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As the campaign heats up, an old story about Kerry's Massachusetts days has been circulating in the national media--but as it turns out, only half of it has been told. It starts with Kerry arriving at a fund-raising event at the Irish American Association in a Boston suburb in 1996. State representative William Reinstein, the class clown of the statehouse, strode over to Kerry and introduced himself as Butchy Cataldo, a former legislator. Kerry, long mocked by local pols for spending too little time in the state, fell headlong into the trap. "Butchy!" he said, slapping Reinstein's back and telling him how good it was to see him again. The story spread like butter through the halls of the statehouse.
Reinstein died in 1998, but his daughter Kathi-Anne Reinstein remembers him telling her the tale. "My father was a complete comedian," says Reinstein, who now represents the district her father once did. But she says the rest of the story is more instructive. "Kerry and his office did call my father up and say, 'We're sorry. We get it. We're going to do better.' And anytime I have called John Kerry's office, they have been amazing. He's absolutely fantastic to me and my district."
Last year, after a police officer's widow in Reinstein's district had packed all her belongings, she was told she could not move into federally subsidized housing because she made $38 more than the maximum allowed. Reinstein asked Kerry's office for help. A staff member immediately called the woman and her son, Reinstein remembers. "The son called me in tears ... All of a sudden, [he's] getting calls from Senator Kerry's office. You don't understand how much that means." The woman was accepted into the housing complex. Today, whenever Reinstein sees Kerry, he always remembers her name.
Even in Lowell, where old-timers still resent Kerry's opportunistic first campaign so long ago, they give him credit for improving his human relations. "A lot of people thought he was aloof," says current mayor Armand P. Mercier. "But his staff was always there for us. He didn't let Lowell's needs go by the wayside." During the 1972 race, Mercier was head of the Lowell Housing Authority. Kerry, struggling for local credibility, asked to meet with him. Kerry arrived at Mercier's office more than an hour late, Mercier says, and the first thing he did was ask to use the phone. "I said, 'Actually, I do mind. I've been waiting an hour and a half,'" Mercier remembers. Fourteen years later, he saw Kerry again, at an event in Lowell. "He came right over to me and said, 'I'm on time, Armand.'"
Kerry will get Mercier's vote in November and, according to a recent poll that shows him 29 percentage points ahead of President Bush, enough others to carry the traditionally Democratic state. Says Mary Ann Richards of Lowell, speaking for so many others: "He doesn't spin my wheels, but I'm voting Kerry."