Posted on 07/27/2002 9:00:07 AM PDT by Theodore R.
The Next Kennedy Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's campaign for the Maryland statehouse . . . and beyond. by Matt Labash 08/05/2002, Volume 007, Issue 45
BALTIMORE On a June afternoon, the streets of Baltimore sweat like the inside of a humidifier. But the shirt-clinging stickiness does not hamper Maryland's lieutenant governor, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. As befits a member of the tribe of Robert F. Kennedy (now 51, Kathleen is his oldest child), she has no discernible body fat and is an avid outdoorswoman who once climbed the Matterhorn in the snow. At the run-down Arena Playhouse, she plows through the door, all thatch and teeth and factory-issue Kennedy vigor.
Trailing behind her is Maryland's fireplug senator Barbara Mikulski, as well as Martin Sheen, a longtime friend of the Kennedy family, who is introduced as "the real president" since he plays a tastefully liberal commander in chief on television's "The West Wing." Both are campaigning for Townsend in her quest to become Maryland's next governor this fall. The lobby fills with well-wishers and journalists. In broken English, a Japanese reporter asks Townsend how it feels to be regarded as one of the only successes left in the Kennedy family. She cocks her head, then affectionately cups his face. "I guess it's better than the alternative," she says. "No success."
Inside, the teenage members of an inner-city after-school dance/theater troupe go through their warm-up paces. Townsend's head juts up and down like a fishing bob, as the sound system blasts Michael Jackson. Not every Kennedy campaign would welcome a reporter from a conservative political magazine to watch its candidate's every move. But as I run into Alan Fleischmann, Townsend's personable chief of staff, he acts as if they've just won a contest. "We're delighted you're writing about Kathleen," he says, directing my attention to a recent National Review piece that praised the scandal-free, moderate Townsend as a Kennedy conservatives "do not have to abhor."
Around Annapolis, Fleischmann is known as everything from "Rasputin" to "The Nanny" for his interjections and interceptions whenever difficult questions, and sometimes not so difficult ones, are directed his boss's way. One wouldn't expect to find him in action here. First, this is a low-pressure gig, a goodwill tour in which Townsend is supposed to introduce Sheen while taking victory laps for funding this particular after-school program. Second, this is the ideal Kennedy milieu, with all the celebrities and chipper, at-risk children.
After her introduction, Sheen takes the stage. He talks to the amateur thespians gathered at his feet about their "craft," trying awkwardly to speak their language: Shakespeare, he says, "is like the rap of its day." As Sheen expounds on his MC Shakespeare theory, Townsend's eyes dart nervously and habitually to Fleischmann, who, like a third-base coach, gives her visual and verbal cues, though none seem necessary since the only task at hand is not falling off the stage.
As the program concludes, Sheen and Townsend take a seat on the floor, surrounded by the children, who sing-shout a spiritual, "Hosanna, Forever We Worship You." A devout Catholic who often discusses matters spiritual, Townsend shows no concern over the commingling of church and state. She and Sheen join in, attempting to clap with the children. The children clap. Then the visitors clap. One girl tries to give Sheen an on-the-spot rhythm tutorial, until the hopeless Sheen collapses in laughter. But Townsend doesn't even notice. She lumbers along in erratic clip-clops like a wounded Clydesdale, happily off the beat.
In many ways, Townsend has spent her entire life clapping off the beat. She became the only Kennedy to lose an election when she ran for Congress two years after moving to Maryland in 1986. In a family where everyone was expected to wait their turn, but females never got one, she is the only Kennedy woman to hold elective office--as Parris Glendening's lieutenant governor since 1994. Then there are the nicknames differentiating her from the rest of the clan, everything from "Clean Kathleen" to "The Nun," which the married mother of four briefly considered becoming.
Of all the RFK idolaters--more than her siblings, more even than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.--Kathleen is said to hold her father dearest. Sixteen years old when he was killed, she was mature enough to know that she lost not just a dad, but what one biographer described as the Kennedy who most defined Kennedyness. She was old enough to appreciate his civil rights stances, his melancholic post-JFK soul-searching, his strict regimen requiring his children to recite current events and poetry at dinner, and his exhilarating adventures in which he'd lead his brood hurtling down ski slopes, through white-water rapids, and along a backyard zipwire set up by Uncle Jack's Green Berets at Hickory Hill, the Bobby Kennedy estate in McLean, Virginia.
