2020
ELECTIONS
Markey overcomes Kennedy challenge in
Massachusetts
The 74-year-old senator held off a primary challenge
from Rep. Joe Kennedy, while House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal also
defeated a younger Democratic challenger.
By
STEPHANIE MURRAY
09/01/2020
08:01 PM EDT
Updated:
09/02/2020 12:05 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/01/massachusetts-primary-markey-kennedy-407078
BOSTON —
Sen. Ed Markey beat back Rep. Joe Kennedy's primary challenge in Massachusetts
on Tuesday, striking a blow against the longtime Kennedy political dynasty and
notching a significant victory for the Democratic Party's left wing.
Voters
renominated Markey, who has held a seat in Congress since the mid-1970s, over
Kennedy, the 39-year-old grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, who attempted to take
on a sitting senator rather than wait for a spot in the Democratic hierarchy to
open up.
Kennedy
called Markey to concede the race shortly before The Associated Press declared
a winner, according to Kennedy campaign spokesperson Michael Cummings. With
about three-quarters of the vote tallied late Tuesday night, Markey had 54
percent of the vote to Kennedy's 46 percent.
Kennedy,
the scion of the state's best-known political family, was favored to win when
he entered the race a year ago, and many suspected Markey might retire to avoid
an embarrassing loss. But Kennedy became the underdog in the final weeks of the
campaign. And unlike other primary battles, it’s was Markey, the 74-year-old
incumbent, who morphed into the favorite candidate of young liberals taking on
the party establishment.
"Tonight
is more than just a celebration of a movement," Markey said in his victory
speech in Malden, Mass. "It is a reaffirmation of the need to have a
movement, a progressive movement, of young people demanding radical change,
demanding justice. A movement giving voice and power to young people when for
far too long they were ignored."
Markey also
said the intraparty battle was "fierce at times," though he praised
Kennedy's commitment to the commonwealth. Kennedy shared a similar message
during his concession speech after speaking with Markey.
"The
senator is a good man. You have never heard me say otherwise," Kennedy
said at his primary night event in Watertown, Mass. "It was difficult at
times between us. Good elections often get heated. But I'm grateful for the
debates, for his commitment to our commonwealth and for the energy and
enthusiasm that he brought to this race."
Another
incumbent prevailed in a House district in Western Massachusetts, where House
Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard Neal easily dispatched his young,
progressive opponent, Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse. He led by 20 points when The
Associated Press called the race.
Because of
their late spot on the primary calendar, Tuesday’s Massachusetts races likely
represented some of the final skirmishes between the establishment center-left
and insurgent liberal wings of the Democratic Party. The primary electorate was
been difficult to gauge — the state rolled out a coronavirus-inspired
vote-by-mail program for the first time this year, which may have resulted in
record turnout. Around 800,000 voters had already cast ballots ahead of
Tuesday, and state officials expected a substantial number of in-person voters
to turn out.
Once in the
shadow of his better-known colleagues, Markey used his work on the “Green New
Deal” and an endorsement from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to
develop a national profile over the past year and amass a powerful small-dollar
fundraising operation. Markey's strength lay with young progressives and
well-educated, suburban voters, many of whom voted by mail. Kennedy was banking
on support from voters of color in cities including Worcester, Springfield,
Lowell and Boston.
A series of
polls released last week showed Kennedy trailing Markey by a significant
margin, and the Newton Democrat scrambled to turn things around. Kennedy campaigned
for 27 straight hours last week, announced a last-minute endorsement from House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and sent members of his famous family onto the campaign
trail.
No Kennedy
had ever lost an election in Massachusetts, but the four-term congressman
entered the primary significantly behind in the polls.
Meanwhile,
at the House level, national progressive groups including Justice Democrats and
the Sunrise Movement eyed Neal as the next powerful Democrat to knock out of
office.
