With Republicans at risk of losing Senate seats in at least
Virginia, Alaska, New Hampshire, Colorado, and New Mexico, it seems
far-fetched to believe that the GOP could pick up a seat in
deep-blue Massachusetts. In fact, practically no one does believe
it — with the not insignificant exception of Jeff Beatty, the
homeland-security expert who is Sen. John Kerry’s scrappy
Republican challenger this fall.
Beatty wasn’t even supposed to get this far. The Republican
establishment, both in Washington, D.C. and Boston, preferred
another candidate, Jim Ogonowski. Ogonowski had surprised political
pundits by doing much better than expected in an October 2007
special election in the Fifth Congressional District. For many
Republicans, it was as simple as this: Beatty had run against
Democratic Congressman Bill Delahunt in 2006 and won just 29
percent of the vote; Ogonowski received 46 percent of the vote
against now-Congresswoman Niki Tsongas. Case closed.
The conventional wisdom left out some important context.
Ogonoswki ran for an open seat in the commonwealth’s least
Democratic district after the Democrats went through a divisive
primary. Beatty was campaigning against an entrenched incumbent in
more hostile territory. Now he is going to get another chance.
Ogonowski failed to collect enough signatures to qualify for the
primary ballot. Beatty easily made the cut
“The scary thing is that we’ve got a plan and we’re ahead of
schedule,” Beatty told me in an interview, citing $1.3 million
raised, 35,000 individual donations, and 2,000 volunteers as
evidence that his campaign is firing on all cylinders. But his
greatest assets, he argues, are his experience and the unpopularity
of both Kerry and Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.
A FORMER DELTA FORCE officer who earned a Purple Heart and Combat
Infantry Badge during President Reagan’s 1983 rescue mission in
Grenada, Beatty is a veteran of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Office
and has run his own anti-terrorism consulting firm.
His clients have included the Boston public schools and the
Massachusetts Port Authority, in addition to homeland-security
consulting for the Statue of Liberty and the Rose Bowl. He opposes
both Kerry’s vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq — “I would
not have voted for the war based on the information available and
believe John Kerry’s vote for the war wasn’t based on the merits”
— and the incumbent senator’s advocacy of a fixed timetable for
withdrawal. Beatty contends that Kerry wanted in then and out now
for reasons of political expedience.
Beatty hopes that by emphasizing his national-security
credentials and his domestic-policy platform of lower taxes,
drilling to increase domestic energy production, and curtailing
illegal immigration, he can score an upset. That’s a tall order,
but one thing to keep in mind is that while Kerry’s liberal voting
record resembles Ted Kennedy’s, his personal popularity and
election results don’t.
Every Republican who has ever challenged John Kerry has broken
40 percent of the vote. By contrast, in nine separate races only
two candidates — George Cabot Lodge in 1962 and Mitt Romney in
1994 — have ever broken 40 percent against Kennedy. Then Gov. Bill
Weld held Kerry to just 52 percent of the vote in 1996, while Bill
Clinton was stomping Bob Dole 61 percent to 28 percent. When the
dysfunctional Bay State GOP failed to recruit a candidate to run
against Kerry in 2002, a Libertarian managed to draw nearly a fifth
of the vote against him.
Beatty believes this is the first time Massachusetts will be in
reach for a Republican presidential candidate since 1984, when
Ronald Reagan ran up big margins in the Greater Boston area
suburbs. “We’ve seen the prequel in Deval Patrick,” he says of
Barack Obama.
Not coincidentally, 1984 was also the year when Kerry faced one
of his toughest challenges as he squared off with conservative
Republican Ray Shamie for the Senate seat being vacated by Paul
Tsongas. That year, Reagan won and Shamie lost but Beatty believes
2008 can be different. He points to a Zogby poll showing that when
voters are given his biographical information, he and Kerry are
virtually tied.
Yet the liberal Boston media is unlikely to help Beatty spread
his message and other polling indicates that both he and John
McCain are very much underdogs headed into the fall campaign. If
the Republican challenger isn’t leading yet in Louisiana, what hope is there in
Massachusetts?
If past elections are any guide, the Democrats will outspend,
outnumber, and outmaneuver the beleaguered Massachusetts GOP. This
is not the year to bet on Republican underdogs, and that includes
Jeff Beatty.
But then again, I was one of those pundits betting on Jim Ogonowski to win the primary.
