posted on March 2, 2004 11:01:35 AM new
ONE of the surest ways to get the phones ringing on any Massachusetts talk-radio show is to ask people to call in and tell their John Kerry stories. The phone lines are soon filled, and most of the stories have a common theme: our junior senator pulling rank on one of his constituents, breaking in line, demanding to pay less (or nothing) or ducking out before the bill arrives.
The tales often have one other common thread. Most end with Sen. Kerry inquiring of the lesser mortal: "Do you know who I am?"
And now he's running for president as a populist. His first wife came from a Philadelphia Main Line family worth $300 million. His second wife is a pickle-and-ketchup heiress.
Kerry lives in a mansion on Beacon Hill on which he has borrowed $6 million to finance his campaign. A fire hydrant that prevented him and his wife from parking their SUV in front of their tony digs was removed by the city of Boston at his behest.
The Kerrys ski at a spa the widow Heinz owns in Aspen, and they summer on Nantucket in a sprawling seaside "cottage" on Hurlbert Avenue, which is so well-appointed that at a recent fund-raiser, they imported porta-toilets onto the front lawn so the donors wouldn't use the inside bathrooms. (They later claimed the decision was made on septic, not social, considerations).
It's a wonderful life these days for John Kerry. He sails Nantucket Sound in "the Scaramouche," a 42-foot Hinckley powerboat. Martha Stewart has a similar boat; the no-frills model reportedly starts at $695,000. Sen. Kerry bought it new, for cash.
Every Tuesday night, the local politicians here that Kerry elbowed out of his way on his march to the top watch, fascinated, as he claims victory in more primaries and denounces the special interests, the "millionaires" and "the overprivileged."
"His initials are JFK," longtime state Senate President William M. Bulger used to muse on St. Patrick's Day, "Just for Kerry. He's only Irish every sixth year." And now it turns out that he's not Irish at all.
But in the parochial world of Bay State politics, he was never really seen as Irish, even when he was claiming to be (although now, of course, he says that any references to his alleged Hibernian heritage were mistakenly put into the Congressional Record by an aide who apparently didn't know that on his paternal side he is, in fact, part-Jewish).
Kerry is, in fact, a Brahmin - his mother was a Forbes, from one of Massachusetts' oldest WASP families. The ancestor who wed Ralph Waldo Emerson's daughter was marrying down.
At the risk of engaging in ethnic stereotyping, Yankees have a reputation for, shall we say, frugality. And Kerry tosses around quarters like they were manhole covers. In 1993, for instance, living on a senator's salary of about $100,000, he managed to give a total of $135 to charity.
Yet that same year, he was somehow able to scrape together $8,600 for a brand-new, imported Italian motorcycle, a Ducati Paso 907 IE. He kept it for years, until he decided to run for president, at which time he traded it in for a Harley-Davidson like the one he rode onto "The Tonight Show" set a couple of months ago as Jay Leno applauded his fellow Bay Stater.
Of course, in 1993 he was between his first and second heiresses - a time he now calls "the wandering years," although an equally apt description might be "the freeloading years."
For some of the time, he was, for all practical purposes, homeless. His friends allowed him into a real-estate deal in which he flipped a condo for quick resale, netting a $21,000 profit on a cash investment of exactly nothing. For months he rode around in a new car supplied by a shady local Buick dealer. When the dealer's ties to a congressman who was later indicted for racketeering were exposed, Kerry quickly explained that the non-payment was a mere oversight, and wrote out a check.
In the Senate, his record of his constituent services has been lackluster, and most of his colleagues, despite their public support, are hard-pressed to list an accomplishment. Just last fall, a Boston TV reporter ambushed three congressmen with the question, name something John Kerry has accomplished in Congress. After a few nervous giggles, two could think of nothing, and a third mentioned a baseball field, and then misidentified Kerry as "Sen. Kennedy."
Many of his constituents see him in person only when he is cutting them in line - at an airport, a clam shack or the Registry of Motor Vehicles. One talk-show caller a few weeks back recalled standing behind a police barricade in 2002 as the Rolling Stones played the Orpheum Theater, a short limousine ride from Kerry's Louisburg Square mansion.
The caller, Jay, said he began heckling Kerry and his wife as they attempted to enter the theater. Finally, he said, the senator turned to him and asked him the eternal question.
"An old, long-whiskered man once said to Teddy Roosevelt: 'I am a Democrat, my father was a Democrat, my grandfather was a Democrat.' Roosevelt then said: 'Then if your father had been a horse thief and your grandfather had been a horse thief, you would be a horse thief?'" --Will Rogers
"The Many Faces Of Sen. John Kerry; John Kerry decided three decades ago that the path to political stardom was to be all things to all people - which included tailoring his stance on issues depending on his audience. Now that he wants to be president, can we trust him to tell us where he really stands?(THE NATION)(stance on Vietnam War in the seventies)"
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1571/2003_Sept_16/107543547/p1/article.jhtml
posted on March 2, 2004 06:23:57 PM new
Linda, I never mind additional comments from you.
