Local boy is still the outsider at home

Gary Younge begins a four week journey from John Kerry's Boston base to George Bush's home town in Texas gauging the pre-election mood of America
Cobbled and quaint, Louisburg Square perches on fashionable and flush Beacon Hill, home to Boston's elite. In one corner stands a mansion as stately, tall and imposing as its owner, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

If you are looking for clues to why Mr Kerry's campaign has struggled and why he should not be counted out yet, there are few better places to start than his own front door.

Twice in the last eight years - in his 1996 senatorial bid and last year before the Democratic primaries - he has had to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars against this prime piece of real estate to inject cash into flagging campaigns. Both times he started as favourite, dropped behind and then clinched victory with a late spurt.

Outside the house is a space where a fire hydrant used to be. In 1997, after his wife, Teresa, racked up huge parking fines for blocking the hydrant, they had it moved, prompting citywide fury.

"You're talking about two of the most sensitive issues in the city," says Susan Orlean, a New Yorker writer who lives in Boston. "Parking and anything to do with the fire department, which is revered only second to the church. It could only have been worse if she'd asked a priest to bless it."

"The whole incident resonated as a sense of their entitlement and arrogance," says Jon Keller, political analyst for the local television station, WB56. "He's the least liked political figure in the state. Nobody around here has ever warmed up to him."

President George Bush once said: "I would say people, if they want to understand me, need to understand Midland [Texas]." If you want to know Mr Kerry, you need to know Boston.

And in the 2,147 miles and huge cultural and political gulf between Boston and Midland lies a large swath of the swing states that will decide which of these two men will have to win if they are going to become president. That is the journey I am making to gauge the mood of Middle America.

"The America I live in is the America of the cities," said New York-based intellectual Susan Sontag. "The rest is just drive through." So, with petrol at just over £1 a gallon making front page news, I am driving through. Heading from New England, over the Alleghenies, into the Midwest, around the Ozarks and into the heart of Tex-Mex, in the run up to what pollster John Zogby has termed the Armageddon election: "Each side predicts the end is near if the other side wins."

Boston is punctuated with evidence of Kerry's character, caste and past. There are the toilets of the plush Copley Plaza hotel where his grandfather went shortly before lunchtime on November 23 1912 and shot himself in the head after losing his third fortune; the Klivert and Forbes cookie stand in Quincy market, set up by Mr Kerry and his socialite friend, Dun Gifford, using their mothers' maiden names and secret recipes; and the North Station where Mr Kerry joined 100,000 other Bostonians on November 7 1960 to greet John Kennedy as he went to deliver his last speech before the 1960 election.

But none of that emotional energy and enthusiasm, with which Boston embraced Kennedy, is evident today. Go to Hope, Arkansas (ancestral home of Bill Clinton) in 1992, or Russell, Kansas, in 1996 where the huge grain silo announced "Home of Bob Dole" (the Republican candidate of that year), and you could witness the civic pride borne from a native son who had become a presidential contender.

Come to Boston now, however, and you are struck by the blend of ennui and indifference that the local boy is up for the big prize.

As a three-term senator who has won the Democratic nomination they clearly respect him. "He's been elected and then reelected, so he obviously must be doing something right," says Mr Keller. "He's a smart liberal in a state with a lot of smart liberals."

The trouble is they don't really like him. "The main thing I like about John Kerry is that he's not George Bush," says Jo-Anne Granger, a retired schoolteacher, who lives in the Boston area. "He hasn't always done things the right way but he's thoughtful and very bright and I was impressed by the things he said when he came back from Vietnam."

But in a city that is both clannish and clubby, he remains an outsider in almost every sense. This is not entirely his fault. He did not grow up in Boston. Thanks to his diplomat father, he went to private school in Switzerland and then to St Paul's prep school in New Hampshire.

In 2001, at a testimonial for the late Congressman Joe Moakley, who represented a tight-knit community in South Boston, Mr Kerry said: "I felt a pang as I listened to him talk about the lessons learned in that community. Because one of my regrets is that I didn't share that kind of neighbourhood ... We moved around a lot."

