Cash and Kerry

...Nonetheless, Kerry is not yet sparking enthusiasm...

...The candidates expect to need more than $10 million apiece, which would probably make the race the most expensive of the cycle and could lead Kerry to tap the $760 million fortune of his wife Teresa Heinz, widow of catsup heir and Republican senator John Heinz...

...That is, Kerry will try to turn his own lockstep liberalism into an advantage by calling attention to the complexity of Weld's ideology...

...But Gingrich's person and policies are anathema (positives at 16 percent) in the Bay State...

...Kerry claims his campaign began with the announcement of his candidacy and that the money can be used should he so desire...

...You can't go back and find any votes in John's record that he'd be ashamed of or have a hard time explaining," says his longtime lead consultant, John Marttila...

...Kerry is a pure, party-line liberal Democrat...

...Weld has also tried to link Kerry to Michael Dukakis, whose negatives remain over 50 percent six years after he left office...

...That pricetag not only spawned a protest group with the menacing name Stop This Outrageous Project Now but also gave Republican governor William Weld a juicy target in his effort to unseat Kerry this fall...

...If the battle is between Weld and Kerry, Weld wins," says a Weld backer...

...Weld's positions on abortion and homosexuality have put him at odds with Republicans nationwide and have led some to call him a "libertarian...

...If the Kerry people are smart, they'll try a bit of jujitsu," says a close Weld adviser...

...Weld's strategy-to accentuate the personal-has three parts...

...Polls showed Kerry winning the first debate narrowly...

...Kerry pounced: "Yes, I've been opposed to the death penalty...

...Cast the race not as Weld versus Kerry but as keeping Weld in the State House versus losing him to Washington...

...Weld raised almost twice as much money as the senator in the first quarter of 1996...

...Heinz has Republican connections that go beyond her late husband's circle: She received an award from the liberal-Republican Ripon Society, on whose advisory board she sits, in 1994...

...Asked which national politicians Weld will call in to help his effort, campaign manager Virginia Buckingham replies, "None...

...Weld's policies are good reason for Democrats to vote for Kerry...

...That ideology is indeed hard to describe...

...That's wrong...

...If it's between Democrats and Republicans, Kerry wins it going away...

...Working against Weld are two big factors: first, the popularity of Bill Clinton, who could take 70 percent of the vote in Massachusetts against a weak Bob Dole and provide Kerry with formidable coattails...

...Weld, meanwhile, is the most popular Massachusetts politician in decades, elected with 71 percent of the vote in a state that is 13 percent Republican, and a darling of the national media-and he can't find a friend anywhere...

...A loss will lead cultural conservatives to stress the indispensability of social issues in splitting the Democrats...

...the woman who slaps her baby around just days later can face a stiff jail sentence...

...No one in American political life, with the possible exception of William J. Bennett, has been keener to use the technology of the information age to keep citizens under surveillance...

...So the woman who aborts a viable fetus in the last days of pregnancy is simply exercising her protected right of choice...

...Third, he has won Kerry's agreement to seven debates over the course of the campaign...

...I don't like killing...

...If you make a pass at a boy who's a day younger, society will hunt you to the ends of the earth, with all its wrath and firepower, and brand you a permanent pariah once you're caught...

...The result is that if you make a pass at a boy on his eighteenth birthday, the state will jail anyone who refuses to rent you an apartment or give you a job on that account...

...Kerry holds a five-point lead in the polls...

...Weld's "conservative" revolution got its foot in the door through Dukakis's mismanagement...

...And that sufficiently frightened the Democrats that Gore came to town to announce a compromise by which the harbor can be cleaned up for a billion dollars less...

...Kerry served two years as Dukakis's lieutenant governor...

...The forensic masterpiece of the evening was Kerry's, after Weld asked if the senator could look into the eyes of a murdered policeman's mother, present in the audience, and tell her why he didn't favor the death penalty...

...The Massachusetts GOP claims it's illegal for Kerry to use it, given that the marriage took place after Kerry had begun raising money for the campaign...

...That's because Weld has described himself as an "ideological soul-mate" of Newt Gingrich...

...I know something about killing...

...Or homosexuality: Weld championed one of the most far-reaching gay-rights bills in the country...

...That's the sunset on the 1990 billion-dollar hike in the income tax, by any chance...

...Heinz thus far has been the great wit of the race, informing viewers before the first debate that she would do anything she could to help a husband who had endured "12 years of celibacy," a dig at Kerry's prodigious amatory reputation since his separation in 1983 (he was divorced in 1988...

...Kerry is seeking to portray Weld as merely more ballast for the Republican juggernaut and has answered Weld's crime-welfare-taxes triumvirate with his own mantra of education and health care...

...But, Governor, let me just tell you...

...Weld riposted at one point...

...First, he has won local Democratic endorsements, including several small-city mayors and Boston City Council president Jim Kelly...

...Second, on many issues, he's not allowing an inch of daylight between his own position and President Clinton's...

...Take abortion: Like Kerry, Weld has backed President Clinton's veto of the ban on partial-birth abortions, yet Massachusetts under Weld has one of the most stringent domestic-violence laws in the country...

...The vice president came to explain to 200 Massachusetts mayors, hacks, and Americorps volunteers just why Sen...

...It could work...

...Gore boasted that a Kerry-supported EPA plan to reduce pollution in Boston Harbor is working-a plan originally slated to cost local taxpayers $1.3 billion for a network of tunnels and sluices...

...Weld has thus picked his issues carefully in the Senate race, taking Kerry to task on welfare, crime, and taxes, and leaving the Contract with America alone...

...But a soaring vision of individual liberty it is not...

...second, Weld's own popularity...

...Kerry was thus able to (a) accuse Weld of exploiting tragedy, (b) remind voters that Kerry is a thrice-decorated Vietnam vet, while Weld succeeded in avoiding the draft, and (c) play the truth-teller by exposing as grandstanding the death-penalty provisions in the Clinton crime bill, which Kerry backed...

...Yet on April 22, Weld's bill to track sex-offenders on their release from prison passed the Massachusetts House...

...A Weld win will embolden those who favor removing the abortion plank from the national platform to argue that, when Republicans take social issues off the table, Democrats have nothing to discuss...

...Kerry and Weld, Yale and Harvard grads respectively, showed an extraordinary command of detail in the first debate, held April 8 in Faneuil Hall...

...His tax cuts and absolute budget reductions (not cuts in the rate of increase) have been wildly popular...

...But its staying power has come from Weld's force of personality alone-a combination of high energy and patrician aplomb that has insulated him from criticism for six years...

...These are top priorities for all liberal electorates, but in Massachusetts they also happen to be industries-the two biggest employers in the state...

...Such maneuvering may be necessary for a Republican to maintain power in Massachusetts...

...Weld is a syncretist, a right-winger on fiscal and crime issues and a hard leftist on matters of sexual lifestyle...

...This leads Weld into contradictions in areas where criminal status and protected status sit on opposite sides of a very thin line...

...Your use of the death penalty in this race is really kind of shameless, and I'll tell you why: There are only seven people on death row at the federal level...

...They're simply what needs to be done...

...Without Weld, that revolution can't continue...

...They may be reason enough for Republicans to vote for Kerry as well...

...These aren't Republican positions," says Weld of his welfare and crime initiatives...

...Weld's wife, meanwhile, is a sometime Democrat, the first cousin of the governor's 1994 election opponent, Mark Roosevelt...

...John Kerry is a national treasure...