The special election in Massachusetts 5th Congressional District yesterday offers eerie parallels with the 2008 presidential campaign. And although the national GOP is overstating the case, Democrats would be foolish to ignore the warning signs of a close election that should have delivered a much wider margin of victory.
Niki Tsongas, widow of the late US Sen. Paul Tsongas, squeaked out a narrow win against Republican Jim Ogonowski, whose pilot brother's death on American Airlines flight 11 on September 11, 2001 was the centerpiece of his campaign.
A Democratic dynasty vs. a 9/11-obsessed candidate is precisely what pundits are selling to voters nationwide as US Sen. Hillary Clinton and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani top the polls in their respective primaries: the "inevitable" subway series.
In Massachusetts yesterday, the Democrat won. But that Tsongas squeaked through by a much smaller margin - and turned out far fewer voters - than any Democratic congressional candidate in a generation raises the "electability" problem anew for Clinton nationwide.
Both candidates had plenty of money and the support of their national parties. But only slightly more than 100,000 voters turned out in a district that brought more than 216,000 out to vote in 2006 and more than 267,000 in 2004. (Back during the first Gulf War, a 1991 special election in Massachusetts 1st Congressional District turned out more than 135,000 voters; the Tsongas squeaker yesterday is unimpressive even for a special election in the Bay State.) In spite of the clear contrast between the Democrat and the Republican during a war time era of national moral crisis, a Dynasty Democrat could not fire up the vote.
The Massachusetts 5th district seat has not been won by a Republican since 1972 when a young Vietnam veteran against the war named John Kerry, targeted by President Richard Nixon's dirty tricks squads during the year of a GOP presidential landslide, lost to Republican US Rep. Paul Cronin. Two years later, Paul Tsongas put the seat back into the Democratic column and it's been there ever since represented by Democrats Jim Shannon, Chet Atkins and Marty Meehan, who recently resigned to become chancellor of UMass Lowell.
The district's largest cities are Lowell, birthplace of Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence, site of the legendary Bread and Roses textile mill strike of 1912, both along the Merrimac River near the New Hampshire border. The mills eventually closed and the high tech industry, led by Wang Laboratories, moved in.
Democratic primary voters this year chose Tsongas over other Democratic rivals largely due to comfort with her name and her husband's legacy. Sound familiar?
Paul Tsongas was a hometown boy made good: he went from the Lowell City Council to the Middlesex County Commission to the US Congress and kept rising up the ladder. In 1978 he challenged and defeated US Sen. Ed Brooke, a liberal Republican, then the only African-American in the Senate. Tsongas did not seek reelection in 1984 due to a struggle with cancer (disclosure: I was the young deputy political director then for the campaign of his successor, US Sen. John Kerry, and for a spell rented a room from Thalia Tsongas Schlesinger, the late senator's wonderful twin sister). But Tsongas appeared to beat his lymphoma and reemerged to run for president of the United States in 1992. He beat Bill Clinton in New Hampshire but went on to lose the nomination fight (it was one of those cases when by coming in second, a candidate "beat expectations" and Clinton became the Comeback Kid). Still, Tsongas, who passed away in 1997, remains a legend in Lowell and in the Massachusetts 5th.
My late friend and political mentor Charles F. McCarthy, a cigar chomping old-school politico with a big heart straight out of The Last Hurrah, worshiped Paul Tsongas above all other gods in the Democratic pantheon. He tried very hard to enthuse me to feel the same, setting up multiple private meetings with the Senator, but Tsongas pioneered the emerging corporate neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party that the Clintons later inherited and continue to dominate. I never signed up for duty. By 1992 I was a political reporter covering the New Hampshire primary. Charlie was also up in Manchester, campaigning for Tsongas. As the returns came in showing Tsongas the victor, I went up Elm Street to the Clinton campaign HQ and watched Clinton deliver his Comeback Kid speech. The two were then in a competition to be the standard bearer to lead the party away from its liberal core principles of the New Deal. The Tsongas legacy is bound up with that of Clinton: I stipulate that a lot of people revere them even as many of us mourn what they've done to the Democratic Party and correspondingly to the country and to the world. Even if their legacies were "less worse" than what the Bush Dynasty has wrought, they created the context and circumstances for Bush-Cheney to wreak havoc.
The campaign leading up to yesterday's special election in Massachusetts provided a microcosm of what a Clinton vs. Giuliani general election campaign would look like. (Bill Clinton, while visiting Massachusetts to campaign on behalf of Niki Tsongas, sounded a lot like, well, Bill Clinton at rallies he attends across the border in New Hampshire on behalf of Senator Clinton, but he did not succeed in inspiring voters to the polls.) Candidate Niki Tsongas, like Senator Clinton, is not a crusading anti-war Democrat like Barack Obama or an economic populist like John Edwards: she campaigned cautiously on behalf of "middle class" issues like health care and did not deviate from consultant-penned scripts. Her consultants spun, during her primary campaign, that in the general election she would provoke a huge women's vote (that did not materialize in yesterday's extremely low turnout election, also an omen for November 2008) and that a husband's legacy would be transferable. In other words: The Tsongas campaign of 2007 was in many ways a replica of the current Clinton presidential campaign.
Her opponent Ogonowski was equally a copy of Giuliani's presidential campaign: He blathered endlessly about 9/11, going to the shameless extreme of showing footage of a jet slamming into a World Trade Tower in a TV ad narrated by the widow of his fallen brother. That he won 45 percent of the votes with that to Tsongas' 51-percent in a safe Democratic district, if extrapolated nationwide, is very good news for Rudy Giuliani's 9/11 strategy of winning the White House and very bad news for Hillary Clinton's general election prospects.
The problem is this: Most Democratic primary voters aren't bothered by dynastic politics in the ways that too many general election voters, particularly independents, are. And they don't yet understand - or don't want to know - why others are bothered by it. The pitch that a candidate automatically brings the experience and luck of his or her revered spouse is not enough to close the sale in a general election. It, in fact, brings a backlash. Dynastic candidates can't help but project a sense of entitlement that the position belongs to them by right of family crest.
Commenting today on The New Republic, John B. Judis acknowledged the warning signs for Democrats and suggested that one of the lessons of yesterday's special election is that "if Clinton wins the nomination, she will have to adopt some of Obama's appeal in order to win the presidency." As if one politician's appeal is transferable to another in a general election. No. It's not. The suggestion is meaningless, because authenticity is not something that is easily faked, especially by an already polarizing candidate.
If in November of 2008 a Dynasty Democrat running against a 9/11 Republican brings the kind of paltry results seen yesterday in the Massachusetts 5th district, that will spell doom nationwide for the Democrats.
If voters in the upcoming Democratic presidential caucuses and primaries cover their eyes to the lessons of yesterday's special election, in January of 2009 they might well find themselves covering their ears... as the tune of Hail to the Chief is played to President Rudolph William Louis Giuliani.
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Posted October 17, 2007 | 05:20 PM (EST)