Kathleen was also cognizant of how far her family fell, when, after her father's death, her mother Ethel melted down, losing all semblance of control over Kathleen's wayward siblings. The family's numerous animals, including a pet pig, were allowed to defecate indoors. Her late brother Michael (who died skiing into a tree) was known to answer the phone with the words, "Confusion here." Many of her brothers became so trouble-prone and drug-addled (David died of a heroin overdose in 1984) that Aunt Jackie made efforts to keep her children far away.
As Townsend told the authors of "Growing Up Kennedy" in 1983: "There was great pressure from Daddy on us to do well. Mummy just couldn't do that. She had her hands full just bringing them up. He was someone you could turn to, play with, and talk to. . . . After he was gone, the atmosphere changed. Basically, there are two aspects to being a Kennedy. The first is that the family has been given a lot and should give a lot in return. The second is that the Kennedys are famous. Without Daddy, the focus tended more to the second."
By all accounts, Townsend handled the pressure and the grief as well as or better than anyone in the family. She internalized the RFK creed ("a Kennedy never cries"), along with the words of Hickory Hill's house poet, Aeschylus: "In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."
"She was very grown-up by 16," says RFK speechwriter Adam Walinsky, a longtime friend who talked with Kathleen the night before the funeral. "She was looking around, trying to make sense of this spiritually, politically, in every other way. That's a tough way to grow up. You've given your father over to public service, then he gets murdered. That's not a prescription for a stable childhood. It seems to her enormous credit that she came through absolutely solid. I've never heard her complain."
But even if Townsend's predominant selling points are her stoicism and moral rectitude (she spent the weeks after her father's death, in tribute to him, teaching children on a Navajo reservation), she has become the 7-Up of politics: Like the refreshing soft drink nicknamed the "Un-Cola," Townsend has been called the "Un-Kennedy," defined not by what she is, but what she isn't. As Kennedy-watchers will note, Townsend has not parked any dates at the bottom of Poucha Pond (Uncle Teddy). She has not slept with a 14-year-old babysitter (brother Michael), had a messy divorce (brother Joe), or a nasty drug habit (brother Bobby). She has not been accused of raping anyone on a beach (cousin Willie), murdering anyone with a golf club (cousin Michael Skakel), or throwing a security guard through a metal detector, trashing a yacht, and acting like an all-purpose ass (cousin Patrick).
In most families, not doing these things would merely be considered a baseline indicator of fitness for office. In the Kennedy family, it's considered nothing to sneeze at. "She enjoys all the benefits of the Kennedy name," says one family intimate, "but she doesn't have the baggage, because she's not one of the womanizing, alcoholic men."
Instead, what Townsend is, is unremarkable. She serves in a medium-sized, unremarkable state where she occupies an unremarkable position (Maryland's constitution bars the lieutenant governor from assuming any duties not delegated by the governor). In a family in which even the runts are renowned for their charisma, hers is considered average. "It's not that she's colorless," former White House counsel Lanny Davis once said. "But she is not colorful. She is normal." Still, for all her unremarkableness, a remarkable thing has happened: Deservedly or not, Townsend seems to be on everybody's short list for stardom.
Since the day she was elected on the ticket of her patron Glendening (who didn't know her well at the time--she had served in unremarkable positions in the Maryland Department of Education and the Clinton Justice Department), she has been considered a favorite to become governor. ("Go for it!" said Oprah.) At the Democratic Leadership Council, where they mint triangulated, third-way politicians, president Al From called her "among the brightest young stars in the New Democrat movement." Bill Clinton himself speculated that "maybe someday I'll be knocking on doors for her when she's running for national office."
That someday seems to be inching ever nearer. Not only was Townsend regularly touted throughout 2000 as vice-presidential material ("Bobby's girl could lead Al Gore to the White House," panted one headline), but she is already being mentioned as a VP frontrunner for 2004. That is, if it's not beneath her. In magazines from Newsweek to Parade, Townsend has even been discussed in the same hallowed breaths as Hillary Clinton as a possibility to become our first female president. Former DNC chair Ed Rendell has already expressed hope that he will end up "chief of staff in the Townsend White House."
All these premature coronations have left many longtime Townsend-watchers in Maryland baffled. Says a reporter who's covered her for years, "There's a real disconnect between her national reputation and that in the state, where it's quite mixed." Indeed, many are asking a nagging question before Kennedy groupies are permitted to hand over the nation's car keys: Regardless of whether Townsend can fend off her Republican challenger, four-term congressman Bob Ehrlich, is she qualified to be governor?