That energy
intensified after what Morse decried as an organized smear campaign against
him: Groups of College Democrats accused Morse, who is also an adjunct
professor at the University of Massachusetts, of behaving inappropriately
toward students. Morse apologized for his conduct; further reporting suggested
that the revelations were engineered to benefit Neal's reelection prospects.
Neal's
victory is a blow to the momentum coursing through the progressive movement.
Already,
one House committee chair, Eliot Engel of Foreign Affairs, was felled in a
primary, and Oversight and Reform Chair Carolyn Maloney, like Engel a New
Yorker, narrowly survived her own primary challenge.
A Morse
upset would have also ushered in generational change — Neal was sworn into
Congress in 1989, the same year Morse was born.
But with
Markey also successfully dispatching the primary challenge, both races
illustrated the power of incumbency in Massachusetts politics.
"It's
very hard to defeat an incumbent. We spend a lot of time on those moments when
incumbents have been defeated, but even when there's a Seth Moulton or an
Ayanna Pressley demonstrating how you can do it, the reality is, it's a very
difficult undertaking," said Peter Ubertaccio, a political scientist and
dean at Stonehill College.
Kennedy
gave up his House seat to run against Markey, and the rare opening drew nearly
a dozen Democrats to a crowded primary race to replace him. The expensive race
— candidates and outside groups spent a collective $4.4 million on television
advertising — was too close to call late Tuesday night. Jesse Mermell and Jake
Auchincloss were fighting for the lead among the seven-candidate field.
Rep.
Stephen Lynch, a moderate from South Boston, easily fended off a primary
challenge from his left from physician Robbie Goldstein, an infectious disease
specialist who staffed a Covid-19 intensive care unit at the height of the
outbreak in Massachusetts. Goldstein emphasized how he differs from Lynch on
health care issues, including abortion and “Medicare for All.”
One of the
sleepier primaries this cycle was in Rep. Seth Moulton's district, where the
congressman — who won his seat by defeating an incumbent, John Tierney — easily
defeated Democrats Jamie Belsito and Angus McQuilken. Moulton led with 77
percent of the when The Associated Press deemed him the victor on Tuesday
night.
James Arkin
and Ally Mutnick contributed to this report.
2020
ELECTIONS
The Unlikely Kennedy Who Ended the Kennedy
Dynasty
In losing his Senate race, Joe Kennedy III has freed
his family from a political burden it has struggled to escape.
By PETER
CANELLOS
09/01/2020
11:27 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/09/01/joe-kennedy-end-of-a-dynasty-407474
For most of
the 60-year history of the Kennedy dynasty, it’s been easier to imagine its
last act as coming in a burst of triumph, a spasm of violence or a
dream-shall-never-die promise of enduring hope. On Tuesday, however, what might
be the final note of this political symphony was written not in glory or
tragedy, but in numbers, the sad prose of politics.
The
74-year-old Markey, who was first elected to the House in 1972, was supposed to
be the type of proud, uncharismatic incumbent whom Kennedys routinely dispatch
to retirement homes or ambassadorships. Joe Kennedy’s grandfather, Robert,
famously ended the 18-year political career of New York Sen. Kenneth Keating, a
64-year-old Rockefeller Republican, without even moving to the state until
shortly before the election. In a 1962 debate, Massachusetts Attorney General
Edward J. “Eddie” McCormack Jr. told political neophyte Edward Moore Kennedy
that if his name had been Edward Moore, his Senate candidacy “would be a joke.”
The joke, of course, was on Eddie McCormack, who lost the Democratic primary,
69-30.
Those
victories were, however, a long time ago. JFK’s assassination will have its
57th anniversary this fall. It’s been more than 52 years since the murder of
Robert Kennedy, and 11 since Ted’s death from a brain tumor. Only voters old
enough for retirement have real-time memories of the Kennedy administration.
Even fewer feel the powerful sense of attachment that followed the Kennedy
assassinations—the belief that this family’s name was synonymous with
enlightened public service. And much of what remains in photos and video clips
of the once-famous Kennedy style is obnoxious to the public mood: Sleekly
dressed men with sometimes leering eyes, captive spouses, cocktails and
cigarettes.
