The last time a 'stiff' kerry went up against a more"likeable average joe"

[Adenoid_Hynkel]

here;s how Time covered it on the verge of the Kerry-Weld debates. looks like they were trying to write his political obituary then as well. like i said, i'm feeling optimistic again:

http://www.time.com/time/international/1996/961007/senate.html

"The race has suspense as well. At the moment, Kerry is dead even with Weld in a traditionally Democratic state where Clinton leads Dole by more than 20 points. Kerry may have spent the past 12 years in the Senate, but he enjoys few of the advantages of incumbency. Instead, Weld is the candidate whose views and personality the voters know best. (They re-elected him in 1994 with 71% of the vote.) While Kerry is well regarded for chairing complex Senate subcommittee hearings on issues like drug trafficking in Central America and for leading the effort to track U.S. soldiers missing in Vietnam, he is also seen as a politician who swoops back into the state only at election time.

Weld and his record are closer to home. He's the guy who took over a state that was demoralized and nearly bankrupt after Michael Dukakis' tenure and proceeded to balance the budget six years in a row while cutting taxes 15 times. More than Kerry, Weld is the candidate who can claim to have presided over an economy that is performing better than that of almost any other industrial state. In 1991, Weld's first year, Massachusetts' unemployment rate was one of the highest in the nation. Last week the state hit a seven-year low. "John's forte has been Nicaragua and the Caribbean, which doesn't exactly dominate the conversation at the coffee shops," says Weld.

Weld may look and sound more like a coffee-shop regular, but his pedigree is more aristocratic than Kerry's. Both candidates hail from old money--one of Weld's ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence, and Kerry descends on his mother's side from New England shipping magnates. Both graduated from prep school into Ivy League colleges. But while Weld moved on to Oxford and Harvard Law, Kerry went to Vietnam and returned with a chestful of medals and enough firsthand disillusionment to lead 5,500 vets in a 1971 antiwar march. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry caught much of the country's mood: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

If Kerry can sometimes sound like a scold, Weld always seems on the verge of poking fun. When he moved into the statehouse, Weld replaced Dukakis' portrait of Revolutionary hero Samuel Adams with one of James Michael Curley, the notoriously corrupt Boston mayor who once campaigned from prison. This summer the Governor pulled what an aide called a "pure Weld" when, after the signing of an environmental bill, he leaped fully clothed into the Charles River.

[NJCher]

1. good to know this

Weld was tough competition. He had some real selling points, not just a team that knows how to spin dubious accomplishments into some sort of "policy."

Thanks for the reminder, A_C.


Cher