For the debate the other night at a small college out in the countryside, both candidates appeared to have sauntered out of the pages of a J. Crew catalog - casual slacks, sports jackets (soon shed), no ties. But, then, if Frazier and Ali had fought as often as these fellows will have debated - nine times - their fisticuffs would have become stylized.
Democratic Sen. John Kerry is the one with the Hapsburg jaw and features that in bodice-ripper novels are called "chiseled." He noted, with the tone of a man scoring a salient point, that the debate was taking place in a building built by federal money. At a Boston coffee shop the next morning he said, "I want less government."Republican Bill Weld is the carrot-topped governor who wants Kerry's job. Weld says he wants less government even more than Kerry does, and he speaks of Bob Dole's proposed 15 percent tax cut in a reverential tone more suitable concerning a sacrament than a mere social policy.
Weld is climbing a cliff without pitons. The last time Massachusetts defeated a Democratic senator, the state was cranky because a month earlier Enos Slaughter had scored from first on a hit to left-center, helping the Cardinals defeat the Red Sox in the 1946 World Series. Weld is climbing with the weight of Dole in his backpack, in a state that recently has been second only - and barely second - to Rhode Island as the most Democratic state in presidential politics. Republicans in Massachusetts (13 percent of voters) resemble the Amish in Pennsylvania, an admirably devout but exotic sect.
An angry white female, nominee of the Conservative Party, is courting those (perhaps 2 percent of the electorate) who object to Weld's politics of (as objectors say) tight money and loose morals. Weld favors almost the full rainbow of gay rights (he stops short of favoring same-sex marriage), supported President Clinton's veto of the ban on partial-birth abortion and, in case there was a conservative somewhere in the Berkshires he had not offended, he volunteered that he has changed his mind and now thinks Clarence Thomas should not have been confirmed.
Both Kerry and Weld are popular, so it is puzzling that the race is a cliffhanger, given that voters can have their cake and eat it, too, by voting for Kerry and keeping Weld in the statehouse. Besides, voters do not find it reassuring that the lieutenant governor, who moves up if Weld moves out, has piled up $750,000 in personal debt, including about $70,000 on credit cards.
Another puzzle is why Weld wants to stop being chief executive of a great state in order to become one one-hundredth of one-half of one of the federal government's three branches. One suspicion is that Weld is bored and that voters admire that. Advantage Weld, who considered flying flags at half-staff when Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead died. When, before the debate began, Kerry, making an effort to unbend, playfully adjusted Weld's sport coat, Weld cracked, "I've already conceded the swimsuit portion of the competition."
Kerry is learning the danger of being earnest in an era when that attribute seems like evidence of an itch to be an improver, which voters nowadays consider a synonym for a nuisance. At the coffee shop the morning after the debate, Kerry speaks with animation and information about issues that suggest he would be a grand governor.
Did you know, he says to a columnist who didn't, that much teenage pregnancy results from sexual activity after school but before evening? Perhaps, he says, the school day should be longer. A good idea, that, but surely no business of the national legislature.
Weld has used 15 tax cuts, mostly for businesses, to fuel a boom in a state that still has the nation's eighth-highest tax burden and has more government than when he was elected. He would be among the most liberal senators on matters the Senate has little to do with, like abortion and gay rights, and among the most conservative on matters such as taxes where the Senate matters. Too bad he and Kerry can't just trade jobs.