At a street corner in a gritty Boston neighborhood, a truck driver leans out his window and hollers a question at congressional candidate Raymond Flynn. "Hey, Ray! Can I have a job if you get in?"
Flynn, the former Boston mayor, jogs over to the truck. "Sure," he says with a laugh. "I appreciate your support."
Trading jobs for votes may be one Boston tradition that's fallen by the wayside, but the city's politicians still do most things the old-fashioned way. There aren't many other places in America where a candidate can declare himself an "unabashed, unrepentant, unreconstructed liberal"--and leave most of his opponents wishing they'd come up with the line first. But Massachusetts' Eighth Congressional District isn't like anyplace else. Encompassing nearly half the city of Boston, all of what locals call the People's Republic of Cambridge, and several limousine-liberal suburbs, the Eighth has sent just three Congressmen to Washington since 1946: John F. Kennedy, former House Speaker Tip O'Neill and Joseph P. Kennedy II. It is a shrine to old-school liberalism and one of the safest Democratic seats in the country. And so, when Joe Kennedy announced his retirement earlier this year, it wasn't long before 10 local Democrats had swarmed into the race to replace him.
Which would be great news for the district's voters--if there were more to distinguish one candidate from another. But almost all of them are as "unreconstructed" and predictable in their liberalism as George Bachrach, the former state senator who made the remark during a televised debate last week. In fact, the most prominent contenders for the seat, Flynn and former talk-radio host Marjorie Clapprood, are known less for what they would do in office than for the controversial things they have done in the past. A once loved mayor with nearly universal name recognition, Flynn has a gift for working a crowd and a reputation for excessive drinking that was examined last fall in a front-page story in the Boston Globe. Clapprood is a raspy-voiced bleached blond who jumped from a stint in the state legislature to a gig as one of New England's most famous--and raunchiest--radio personalities. (On the air she once asked Fabio, the romance-novel cover model, if he has "big private parts.") The mayor of Somerville, Michael Capuano, showed strength in a recent poll, but the best hope for an upset may be a wonkish venture capitalist named Chris Gabrieli, who's spending his own millions to run a campaign focused on, of all things, policy ideas. Can his fortune beat their fame?
Flynn and Clapprood hail from two sides of the liberal tradition. An Irish Catholic who rose to prominence in the early 1980s as a populist champion of the working class, Flynn, 59, is an F.D.R. Democrat who's tight with organized labor. He left city hall in 1993 to serve for four years as Bill Clinton's U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, but he still sounds more like a ward heeler than a diplomat. "I've always been a fighter for the poor people of this city, and I'll continue to do that," Flynn says one morning as he waves at rush-hour traffic. It's a well-earned boast, but it isn't backed up by much in the way of new ideas. Asked what he'd do in Congress, Flynn ticks off a laundry list of Democratic perennials, like raising the minimum wage and increasing spending for early-childhood education.