel about social striving by F. Scott Fitzgerald, with Ted Kennedy in the role of Tom Buchanan, and John Kerry as Jay Gatsby. Except that Gatsby made his own money, he didn't marry it.
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