FOR A KENNEDY, there are few friendlier places to give a speech than the Council House in Prince George's County. Maryland, it should be noted, is commonly referred to as a Democratic state of middle temperament. Democrats enjoy a 2-to-1 registration advantage, and no Republican governor has been elected here since Spiro Agnew in 1966. Even so, Republicans can make it interesting by picking off moderates, as in 1994, when they reduced the Glendening/Townsend ticket to squeaking by on a margin of 6,000 votes.
To win, Ehrlich's camp figures it must not only beat Townsend in 21 of 24 counties, but also chip away her overwhelming margins in the liberal bulkhead population centers of Baltimore, Montgomery County, and Prince George's. Townsend, like any good Democrat or Kennedy, is banking on bringing out the elderly, the women, and African Americans.
With all the elderly, black women in the day room of the Council House retirement complex, Townsend's victory seems a foregone conclusion. Beside a Heimlich chart instructing seniors how to dislodge food that might go down the wrong pipe during a spirited bingo game, a poster announces, "The next governor of Maryland comes to Council House." The crowd is a swirl of rose perfume, peach-tinted glasses, and oversized earrings. I plunk down at a table of senior women, asking if they know who's running against Townsend. "We don't really care," says one. "I've always been with the Kennedy family. I'm just sorry the other one got killed in a plane crash--I had great hopes for him."
A procession of 17 local Democratic officials take the podium for the requisite pandering. When Townsend finally arrives after getting hung up in traffic, she apologizes with convincing sincerity to the patient seniors, who are looking forward to being served a slice of Camelot along with their light refreshments. Any Kennedy in election season knows to sprinkle in plenty of ancestral references, but Townsend skips to the money shot in her opening line: "I'm sorry I'm late. I have to tell you that my grandmother Rose always said be on time. She's looking down from heaven right now, and she's not pleased." The seniors, naturally, are.
Townsend has come to launch her prescription drug initiative, which promises to reduce the cost of medications for uninsured seniors by at least 28 percent. As she finishes her spiel, voters reciprocate with hugs and origami flowers they've made during craft time. Just for sport, I sidle up to Townsend, armed with yesterday's Baltimore Sun, in which a chain drugstore lobbyist decries the plan as untenable for pharmacies since it would reimburse only 90 percent of the drugs' costs. When I ask her about it, I expect her to shoo me like a fly with a boilerplate response, since I know nothing about the subject, and this is one of her pet campaign initiatives. She has surely anticipated most criticisms--or at least the ones from yesterday's paper.
Instead, her infectious smile does a slow fade. She looks as if she's just been asked to hand over her lunch money. She fumbles for words, saying her campaign has worked with lots of pharmacists, that they've really reached out, that, "Uh, basically, you know what, I can talk to you. But if you're really trying to get background, why don't you go ahead and talk to [one of her aides]." At that moment, a young, statistics-spewing aide snatches me aside and fills me in on cash-and-carry markets, dispensing fees, volume increases, and other specifics that neither I, nor Townsend, it appears, know anything about.
I am satisfied with her aide's answer, and don't plan to press the issue, when a few minutes later Townsend's press secretary, Len Foxwell, approaches me, saying, "Can I give Kathleen another chance to answer that question? She was distracted over there." I have been asked for many favors by political staffs over the years: to keep their member on background, to send them a copy of a piece in which they're quoted, to never call again. But I've not been asked for a mulligan. "Uhh, yeah, okay, I guess," I assent.
Anxious for her to "close the loop" on her do-over, Foxwell grabs Townsend, whispers some talking points, and sends her back my way. Scratching her head tentatively like someone who has just crammed for an oral exam, Townsend begins, "On the record, you want to ask the question, 'How are we going to pay for this?'" Actually, we were on the record the first time, but yes. Foxwell helpfully restates the question. "First of all, wait," she says shakily, "We're the richest state [pause, start over], highest family income state in the country, one of the lowest child poverty rates, I think we can find in our budget the $8million to pay for this."
Because of Townsend performances like this, Bob Ehrlich, a moderate Republican from a lunchbucket suburban district in Baltimore, is licking his chops. He has challenged her to debate early and often, and when I ask her if she has any plans to debate, she says she does, but that they first have to get through primary season (she's running unopposed). Even Townsend laughs when Foxwell adds, "Ross Pierpont is a dogged campaigner."
Pierpont is Ehrlich's Republican competition, if you can call him that. He is an 84-year-old retired physician and fringe candidate who has run for nearly every office in the state and has lost, by his own estimate, "19 or 20" straight elections. He has lost to the best, and lost to the worst, and of those, he says Townsend "is the most inept candidate by a wide margin. She's an airhead of the first order. She's a trained bear. She has two or three people around her . . . I call them the 'babysitters' . . . telling her to open her mouth, to shut her mouth, to wave her arms. It's like training a bear."
