Bluebloods Kerry, Weld Seek to Define Their Dissimilarities : Policy differences become apparent in campaign for Massachusetts Senate seat. But polls show voters are so evenly divided the race is a virtual dead heat.

They’re healthy, and very, very wealthy. They’re tall, painfully patrician and exceedingly well-educated. They are lawyers; for that matter, one-time prosecutors. They have high-achieving children and stunningly accomplished wives. They speak French--and Latin. Both boast summer homes, and fancy in-town addresses. They even own matching four-wheel drive vehicles.

On paper, the similarities between the two candidates for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts this fall--the two-term Democratic incumbent, John F. Kerry, and Republican Gov. William F. Weld--are “scary, absolutely scary,” said Sandra G. Krakoff, a Boston placement consultant. “I would just love for one of them to come up with something a little bit different about the other.”

In what may be the nation’s highest-profile Senate race, Kerry and Weld have been trying to do exactly that.

Weld helped close a double-digit deficit in the polls earlier this year with a series of hard-edged television ads portraying Kerry as soft on welfare reform, drug dealers, violent criminals and gangs. By mid-September, Kerry was firing back with ads suggesting that Weld balanced the state’s budget on the backs of disadvantaged women, workers and children.

Polls now show the race a virtual dead heat, with each camp banking on some built-in advantages. Democrats outnumber Republicans 3-to-1 in Massachusetts, and Kerry should further benefit from the huge margin by which President Clinton is expected to carry the state in his reelection bid. But Weld has overcome the registration gap before--he won a second gubernatorial term two years ago with a whopping 71% of the vote--and is the more animated campaigner of the two.

Interest in the contest is accentuated by its national implications--a Kerry win will keep alive Democratic hopes of picking up enough seats elsewhere to reclaim control of the Senate; conversely, a Weld victory would deal a serious blow to that scenario.

At one time, the race seemed likely to be as much about money as policy. But after months of haggling, the two candidates agreed on a $6.9-million spending cap--an unusual gentleman’s accord for politicians of enormous personal wealth. While Weld, who will remain governor if he loses the Senate election, is believed to have spent much of his campaign budget with his summer ad hurricane, Kerry still has millions to launch a renewed media barrage.

Both men can count on an attentive public. In a state where campaign signs bloom alongside fall chrysanthemums--and just as abundantly--politics remains the favorite sport, bar none. On the subject of the Kerry-Weld face-off, talk-show hosts titter and subway commuters wearing pins touting one candidate or the other joust playfully. And the race’s closeness is bound to heighten its appeal.

“That’s what makes it fun,” Weld said last week, wooing senior citizens in the blue-collar community of Brockton by repeatedly promising never to raise taxes or tamper with Social Security.

Stooping to embrace his elderly supporters, the 6-foot-4, 51-year-old governor seemed genuinely to be enjoying himself. Weld’s relaxed, easy manner has done as much as his tough talk on taxes, crime and welfare to make him immensely popular. If, politically, he prides himself on a brand of Republicanism that is closer to libertarianism, personally, Weld is known as a brilliant, affable eccentric.

He and his wife, Susan, share an elegant, rambling house in Cambridge with five children who span junior high to medical school years. The Welds have an immense library, but no television set. Evenings usually find the governor with his nose in a book, often in Latin. Susan Weld, known as SuSu, is a professor of Chinese legal history. She is also a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt, one of her husband’s political heroes.

Weld often spends lunch hours on the squash court. He is an unrepentant hunter. He plays cards and imbibes what he describes as “amber-colored liquid.” His sense of humor borders on the outrageous, such as when he leaped fully clothed into the Charles River last summer after signing waterways protection legislation.

He also is more than willing to make fun of his privileged lineage. As a descendant of the Cabot family, he quips, “My family came to this country with only the shirts on our backs. We sent the servants ahead with the luggage.”

Still, Weld’s sizable family fortune pales beside the $760 million John Kerry married into last year when he wed Teresa Heinz, widow of catsup magnate and former Republican Sen. John Heinz of Pennsylvania. Their Nantucket wedding ceremony and swift move to a townhouse on Louisburg Square, possibly this city’s most prestigious address, helped repackage Kerry’s image from the Senate’s version of Robert Redford--dashing bachelor, squire to actresses Catherine Oxenberg and Morgan Fairchild, among others--to Boston’s answer to Robert Young. A blizzard of photographs showing Kerry, his new wife (who still uses her late husband’s surname), her three children and his two college-age daughters from a previous marriage did not hurt that effort.

Like his foe, the 54-year-old Kerry is to-the-manor-born. And his urge toward public life surfaced early. At prep school--St. Paul’s, in New Hampshire--he began signing his papers “J.F.K.” (The “F” stands for Forbes, his mother’s blueblood clan.) At Yale University, Kerry was invited to join Skull and Bones, the secret society whose previous members include George Bush.

Rather than taking the safe route directly to law school, however, Kerry enlisted in the Navy and went to Vietnam. Manning a boat on the Mekong Delta, he was decorated with three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star, among other distinctions. His heroism in combat made it seem curious when he dodged a question about personal sacrifice during a televised debate with Weld, who has no military record.

But Boston real estate developer Paul Nace, a Kerry confidant, who served in Vietnam at the same time as the senator, cautioned, “Those of us who were in Vietnam are not quick to talk about it in virtually any context.”

Kerry first vaulted onto the national political radarscope in 1971, when he mobilized thousands of fellow Vietnam veterans for a protest march in Washington. The following year, he ran for Congress from Lowell, north of Boston, and lost. He then rose through local and state political ranks before first winning his Senate seat in 1984 (he ran after the Democratic incumbent, Paul S. Tsongas, stepped aside to overcome a bout with cancer.

As the Nov. 5 vote nears, Kerry has been reminding voters of his Senate record. Though he has labored in the large regional shadow cast by Massachusetts’ senior Democratic senator--Edward M. Kennedy--Kerry has been a consistent defender of such traditional liberal orbits as education, the environment and minimum wage increases.

To stress the ideological distinction between himself and Weld, Kerry has sought to link the governor with House Speaker Newt Gingrich. He notes that Weld refers to the Georgia Republican as “Newtie” and has described Gingrich as his “ideological soul mate.” Kerry also verbally pummeled Weld for saying he would have voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a position Weld later recanted.

Whatever the outcome on Election Day, the margin of victory is expected to be slim. “This election was never meant to be a gigantic blowout victory,” said Kerry campaign consultant John Marttila. “These two guys are both just too popular for that to happen.”