Joe Kennedy
knew this. What made the 39-year-old grandson of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy
special was that he wasn’t like the Kennedys of the ’60s, at least in
personality. He had all the family’s looks and charm, and more native
intelligence than most of his kin. But he was also kind and deferential to his
elders, unassuming in his manner, studious in his approach to politics and
warmly conventional in his personal life.
He was
different from other Kennedys in part because he was raised to be, by his
divorced mother. She, and he, knew that if the Kennedy tradition of public
service were to continue it would require a different kind of standard-bearer.
He was raised for the job.
The irony
on Tuesday was not that the Kennedys finally got the electoral slap in the
face, the comeuppance, that they managed to evade after sex scandals and
Chappaquiddick. It’s that nice, earnest young Joe Kennedy somehow allowed
himself to get tangled up in a tired mystique that was ripe for a backlash and
offensive even to some of his closest relatives.
Joseph P.
Kennedy III was in high school when his mother wrote the book that effectively
destroyed his father’s political career.
His parents
had been divorced for two years when his father, U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy
II, the anointed successor to the family dynasty, tried to get their marriage
annulled. He was Catholic; his ex-wife, Sheila Rauch Kennedy, was not. He
wanted to marry his secretary. The only way to do so and remain in good
standing with the church was to claim that their marriage, despite the presence
of twin sons, had been invalid from the start.
To Joe II’s
apparent surprise, Sheila objected—so viscerally that upon receiving his
written request she was sick to her stomach. It was well-known that the church
had been granting annulments to certain rich, powerful Catholics who wished to
remarry. Joe II, seemingly oblivious to his privilege, regarded annulment as
simply the Catholic way of divorce. Sheila, the non-Catholic, set about
studying the matter, and discovered that an annulment meant the marriage had
never existed in the eyes of God. When she presented the facts to her former
husband, he replied, according to her account, “I don’t believe this stuff.
Nobody actually believes it.”
Damage was
done, and kept on being done. Four years later, in 1997, Sheila wrote her book
about the subject, casting herself as a well-meaning divorced mom, with no
serious resentment against her ex, who nonetheless refused to be tossed in the
dumpster by her former husband and the Catholic Church: “My concern was for my
children’s moral development. . .” The book, “Shattered Faith,” featured on its
cover a wedding picture of a lightly smiling Sheila and a broadly beaming Joe
II. Her dedication read: “For our children.”
Within a
year, Joe II announced he would not seek re-election to the House seat he had
held for 12 years. The decision was widely attributed both to the annulment and
the death in a skiing accident of his brother Michael, whom he had made his
successor as head of Citizens Energy, the non-profit company he founded to
deliver low-cost heating oil to needy families. Michael himself had been the
focus of a recent scandal over a longstanding affair with his children’s
teenage babysitter.
Those
weren’t the first reversals in Joe II’s life. The eldest son of Bobby and Ethel
Kennedy carried the burden of having been deeply affected by his father’s
death. His subsequent years included his expulsion from several private schools
and an accident in which he was cited for reckless driving and a young woman
was paralyzed. He was serving in Congress when his first cousin, William
Kennedy Smith, was accused of raping a woman at the family compound in Palm
Beach and later acquitted.
Bombastic
in manner, and clumsy with words in the same manner as his Uncle Ted, Joe II
confronted a fair amount of skepticism in his political career. He was hardly
the charismatic figure his father and Uncle Jack had been. But like his Uncle
Ted, he stuck his neck out for causes that other politicians shunned, such as
peace in Northern Ireland, the creation of the Community Reinvestment Act to
force banks to end discriminatory lending and his signature issue, the
provision of heating oil to needy families in cold parts of the country. In his
outspoken style could be seen both the power and detriments of entitlement. He
could seem obnoxious and courageous in the same breath.