To drive his point home, Pierpont has published an 18-page pamphlet entitled "Save Our State from the Costs and Consequences of More Kennedy Incompetence." He also releases Townsend's office personnel directory, which lists 15 people, by far the largest staff a Maryland lieutenant governor has ever employed. In fact, Townsend may be the only lieutenant governor in America to have a chief of staff, an assistant chief of staff, and two deputy chiefs of staff. Once when she met with the Frederick News-Post's editorial board, she showed up with so many staffers that the editors asked half of them to stand outside.
Here, it seems prudent to point out that Townsend graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, has a law degree, is an avid history reader, is married to David Townsend, a reputedly brilliant tutor in the St. John's College great books program, and has herself authored several thoughtful articles on religion, virtue, and voluntarism for the Washington Monthly going back 20 years. In short, Townsend is not stupid, though she often plays it on TV.
Earlier this year, when trying to make a good showing at the Preakness Stakes, she enthused to Baltimore's WBAL radio about the prospects of "Warmonger" (as opposed to "War Emblem," the name by which the Kentucky Derby winner is known to most). Asked to recount her favorite play after the Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl last year, she said, "I loved it when we made that football. The Giants had just made a football, and we came right back." Standing up for his boss, purportedly an alum of innumerable touch-football games at Hickory Hill, Alan Fleischmann said the noise on the field made it hard for Townsend to hear: "She knows football better than anyone I know. This is a woman who loves football."
But Townsend doesn't get into trouble only when she's talking sports. Two years ago, at an address to Hispanic activists, she spoke of the need to hire people who "speak Hispanish" because "Hispanic is an important language to learn." While addressing gay-rights supporters, she referred to a nearby statue of Thurgood Marshall as a "statute." Twice. One reporter wrote of having to explain to her what the word "fatalist" meant. Another wrote of her lip visibly quivering when he pressed her for her position on slot machines (her staff told him she hadn't been feeling well that morning).
To be sure, Townsend has improved a great deal since she arrived on the political scene. Once a dowdy dresser with thick glasses, she has gotten contacts and smartened up her look. In 1986, when running for Congress, she came off like a frolicking puppy, literally jogging door to door. (She was stomped by Helen Delich Bentley, a salty former journalist who dismissed as "crap" claims that the carpetbagging Townsend wasn't simply running on her family name.) In the spirit of her grandmother Rose, a perfectionist who used to return Townsend's childhood letters with red-penned grammatical corrections, Townsend has worked with speech coaches (she denies this when I ask her about it, until I indicate her staffers have already let the cat out of the bag).
Consequently, she is a maddeningly erratic performer. One day, she'll be flawless on Larry King or at the National Press Club. The next, she'll muck up the announcement of her running mate, retired Adm. Charles Larson--a party-switching Republican and former superintendent of the Naval Academy--by calling him "Lawson."
For Townsend's critics, recounting such gaffes has proven hard to resist. But Republicans are leery of drawing attention to them because of "the George W. and Lazio problems": Making hay over a Democrat's verbal mishaps while George W. Bush is president might be a doubtful "strategery." Rick Lazio, meanwhile, proved it is unwise to hit a woman. When he started beating up Hillary Clinton, a much less sympathetic figure than Townsend, in their Senate race, his numbers went south.
For the moment, the Ehrlich camp is left with a platform light on specifics (they say those are coming), and what Democratic state delegate Mike Busch, an Ehrlich friend and Townsend supporter, calls Ehrlich's "I'm not KKT" theme. ("If you don't want to see another 'President Kennedy'," Ehrlich's fund-raising letter warns, "I need your immediate support.") Indeed, the Ehrlich camp is rejoicing after Townsend's first ad, which they call the "Kathleen Created Maryland and On The Seventh Day She Rested" spot.
As Ehrlich's let-it-fly spokesman Paul Shurick says, "I was afraid she was going to run around saying, 'I had nothing to do with this administration.' Now that she's taking credit for being in the wheel room, we're going to start attacking her on Maryland's problems. If she created Maryland, she created all of it, not just the good stuff."