"An old, long-whiskered man once said to Teddy Roosevelt: 'I am a Democrat, my father was a Democrat, my grandfather was a Democrat.' Roosevelt then said: 'Then if your father had been a horse thief and your grandfather had been a horse thief, you would be a horse thief?'" --Will Rogers
posted on March 4, 2004 10:06:44 AM new
Thought you guys might get a chuckle out of this one. Taken from the SFGate newspaper.
Bush ridiculed Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the almost-certain Democratic nominee, as an unprincipled Washington insider who wavered on key issues and was weak on defense.
"Sen. Kerry's been in Washington long enough to have taken both sides on just about every issue," Bush quipped to an audience of supporters at the Shrine Auditorium who had paid up to $2,000 each to hear him.
posted on March 4, 2004 11:51:40 AM newBush's own Party doesn't want him re-elected
WASHINGTON -- At 1 p.m. on Feb. 25, some 15 prominent Republicans invited to be surrogates in the coming presidential campaign gathered at Bush-Cheney headquarters in suburban Northern Virginia for a private briefing. Less than two hours earlier that day, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan detonated a political bombshell. To judge from the bland and uninformative briefing, nobody on the president's campaign team heard the explosion.
Former Montana Gov. Marc Racicot, a Washington lawyer-lobbyist who last year resigned as figurehead chairman of the Republican National Committee to become figurehead chairman of Bush-Cheney '04, led the precisely orchestrated, one-hour briefing. He did not mention that Greenspan had just testified to Congress advocating reduced Social Security benefits. Racicot might be excused for being silent and unaware of the central banker's latest political mischief, since it also escaped the attention that morning of key Bush policymakers.
The invited advocates were handed a thick batch of talking points to ingest by the campaign's appropriately named chief of surrogates, Julie Cram. Nowhere in the handout did the forbidden words "Social Security" appear. "The president's opponents are against personal retirement accounts" is the closest the briefing material came to the dreaded subject. Many prospective surrogates left campaign headquarters profoundly depressed by the mediocre briefing and the material given them.
This fits the deepening malaise among Republicans in the capital. They are neither surprised nor terribly worried by polls that temporarily show George W. Bush trailing John Kerry. What worries the GOP faithful is the absence of firm leadership in their party either at the White House or on Capitol Hill.
The lack of a ready response to Greenspan, while Democrats quickly turned his comments into an indictment of President Bush's tax cuts, was not an isolated failing. Today, Republicans on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue seem to be going in opposite directions.
-- Disagreement between congressional Republicans and Bush over the size of the highway bill reflects mutual recriminations over runaway federal spending in general. While the president's aides are angered by the lawmakers' addiction to concrete, conservative lawmakers are furious that Bush's budget has preserved and actually increased federal funding for the arts.
-- Bush's call to make his tax cuts permanent and to repeal the estate tax for all time leaves Republicans in Congress perplexed about how they will be able to write a budget without a massive increase in the huge deficit that never will command a majority vote.
-- House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and his allies are bitter that they received no backing from the president and administration in their efforts to keep the independent 9-11 investigation from extending into the campaign season.
-- The president came out for a constitutional amendment to bar gay marriage without consulting congressional Republican leaders, which helps explain the unenthusiastic reception from his own party on Capitol Hill.
-- Congressional Republicans still have not recovered from the shock of the President's Economic Report extolling the outsourcing of industrial jobs -- good economics perhaps, bad politics definitely.
The disaffection is such that over the last two weeks, normally loyal Republicans -- actually including more than a few members of Congress -- are privately talking about political merits in the election of Sen. Kerry. Their reasoning goes like this: There is no way Democrats can win the House or Senate even if Bush loses. If Bush is re-elected, Democrats are likely to win both the House and Senate in a 2006 midterm rebound. If Kerry wins, Republicans will be able to bounce back with congressional gains in 2006.
To voice such heretical thoughts suggests that Republicans on Capitol Hill are more interested in maintaining the fruits of majority status first won in 1994 rather than in governing the country. A few thoughtful GOP lawmakers ponder the record of the first time in 40 years that the party has controlled both the executive and legislative branches, and conclude that record is deeply disappointing.
But incipient heresy also reflects shortcomings of the Bush political operation. Its emphasis has been on fund-raising and organization, with deficiencies in communicating and leadership. The president is in political trouble, and his disaffected supporters who should be backing him aggressively provide the evidence.
posted on March 4, 2004 12:08:06 PM new
This proud conservative is voting for John Kerry. Bush's spending is simply out of control. I like reading about Kerry being frugal....we need a fiscal conservative president.