Growing up
in the house Sheila bought in a middle-class area of Cambridge, overseen by a
diligent, attentive mother who nonetheless seemed wise to all the ways that
Kennedys could run amok, Joe III and Matthew were instilled with the modesty
that some others of the clan lacked. Joe III visited Hyannis Port in the
summers, drinking in the Kennedy aura and sharing in the family playfulness,
but then returned to Sheila’s more disciplined abode.
The young
man that emerged was both the perfect flower of the Kennedy political species—a
red-haired amalgam of Bobby and Jack, but with a quieter manner—and its
antithesis. Where Teddy had been caught cheating at Harvard and Joe II
struggled to obtain any sort of college degree, Joe III buckled down and
studied his way through Stanford and Harvard Law School before becoming an
assistant DA on Cape Cod.
When Barney
Frank announced his retirement from Congress, Joe III joined a crowded field to
replace him. Taking nothing for granted, he worked hard and met thousands of
voters face to face. His victory in 2012, with memories of Ted’s emotional
send-off still fresh in voters’ minds, was both an affirmation of the power of
the Kennedy name and a recognition of its limits: Joe seemed likely to succeed
as long as he followed his anti-Kennedy script, earning his way ahead,
respecting senior colleagues, taking pains not to appear presumptuous.
But a
certain presumptuousness—a willingness to use fame to give voice to the
voiceless—is built into the Kennedy image, and voters could only wonder if this
new-generation Kennedy was really a Kennedy at all.
Over four
terms in Congress, Joe III behaved like a scaled-down version of the family
archetype. He championed health care, like his Uncle Ted, but seemed content to
accept a lesser role on the crowded roster of Democrats scrambling to remake
the system. He raised his voice at times, particularly in delivering the
Democrats’ rebuttal to Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech in 2018. But he
was nothing like the passionate crusader that his former law professor,
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, has been in pushing progressive causes. At
times, he expressed a preference to spend more time with his young family: He
and his wife Lauren, a former law-school classmate, have a 4-year-old daughter
and 2-year-old son.
But being a
Kennedy means being perpetually groomed for greater things. Ted Kennedy
struggled with these kinds of expectations on a far grander scale. Like the
inheritor of a family business, he felt a responsibility to the hundreds of
high-profile minions—many of them eminent in their own fields—who had attached
their fortunes to the Kennedy name. Despite the inevitable fraying of family
ties in the absence of Ted’s unifying presence, and the competing ambitions of
some cousins, the family torch was being carried by Joe. Its fuel was ambition.
There was a real danger of it being extinguished on his watch.
In July of
2019, POLITICO’s Stephanie Murray reported that many Bay State Democrats
believed Markey was ripe for a takedown in the Democratic primary. It seemed
like a smart bet. Just a year earlier, Ayanna Pressley had routed long-serving
Rep. Michael Capuano in a district that covered Boston, Cambridge and
Somerville. Her appeal to generational change, diversity and a firmer
commitment to progressive causes mirrored that of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in
defeating Joe Crowley, a seemingly entrenched New York incumbent. Markey bore
more than a passing resemblance to Capuano and Crowley.
Markey’s
dilemma was also Kennedy’s: What if another young upstart took down Markey?
That person might be expected to hold the Senate seat for decades, while Joe’s
own sense of promise would fade as he passed through middle age. Kennedy’s
supporters put out word that Joe was open to challenging the incumbent. No
doubt many felt that Markey, staring at his 75th birthday, might prefer to be
handed a gold watch and key to K Street riches rather than go toe-to-toe with a
man 35 years his junior; plus, Markey would be handing the seat to someone he
evidently liked and shared his values.
This was
hardly an unlikely scenario. Markey seemed far more comfortable on the floor of
Congress than on the campaign trail. He had enjoyed 40 years of easy, pro-forma
re-elections to his House district north of Boston. When he advanced to the
Senate, in the special election following John Kerry’s elevation to secretary
of State, his victory was a tribute to his long years of service more than
dynamic campaigning. The race was the most lackluster for a highly contested
seat in recent Massachusetts history.