Team Ehrlich has already begun tethering Townsend to her boss's excesses, such as the $900-million budget shortfall Maryland now faces, partly as a result of Glendening's profligate spending. For most Democrats, Townsend cannot run away fast enough. "I don't think Glendening wants to align himself with Glendening," says one. It would be hard to overstate just how unpopular the governor is. A technocrat without a personal touch, he is so boring that while other politicians had sandwiches named after them at an Annapolis deli, Glendening requested that his name be given to a Healthy Choice baked potato. Perceived as a classic big-spending liberal ("Parris Spendening" is a nickname), he's prone to flip-flops, and has ended his otherwise colorless tenure by ditching his wife of 25 years, then marrying one of his key aides. In a survey a few years ago measuring gubernatorial popularity, Glendening finished last, right behind Arizona's Fife Symington, who at the time was facing a 23-count indictment.
Here, however, Townsend (or her aides) has displayed considerable political skill. For eight years, she has remained a loyal foot soldier, while preserving her neoliberal poster girl status and absorbing almost none of the governor's negatives. In the 1998 campaign, it was Townsend who, in many ways, saved Glendening's bacon. Because she is so likable, she was front and center, even in his biographical ads. Her family's out-of-state fund-raising network ensured money flowed like water. (One local Dem says Townsend is a fund-raising "piranha"--she reportedly hit Clinton pal Nate Landow up for cash on the way to Al Gore Sr.'s funeral.)
Most important, when their campaign was floundering, it was Townsend who brought in longtime Kennedy hit man Robert Shrum. Three weeks before Election Day, Shrum cut ads portraying their Republican competitor Ellen Sauerbrey as a racist for voting against a "civil rights bill" that not only wasn't a civil rights bill but had even been voted against by the black House speaker. No matter, African Americans turned out in droves and voted for Glendening-Townsend by a 9-to-1 margin, deciding the election.
Also, wasn't there a news article yesterday that said the MD Troopers Association, who have never before endorsed a Republican, have endorsed Erlich?
Many Marylanders have been in the Democratic Party for generations, but have begun to realize that "It's not your father's democratic party." The 2-1 statewide advantage for the Dems is not actually how people vote. Bob Ehrlich really does have a chance, just not with the dependency or government worker groups, of which Maryland has a great number. He will win overwhelmingly with those contributing to the economy.
I grew up there and, in fact, lived a little more than a mile from Marvin Mandel's office. We used to see him from time to time when we went to the pharmacy in the same building. As my father put it: "He's a nice man...a crook but a nice man!".
Here, I'll hand you off to Don. He's got boat loads of stuff on the "Maryland Machine"!
J
Combined with the missing and dead vote they stole the election the first time Glendenning (current gov) ran by giving the Republican on the election board (1R, 2D's) a government job after certifying the fraud they commmitted.
People know KKT as the empty "head" she is, and there is a lot of dislike among those who mindlessly pull the D lever like I have never seen in this state before.
Deservedly or not, Townsend seems to be on everybody's short list for stardom.
Who is this *everybody*?
Surely not the voters of Maryland who phone talk shows!
It's the word "but" that changes everything. I think the same is geographically true of OR -- the majority of the counties are heavily Republicans, but it's the populous corridor of I-5 that keeps the Democrats entrenched there too. There's probably even a Republican zone in HA, but I don't know where it might be. Even VT might still have one or two Republican areas left.
I defy anyone to show me a stupider politician on his/her feet. She makes Quayle look like Mencken. The best way for her not to win is if she debates. Which she won't, IMO.
Please refresh my memory. After the first couple of weeks of the campaign, what did Quayle do that was dim-witted besides not challenge the incorrect spelling on the card handed him by the teachers in a school photo op? He may even have known how to spell potato, but was too polite to challenge the "authorities" in front of their students.
Do you think that the teacher who prepared the spelling cards was that ignorant or was Quayle set up?
He was a Republican. That's all that it takes with Big Media.
Read Scandal, by Ann Coulter and you will not have to ask the question ever again.
Glendening/Townsend didn't squeak by. They outright stole that election by keeping the polls open in Prince Georges County and Baltimore City past the mandated closing time of 8PM. Both of these regions are majority black, Democrat party areas where Democrats scream "racism" if Republican poll watchers should show up to see that the election is kept honest in these areas. Most are not even watched because Republican poll watchers fear for their own personal saftey should they set foot in these areas. The DemonRATS jack up the vote totals without any fear of being caught. Just watch this November; when Townsend is behind by five or six thousand votes, suddenly around 12 or 1 AM she will be ahead by that amount. DemonRATS will claim that the polls needed to be kept open because the "lines are too long" and everybody should get a chance to vote. That's how it's done in the People's Republic of Maryland. I live here and I've seen it happen.
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