Joe Q. Public

As Kennedy leaves office, will he play a new kind of politics?

Talking Politics by Michael Crowley

The breathless coverage last week of Joe Kennedy's decision to leave Congress told a story mainly of endings, conclusions, political sunsets. Kennedy, the wounded soldier, was limping away from politics, at least for now. In the Boston Globe, David Shribman declared: "No Kennedy has ever done such a thing. And by stepping out of the political spotlight in mid-career and at middle age, Kennedy, 45, ineluctably signaled -- and then accelerated -- the gradual eclipse of this remarkable family."

But is this really the perspective we should take on Kennedy's farewell to the Eighth District? In fact, the heart of his Friday speech was strikingly forward-looking. Kennedy didn't so much close a door on his political past as open one to his political future.

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Forgotten man

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"I look forward to a dynamic life at Citizens [Energy] and in the private sector," he said, referring to the nonprofit heating-oil company he founded 18 years ago. "I have a strong belief that new and innovative solutions to many of our country's serious problems must come from the private sector and not just the government."

"I believe that public service is not limited to public office," he said.

Remarkable words, coming from a Kennedy. After all, an entire generation still has misty-eyed recollections of the way Jack and Bobby made government service a noble calling. You might say they made D.C. cool.

But the meaning of Joe's decision isn't as simple as the supposed fall of the Kennedy dynasty. It's true, as Shribman wrote, that no Kennedy has ever done such a thing. But maybe the Kennedys haven't changed -- politics have.

Washington is not the place it was when Jack Kennedy envisioned his idealistic New Frontier, or Bobby Kennedy imagined that the federal government could wipe out poverty from Watts to the Mississippi Delta. Gone is the will for the old brand of Kennedy activism.

Instead, deep caution reigns in the Capitol. Major social programs of the past have been deemed failures, and having emerged at last from a decade of crippling budget deficits, nobody wants to risk going back.

As a result, power is shifting from a paralyzed Washington to the states. From crime prevention to welfare reform to education, big decisions are increasingly being made in the state house, not the White House. Bill Clinton is left to govern with Chiclet-size initiatives. And can you name the last significant law passed by Congress?

As power has migrated, the stars of politics have followed. A decade of exodus from Washington has left 42 of the stodgy Senate's seats filled by first-termers. In the House, 180 members have called it quits since 1992. Fundraising pressures and a scandal-driven culture are big factors, but so is the loss of influence. As the New York Times recently reported, many rising young pols are concluding that "they could make more of a difference serving in their state legislatures than in the United States Congress."

For Joe Kennedy, the final decision to leave Congress was foremost a personal one, rooted in family responsibility and the death of his brother Michael.

But even before this year of turmoil and tragedy, he knew that Washington in the late 1990s was the wrong place for a liberal with an ambitious agenda. That's why he planned to run for governor in the first place.

His chance at the governorship is gone for now. But Kennedy can still be a major player in the state if he wants to. He will find it far easier to have an impact in the mercurial atmosphere of Beacon Hill than he did on a tediously centrist Capitol Hill. It doesn't take much to shift the tides of Massachusetts politics. A handful of grisly crimes can almost reverse the state's position on the death penalty. A Patriots winning streak can shift the debate on a multimillion-dollar stadium subsidy. And a private citizen like the antitax activist Barbara Anderson, who has never held elective office, can almost single-handedly cow legislators into paying fealty to her tax-slashing demands.

Nobody really knows how Kennedy will spend the next few years. But he wouldn't need a political office to become one of the state's leading figures. Unbeholden to any constituency, free from institutional gridlock, Kennedy could make himself into a new kind of political leader.

Boston Herald columnist Wayne Woodlief has suggested that Kennedy could become a "shadow governor," hounding Paul Cellucci (the current front-runner in the governor's race) with a liberal voice of conscience. It may be the role for which he is best suited. Even without an official platform, Kennedy can inject himself into any policy debate he likes, and the news media will listen.

That's not just good news for liberals, it's good for state politics as a whole. Perhaps throwing a Kennedy into the mix will wake up a bored electorate. What better way to lure folks back to dry but crucial policy questions like worker training than with that instantly recognizable grin and that tumbleweed of gray hair?

These days, you don't even have to be a crusading partisan to be a leader. Kennedy could emulate former president Jimmy Carter, who emerged from a disastrous presidency to become one of the country's leading forces for charitable activism. Or Colin Powell, now a national symbol for volunteerism.

When he returns to the chairmanship of Citizens Energy, Kennedy will have millions of dollars of capital and a seasoned staff behind him. From this perch, he'll be free to pursue the "new and innovative solutions" he talked about on Friday. Think of the role, for instance, that Citizens could play in shaping the new energy and pollution-control measures the US will need as it struggles to comply with new accords on global warming.

Where Kennedy will take Citizens remains to be seen. But we've already caught glimpses of what Kennedy the Massachusetts activist might look like.

In a February 8 Boston Globe op-ed piece, Kennedy announced an ambitious "campaign to end child hunger" in Massachusetts, and lashed out at state political leaders for "tripping over one another to lure voters to them with big tax cuts. . . . Somehow, hungry children never quite make it into that spiel."

At a Boston conference on the state economy a month later, Kennedy presented a sophisticated worker-training and adult-education plan for the state. Again, he complained about the current political dialogue: "Absent from this debate is a serious and substantive discussion about what investments we need to sustain the strength of this economy."

Here is the candidate that never was. And now, perhaps Kennedy can become something like the governor that, at least in this election, he is not to be.

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.