Despite his high birth he did not inherit great means, which placed him outside the Boston upper class crowd. And his senatorial career has been dwarfed by the dynastic reputation and bold style of Edward Kennedy, who has been representing Massachusetts in the senate for more than 40 years. "It's like living in the shadow of the Hapsburgs in Vienna," says Richard Parker, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

"The one thing he did have in his favour was that everyone thought he was Irish," says Mr Parker. That was dashed last year when Mr Kerry learned from reporters that his grandfather's real name was Fritz Kohn, an Austrian Jew who changed it to avoid anti-semitism. He picked Kerry by sticking a pin in a map.

In the US, this is not necessarily a problem. Mr Bush has refashioned himself from a north eastern blueblood to a Texan everyman. With few established roots, Mr Kerry has also had to craft his own narrative as he goes along.

The trouble is that few people in Boston know what he has reinvented himself as, and very few of those who think they do understand actually like it. Mr Bush is a brush cutter; Mr Kerry a windsurfer. A poll this year revealed that while most would rather have Mr Kerry teach their children, they would prefer Mr Bush at their barbecue. In presidential elections, these perceptions count. "I know those things shouldn't matter, but they really do," says Melissa Enright, who lives in the city's Brookline area. "This is someone you're stuck with for the next four years and you want to feel good about it."

"He's not their boy in the way Ted Kennedy is," says Ms Orlean. "Politics here is very in-bred, and he's a solitary figure with the determination of leadership and without any of the human instincts to connect to people."

Indeed, for the rest of America, Boston, Massachusetts, represents not just a city in a state but a cluster of cultural and political symbols in much the same way as Islington and Hampstead do in Britain. On his first trip to China, former secretary of state James Baker was asked whether he had been to a communist country before. No, he replied, only Massachusetts.

This is the stuff of caricature. The last four Massachusetts governors have been Republicans, and the current one, Mitt Romney, is a Mormon. And while Boston may have its fair share of Brahmins, it is primarily a gritty, working class city where African Americans, Hispanics and Asians outnumber whites.

But the caricature works. Bush's father pinned the "Massachusetts liberal" label on his Democratic challenger, Michael Dukakis, a former governor of the state, in 1988 to great effect. Now his son's team are out to do the same thing.

Mr Kerry is used to be being lampooned. Derided as "gorgeous preppie" by leftwing cartoonist Doonesbury, he was branded "a phoney" by ex-president Richard Nixon on previously classified tapes and taunted as "Live shot" around Boston for always hogging the cameras.

Back in 1972, shortly after Mr Kerry's anti-Vietnam protests had made him a national figure, such attacks helped to derail his bid to represent the mainly blue collar constituency of Lowell.

"People here saw him as a carpetbagger and an opportunist back then," says Kendall Wallace, who covered the campaign for the Lowell Sun at the time. And in troubling echoes of the current race Lowell adds: "And when he was attacked he didn't fight back." Mr Kerry went from a 54% to 21% lead in the polls to defeat. It was the last election he would ever lose.

In 1982 he was elected Massachusetts lieutenant governor and in 1984 he entered the Senate. His stiff, aloof manner almost lost him the seat in 1996 against the garrulous blueblood Republican, William Weld, who led Mr Kerry in the polls up to 10 days before voting day. The same thing happened in January, when two weeks before the caucuses in Iowa he was all but written off. "I'm a good closer," says Mr Kerry.

The question is: can he do it again? "A lot of people want to see a pattern here but those cases were very specific," says Mr Parker. "You're left wondering whether this is his eighth life or if he has used up all nine."

"People are hard wired differently and John doesn't seem to really focus until the final stages of the campaign," says Robert Reich, former secretary of labour in the Clinton administration and a lecturer at Brandeis university, who has known Mr Kerry for 25 years. "But I don't know that he has been in a race where the opponent will do almost anything and say almost anything to win. The issue now is, when faced with this kind of opponent, how ruthless can Kerry be?"

· Next stop: Derry, New Hampshire

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