THE GOOD FIGHT

By James Graff

While many Americans have tuned out the presidential campaign, voters in Massachusetts are holding their breath, almost reluctant to choose between Democratic Senator John Kerry and Republican Governor William Weld in their race for the Senate. Massachusetts voters are feeling a little like children caught in a divorce. Instead of fighting, they ask, why can't the candidates just stay where they are?

That's what Kerry would prefer, but it would deny the state a race that should be the envy of voters everywhere. The Kerry-Weld battle has it all: two strong candidates, seven debates, a serious discussion of issues like taxes and crime, even an agreement by both candidates to limit campaign spending.

The race has suspense as well. At the moment, Kerry is dead even with Weld in a traditionally Democratic state where Clinton leads Dole by more than 20 points. Kerry may have spent the past 12 years in the Senate, but he enjoys few of the advantages of incumbency. Instead, Weld is the candidate whose views and personality the voters know best. (They re-elected him in 1994 with 71% of the vote.) While Kerry is well regarded for chairing complex Senate subcommittee hearings on issues like drug trafficking in Central America and for leading the effort to track U.S. soldiers missing in Vietnam, he is also seen as a politician who swoops back into the state only at election time.

Weld and his record are closer to home. He's the guy who took over a state that was demoralized and nearly bankrupt after Michael Dukakis' tenure and proceeded to balance the budget six years in a row while cutting taxes 15 times. More than Kerry, Weld is the candidate who can claim to have presided over an economy that is performing better than that of almost any other industrial state. In 1991, Weld's first year, Massachusetts' unemployment rate was one of the highest in the nation. Last week the state hit a seven-year low. "John's forte has been Nicaragua and the Caribbean, which doesn't exactly dominate the conversation at the coffee shops," says Weld.

Weld may look and sound more like a coffee-shop regular, but his pedigree is more aristocratic than Kerry's. Both candidates hail from old money--one of Weld's ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence, and Kerry descends on his mother's side from New England shipping magnates. Both graduated from prep school into Ivy League colleges. But while Weld moved on to Oxford and Harvard Law, Kerry went to Vietnam and returned with a chestful of medals and enough firsthand disillusionment to lead 5,500 vets in a 1971 antiwar march. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry caught much of the country's mood: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

If Kerry can sometimes sound like a scold, Weld always seems on the verge of poking fun. When he moved into the statehouse, Weld replaced Dukakis' portrait of Revolutionary hero Samuel Adams with one of James Michael Curley, the notoriously corrupt Boston mayor who once campaigned from prison. This summer the Governor pulled what an aide called a "pure Weld" when, after the signing of an environmental bill, he leaped fully clothed into the Charles River.

His affability helps sugarcoat fiercely conservative fiscal policies that might otherwise be a tough sell in a state where only 13% of the voters are registered Republicans. Weld cut benefits to the poor, hiked tuition rates at state universities and passed an austere welfare-reform plan a year before Congress caught up. All but two of his tax cuts have benefited businesses rather than individuals, and his decision to accept money from political-action committees looks all the worse since Kerry turns down those contributions. It doesn't hurt that Weld courts confrontation with the national Republican Party, as he did when he threw a fuss over being banned from giving a pro-abortion rights speech at the G.O.P. convention this summer.

Weld's version of triangulation--positioning himself between both parties--does not always succeed. He caused a fury in late 1994 when he rewarded Democratic legislators backing his capital-gains tax cut with a big salary hike. His reliance on old-style patronage was evident in June 1995, when he threw his support behind an anachronistic state mandate that only off-duty police officers be hired to oversee roadwork.

Weld has trouble fighting the perception that he wants to go to Washington because he's bored on Beacon Hill. "Right now, the fights that matter most...are in another arena--Congress," he said when he announced in November 1995. He was still happy then to declare himself Newt Gingrich's "ideological soul mate," a statement Kerry highlights every chance he gets. Weld counters by trying to tag Kerry as a liberal, as if that were a deadly liability in a state whose other Senator is Ted Kennedy. The Governor has hit his opponent hard for voting to protect disability payments to drug and alcohol addicts. In fact, Kerry is two ticks to the right of Kennedy. He led the legislative battle for the centerpiece of Clinton's crime bill--putting 100,000 more cops on the street--and he voted for the welfare-reform bill.

Starting with his most recent debate with Weld, Kerry has ditched his gentlemanly detachment and fired off a few zingers, although nothing personally nasty. His numbers, which had been sliding, have stabilized. Weld, after huffing and puffing his way through a 5-K race in Quincy, was overheard telling a supporter as he chugged a bottle of Power-Ade, "It's a dead heat. And that's pretty disconcerting." Except to lovers of political suspense.