Armed with her morning coffee on bustling Milk Street, Ann Hughes makes a face when asked about Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy’s re-election chances.
“Even people who like him think it’s gone on long enough,” said Hughes, a legal secretary who says she voted for Kennedy in the past. “A lot of people think Teddy’s time has passed.”
At 62, Edward M. Kennedy is seeking a sixth full term in the U.S. Senate, and with it a validation of a public life spent in service to the activist, big-government beliefs of his martyred brothers.
But with less than a month until Election Day, it’s apparent that a goodly number of Massachusetts voters-perhaps a majority-share Hughes’ cold-eyed assessment of their senior senator.
Like many incumbents, Kennedy confronts a fierce anti-government mood, an atmosphere of distrust and dissatisfaction that has imperiled the futures of public officials around the country, including such liberal icons as New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and House Speaker Thomas Foley (D-Wash.).
There is no more compelling target than Ted Kennedy, who first went to the Senate in 1962 and is locked in an increasingly fractious struggle with Republican Mitt Romney, a 47-year-old millionaire venture capitalist and political novice.
But Kennedy, the sole surviving son of America’s most glamorous political family and a Washington liberal of mythic proportions, suffers from more than anti-incumbent fervor and a tabloid past. There is the pull of demographic change as well.
The median age in Massachusetts is 34, which means about half the population was born in or after 1960, the year John F. Kennedy became president. Voter memories of the Kennedy clan are more likely to turn on scandal than on hazy recollections of Camelot.
And, over the last 32 years, the Bay State has become more suburban and more conservative; the ethnic neighborhoods and manufacturing towns that were drawn to the Kennedy mystique have withered, and with them the view of Washington as a place where the concerns of working families are addressed.
In a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 4 to 1, a startling number of voters believe Kennedy has come to personify runaway government and an entrenched Washington establishment.
“It doesn’t matter if people say they think Teddy is a good senator,” said Boston novelist George V. Higgins. “No one knows what that means anymore.”
Kennedy’s opponent is the son of former Michigan Gov. George Romney and is an entrepreneur possessed of what used to be called Kennedy good looks.
On the campaign stump, Romney talks about his successes in the private sector-his company, Bain Capital, helped launch Staples, the office-supply store chain-and the need to supplant “old-style politics” in the nation’s capital.
“The message is, `If we want to change what’s going on in Washington, we’ve got to change the people in Washington,’ ” said Romney adviser Charles Manning.
Romney’s pollster, Linda DiVall, sees the candidate as “somebody who’s a problem-solver. Unlike the senator, he’s not someone who’s wedded to a political institution.”
Some Kennedy loyalists worry about their man as much as they worry about Romney, concerned that the Democrat is unprepared for the electoral task and befuddled by the current political climate.
“Teddy hasn’t had a real race since 1962,” said a former Kennedy aide. “What comes across when he tries to campaign is that he’s out of touch as a person. He’s fighting, and maybe losing, the idea that he ought to take the gold watch and step out of the way.”
The Massachusetts Senate race would be just another incumbent-in-trouble story were it not for the Kennedy legend, and the senator’s own raucous, roistering past.
To the diminishing number of Democratic faithful, the sound of Teddy’s voice evokes memories of Jack and Bobby, of the ascendancy of an Irish-Catholic political dynasty and the activist Washington agenda of the 1960s.
To others, the images conjured up are those of Mary Jo Kopechne, a campaign worker who drowned in Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick bridge in 1969, or the boozy 1991 Easter weekend in Palm Beach that ended with the rape trial and acquittal of nephew William Kennedy Smith.
Clearly, Kennedy’s celebrated fondness for strong drink and fast living stands in stark contrast to Romney, a father of five and Mormon lay preacher who doesn’t smoke or drink.
Some observers believed Kennedy’s 1992 marriage to Victoria Reggie, a 40-year-old attorney, would stem criticism of what the senator once called “the faults in the conduct of my private life.”
But in a year when voters say they are concerned with character, the evidence suggests they remain skeptical of Kennedy’s revamped domestic situation. And a recent threat by his first wife, Joan, to reopen the particulars of their divorce settlement didn’t enhance the image-buffing, though she subsequently agreed to postpone the action.
“Teddy’s a national joke and a local disgrace,” said retired pharmacist Chuck Connaughton, standing outside a Romney event on Boston’s Beacon Hill last week.
Even Kennedy’s history of legislative successes-Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper, named him the most effective lawmaker in Congress two years ago-seems to be working against him.
According to a recent survey by the Boston Globe and WBZ-TV, 57 percent of those questioned had a favorable opinion of Kennedy, and 52 percent believed he was doing a good job. But 49 percent said it was time to give someone else a chance.
Higgins, the novelist, and Hughes, the legal secretary, among many others, share the broad public disdain for political professionals, and the suspicion that their interests would be better served by a cadre of new names and faces.
More than his public pronouncements or his private excesses, it is that time-for-a-change imperative that has put Kennedy’s last hurrah at risk.
He has revamped his campaign staff, with a number of workers from former Gov. Michael Dukakis’ organization piped aboard to pull together a field operation.
And Kennedy is on the air with a host of TV ads, all designed to remind voters of the legislative clout so many contend no longer impresses them.
Kennedy’s ads have also targeted Romney’s involvement in an Indiana labor dispute in which Ampad, a company in which the Republican had invested, fired employees and then rehired them at lower pay and benefits.
But even in Kennedy’s commercials, the rigors of his eventful life are writ large.
His face is florid and tired, his syntax odd and characteristically jumpy, his gait awkward, the result of a back injury suffered in a 1963 plane crash.
“Even on television, the stark generational differences with Mitt-the physical appearances, the style and energy-are right there,” said pollster DiVall.
For all Kennedy’s travails in this election cycle, however, style and energy may not be enough for his rival.
“I run for the office,” Kennedy told a rally in Quincy on Monday.
“I don’t run against opponents.”
