Battling Romney
For decades, Ted Kennedy’s name on the Massachusetts ballot seemed enough to guarantee his victory. Though the nation’s Democrats had decided resoundingly in 1980 that they didn’t want a Kennedy presidency, Ted’s victory for the Senate in his home state time and again was a given. Until 1994. By then, his reputation as a womanizer and drunk had reduced him to a national joke and paved the way for his first real opponent in years: Mitt Romney, a wealthy forty-seven-year-old businessman making his first foray into politics. The son of former Michigan governor and onetime presidential candidate George Romney, Mitt had what Ted seemed to be lacking: He was a pious family man, raising five sons with Ann, his wife of twenty-five years. He’d complained so much about the bad example Kennedy was setting that one morning, in the summer of 1993, Ann finally turned to him and said, “If you don’t stand up and do something about it, then, you know, shut up and stop bothering me.”
In traditionally Democrat country, Republican Mitt “was positioning himself as a moderate, almost an apolitical candidate,” Ted later wrote. “He was pro-choice, he declared. But efficiency was what he really had to sell: sleeves-rolled-up, businesslike efficiency, to replace the senior senator’s outdated ways.” It was to be an expensive race: Ted would take out a two-million-dollar loan against his Virginia home and spend more than six million dollars on the campaign. By Labor Day, a Boston Globe poll found Mitt and Ted in a virtual tie. Ted realized he was no shoo-in for the post he’d held for thirty-two years, and his campaign strategy had to be updated. In a move that highlighted just how different Ted’s union with Vicki was compared with his first marriage to Joan, Ted asked Vicki for advice. She was not just a helper in his campaign, showing her pretty face and reading his speeches; she was a collaborator. When Mitt touted in ads that he’d created thousands of jobs, Vicki suggested to Ted and his campaign managers that they look closely at Mitt’s business record. She knew from her work as a bank lawyer that venture capitalists sometimes cut payrolls, “that there would be a lot of downsizing . . . a lot of restructuring of debts and that sort of thing.” At first, her suggestion didn’t seem to sink in with the advisers, so she even circled back to it to make sure it had registered. It did, and the campaign hired The Investigative Group, Inc., a detective firm, to probe Mitt’s company Bain Capital. The firm uncovered slashed jobs, wages, and benefits at a Bain-bought factory in Indiana, helping to bolster Ted’s campaign.
With Vicki at his side—as well as a few longtime aides, some of whom were resurrected from retirement to help—Ted was having fun campaigning. A Boston Globe story in June described him as “energized” and “feisty.” Taking issue with a Boston Globe column that questioned whether Kennedy’s charisma had waned after three decades in office, Kennedy pointed to his Senate committee’s passage of the nation’s most comprehensive health care reform measure and asked a campaign crowd, “Do I still have my charisma?”
Vicki went after women voters with vigor (or “vigah,” as the Kennedys would say). While Joan had hosted countless teas and spoken to women’s gatherings, Vicki was targeting a new woman—not just the stay-at-home mom who influenced her husband’s vote, but the working mom who balanced her professional world with her family and cared deeply about her community and its policies. “She was a natural,” Ted would recall. “As women in that group have since told me, she was one of them, swapping stories of working motherhood. . . . She listened to the stories of women who have since been her very good friends.” But Ted wasn’t the young candidate representing the New Frontier anymore, and Vicki wasn’t automatically hounded and adored the way that Joan had once been. In fact, plenty of young voters had no idea who Ted was. Some, when asked if they’d like to meet Mrs. Kennedy, replied, “No, thank you!” So Vicki would politely ask them for their vote anyway and move along.
With Mitt gaining on Ted in the polls, the senator beefed up his television commercials. Some had more bite than any he’d run previously. Ted liked to point out that in thirty-two years in politics, he’d never referred to his opponent by name. But this campaign, Ted called Mitt out, attacking his business practices and highlighting his campaign missteps. Vicki helped make that call: “It was important to talk about his opponent’s record,” she told Clymer, “because his opponent was running on his record. I mean, he put that in play. He said, ‘I’m a business man. I’ve done this, therefore I’m qualified to be your U.S. Senator.’ ”
For one commercial, Ted donned a white lab coat for a health care–related commercial. Vicki saw him and nixed it. The press reported that she thought the coat made Ted look fat, but, in reality, she said he simply didn’t look like himself. “It doesn’t ring true to me,” she said. “It looked like a costume as opposed to what he really was doing.” With Vicki’s Lebanese ancestry, Ted was able to reach out to a new ethnicity as well. One Lebanese grandmother pulled Vicki aside and quizzed her about Ted: “So, honey, is he good to you?” “Do you love him?” “Does he eat Lebanese food?” Vicki said yes to all three, and the woman said, “OK, honey, I’m gonna vote for him for the first time in my life.”
While Joan had always infused Ted’s campaigns with classical music, Vicki’s tastes could lean decidedly more contemporary. At an Aerosmith fund-raiser for Ted, the senator relied on his wife while writing a speech that managed to weave in several Aerosmith song references. The Boston Globe story reported a few of them, including how Ted “said he needed the help of Aerosmith because he wanted to ‘Walk This Way’ down to Washington.”
Mitt Romney failed to resonate with voters, and Ted proved impossible to beat. On Election Day, Ted won his seat by a margin of 58 percent to Mitt’s 41 percent. Later, as he and Vicki celebrated with friends and family, Ted shrugged off the toasts and congratulations being offered him and began, “Well, this victory really isn’t about me. It’s about my family, and it’s about the people of Massachusetts and their residual goodwill that goes all the way back to Grampa’s day—”
Vicki cut him off. “Please excuse my language, but BULLSHIT! This is just ridiculous!”
As Ted stared at her, she continued: “You know, Teddy, if you had lost, it would’ve been you that lost. It wouldn’t have been your family that lost. You would’ve lost. You won. You won! Not your family. You.”