But
Kennedy, his advisers and many other people underestimated Markey’s vitality,
campaign skills and, especially, his sense of determination. Being put out to
pasture by a Kennedy seemed to him the greatest affront, the height of
indignity, and he made others see it that way, too. Soon, Markey was appearing
in ads shooting baskets with a panther-like agility that Donald Trump and Joe
Biden could only dream of; in recognition of Markey’s decades of support for
clean energy, none other than Ocasio-Cortez offered her endorsement, cementing
Markey’s position to Kennedy’s left—the key to a huge trove of votes in a
Massachusetts Democratic primary.
Kennedy,
meanwhile, struggled to articulate a reason for running. His politeness seemed
to prevent him from offering the most plausible answer, that Markey had lost
his effectiveness. Instead, he made oblique references to generational change,
while Markey essentially accused him of running a vanity candidacy, funded in
part by a PAC led by Joe II. Then, with his back to the wall, Kennedy played
the very card he had been raised not to play, the family legacy. If he had to
bear the burden of being a Kennedy, he seemed to believe, he might as well reap
the benefits. It was a disastrous calculation.
Ethel
Kennedy, Joe’s 92-year-old grandmother, cut a video for his campaign. Shot in
extreme closeup, as if someone shoved a cell-phone camera in her face, the
withered matriarch repeats, “I hope with all my heart you vote for Joe. . . He
reminds me of Bobby and Jack and Teddy.” Black-and-white photos of the Kennedy
brothers in their prime crawl across the screen. The presence of the rarely seen
Ethel and the vintage photos seemed to emphasize the vast number of decades
that had passed since Camelot. She is a living link, to be sure, but only in
the sense of the last survivors of D-Day or Iwo Jima, offering their frail
salutes at Memorial Day parades.
Suddenly,
Joe Kennedy became the candidate of the past, older than Ed Markey.
A few
states away, in New Jersey, Amy Kennedy, the wife of Joe’s cousin Patrick, is
making a surprisingly plucky campaign for a House seat against Democratic Party
turncoat Jeff Van Drew. But no one is comparing her to Bobby and Jack and
Teddy. She’s running as part of a more ordinary dynasty: Her father, Jerry
Savell, was an Absecon city council member. Patrick Kennedy, himself an
ex-congressman, appears only in a family photo with their kids. The race, which
once seemed to be Van Drew’s to lose, is now rated as a tossup. So Congress may
yet have a Kennedy family member in January.
Amy’s
victory, if it comes to pass, would only be further proof that the Kennedy
political dynasty, like the Kennedy mystique and all the sepia-toned memories
that it engenders, has reached its generational end. But the Kennedy legacy of
public service continues, not just in the person of Amy but in the causes
advanced by other family members, from the Shrivers’ Special Olympics, to Joe
II’s Citizens Energy, to Bobby Jr.’s global environmental campaign and more.
They stand as proof that Kennedys can play roles in public life without having
to don the clothes of their grandfathers.
And some
qualities once associated with the dynasty, forgotten in the fugue of privilege
and entitlement, haven’t lost their viability, either. Arguably, the Kennedys
practiced a form of charismatic politics that bridges the gap between today’s
anti-establishment populism and government as usual: The Kennedys were populist
believers in government. And Joe Kennedy’s talents seem too useful to slumber
forever in a law firm or on the board of his father’s energy non-profit. In two
years, Massachusetts’ popular attorney general, Maura Healey, is expected to
give up her job to run for governor. It would be a perfect venue for a skilled
lawyer and politician to prove himself to be his own man.
The Kennedy
dynasty is dead. Joe’s Senate loss places a 2020 marker on its gravestone. Yet
no one should be more relieved than the Kennedys. Now they are free to be
themselves and discover their own ways to make a contribution.
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