Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 10, 1994 TAG: 9410110011
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GAIL COLLINS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Twenty Head Start pupils are sitting at his feet, looking interested but confused. Who is this big guy in the suit, anyway? And why are seven TV cameramen jostling behind them, treading on their fingers?
``Do you think the baby rabbits should play with the little fox?'' says Kennedy in his loud, Senate-debate voice. He is sitting in a low chair, in an expensive but wrinkled blue suit. His bulky figure is ramrod-stiff from the back brace.
All in all, the scene could not be more improbable, unless you had Barney the dinosaur shooting dice in the corner.
``Noooooooo!'' yell the children. Nobody wants the bunnies to go soft on foxes. Good thing the senator did not ask whether Daddy Fox should get the death penalty.
``Look,'' Kennedy tells them. ``We're supposed to represent the party of optimism.''
Well, the pundits do say he's out of touch with the younger voter.
After 32 years in Congress, Ted Kennedy is in a tough race, running neck-and-neck with a 46-year-old Republican businessman. According to the polls, the problem is not the drinking or the scandals. People just aren't sure they want to keep seeing the same old senatorial face into the next millennium.
``I don't think 62 is too old, do you?'' Kennedy asks the senior citizens at a lunch program in a working-class town near Boston.
``You're still looking good, Teddy!'' somebody yells.
This is an affectionate lie. In fact, some of the seniors waiting for their free hot meal look a lot better than Ted Kennedy does. His eyes are tiny and red, his skin mottled, his face lumpy and swollen.
``He wasn't around all that much for the last six years,'' says a Boston reporter. ``Then all of a sudden he was back, and he'd changed.'' One of his opponent's ads shows Kennedy, who suffers from a bad back, trying slowly and painfully to squeeze himself behind a table.
The danger is not that voters will look at Kennedy and see long nights in the barroom. The worst scenario is that they will regard him as a walking illustration of fat in the budget.
``Everybody's looking at the bottom line, but sometimes you have to put some value on relationships,'' he tells the seniors. In a brief speech, he manages to propose at least four expensive new initiatives, including Medicare coverage of podiatrists' bills. He also mentions that his mother is 104 at least a dozen times.
``Long-term care is a matter of passion to me,'' he adds. ``I see it every day with my mother. Who is 104 years old.''
It's all so '60s. Hobble-legged, stuffed into last year's suits, Kennedy is running around Massachusetts talking about unmet needs and new programs. He is perhaps the only member of the U.S. Senate who is not trying to hide the fact that he thinks government is a good thing.
``The agenda Ted Kennedy took to Washington 32 years ago had a big heart, but it didn't work,'' says Mitt Romney, his opponent.
Romney's TV ads are harsh, but in person he is careful not to say anything too mean. Voters may not be sure they want to keep Kennedy, but about 57 percent tell the pollsters they approve of the job he's been doing.
Romney, the son of a former Michigan governor, is prepared to spend a whole lot of money reminding voters that he is everything their senator is not. Pro death penalty. Fiscally conservative.
Thin.
``One hundred seventy-six pounds! Almost 6-foot-2!'' he tells a radio reporter cheerfully. Romney, who has no known vices, looks like a guy who has never experienced either ill health or a bad hair day.
His problem is that voters may look at his lean figure and think downsizing.
Romney is a venture capitalist - one of those guys who buy companies, reorganize them and eventually sell them again to somebody else.
His firm's latest acquisition is a factory in Indiana that makes stenographer's notebooks. As soon as the deal was signed, all the workers were fired. Most of them were rehired at lower pay, with worse health coverage and no company pension plan. The ones who weren't invited back, including most of the people out on sick leave, got no severance.
A couple of weeks ago, a man from Kennedy's ad agency was down in Indiana, sniffing around.
``I don't know Kennedy,'' said an official from the paperworkers' union. ``But I know Romney. We'll be in your ads.''
This week, when Massachusetts viewers are not watching ads about how their old, fat senator is soft on crime, they can see a veritable miniseries of commercials about how Mitt Romney screwed his workers out of their health benefits.
``He puts profits before people,'' says Kennedy. To be fair, the senator has never had to meet a payroll in his life.
The new ads have given the Kennedy campaign a huge lift. Maybe their man can't get into the swing of the anti-government mood. But he can remind people what it was about business that made them turn to government in the first place.
Gail Collins writes for Newsday.
Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
Keywords:
POLITICS
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