A Kennedy Pursues Money Side of the Family Business

It was election day 1988 and Patrick J. Kennedy was launching his political career with a big assist from his vast and famous family.

Running for the Rhode Island Legislature at the callow age of 21, he stationed relatives--including his father, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.)--outside polling places. They didn’t just shake hands. The photogenic clan posed for Polaroids with voters. The young Kennedy swept to victory and, while still in his 20s, moved on to the U.S. House.

Now he is again capitalizing on his family name--only this time Democrats throughout the nation may benefit. As chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Kennedy has brought the mystique and glitz of America’s premier political family to the rough-and-tumble job of financing the party’s drive to reclaim a majority in the House of Representatives.

He rewards big donors with visits to the dynasty’s fabled compound in Hyannis Port, Mass. He entertains others at the grand oceanfront mansions of Newport, R.I., that are part of his district. And he proudly invokes his legendary uncles, John and Robert, to help pry open wallets in circles where the Kennedy name still sizzles.

“If in some way I could help get the House back, I would be paying tribute to the best of my family legacy,” Kennedy said at a recent fund-raiser in Cherry Hill, N.J., for Democratic House candidate Susan Bass Levin.

It speaks volumes about the burgeoning role of money in U.S. politics that one of the fastest rising stars in the Kennedy firmament is making his name not by writing landmark laws, not by delivering soaring oratory, but by raking in astonishingly big bucks.

Indeed, he has smashed fund-raising records in the process. By the end of March, the most recent reporting period, the Democratic committee had raised $45 million for the 2000 election--more than twice as much as at the same point in the last election cycle.

It is a path Kennedy has chosen, in part, out of awareness of his own limits.

“My strengths are not being a legislative titan,” he said in an interview. “My strengths are not [in] being taken that seriously on the substance side. My strengths are my youth, my energy . . . my family name, my connections.”

Even as he freely invokes his name and connections on the campaign trail, however, he defies the Kennedy stereotype in many ways. He is an asthmatic in a family that bonds on the touch football field. He is not especially eloquent, falling short of the grand “Ask not . . .” standard of oratory. His path to power has been unusually cautious for his competitive clan. He rebuffed family pressure last year and turned down a chance to run for the Senate. Even his appearance sets him apart. He so lacks the classic, chiseled features that distinguish many Kennedy men that people sometimes come up to him at receptions and ask: “When is Congressman Kennedy going to get here?”

For now, the recognition he seeks the most will come if his mission is accomplished in this fall’s elections. If Democrats win control of the House, it will establish Kennedy as a key political player in Congress--and catapult him to the forefront of his family’s next generation of public figures.

Congressman’s Temper Sometimes Flares

Thirty-two years old and unmarried, Kennedy is all boyish exuberance on the stump. At a champagne brunch for local politicos on the elegant Newport shore, Kennedy unceremoniously leaps up onto a folding chair and shouts to the crowd: “Hi, everybody!”

He also can be something of a hothead. He almost came to blows with Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) while the House was debating the impeachment of President Clinton in December 1998. Kennedy objected to Barr quoting his uncle, the late president, during floor debate. And this March, Kennedy’s temper got the best of him when--rushing for a plane at Los Angeles International Airport after a fund-raising event--he shoved a security guard who told him his carry-on bag was too large.

The grainy security-camera videotape of the confrontation was played on national television. The Los Angeles city attorney’s office investigated, ultimately deciding no charges were merited. Kennedy apologized to the airport guard, expressing regret for rudeness. But he complained that the incident was blown out of proportion--in part because he is a Kennedy. “I am given zero tolerance for defect,” he grumbles.

Darrell West, a Brown University professor whose biography of Kennedy is being published later this year, says of the occasional outbursts: “He is still learning to cope with the pressures of being a Kennedy.”

Indeed, his life has been repeatedly shadowed by the tragedies, personal problems and privileges that are the stuff of the Kennedy legend.

The third and last child of Sen. Kennedy and his first wife, Joan, Patrick never knew his assassinated uncles: President Kennedy was shot in 1963, four years before he was born; he was an infant when Robert F. Kennedy was killed while campaigning for the White House in 1968.

He had just turned 2 years old when his father drove a car off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts and a female passenger drowned. The accident and Edward Kennedy’s failure to notify authorities of it for several hours helped stymie the senator’s presidential ambitions.

His mother was an alcoholic, his father dogged by rumors of womanizing, and their marriage ended in divorce when Patrick was 15. Shipped off to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., he struggled with his own substance abuse problems--drugs and alcohol--and landed in rehabilitation. He began college at Georgetown University in Washington, living with his father in the Virginia suburbs. Itching to get away from home and the distractions of political life in the capital, he transferred after a year to Providence College in Rhode Island. There, he carried the family name lightly, according to William J. Lynch, who knew him in college and is now chairman of the Rhode Island Democratic Party. “He was reserved and introspective,” Lynch says. “Pretty nondescript.”

Today, he wears the Kennedy mantle with a kind of unpretentious pride. As he rode around his district one recent weekend with a reporter, he casually pointed out all the landmarks named after his relatives like a local tour guide: a ship named after his grandfather, family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy, a plaza named after his uncle John.

But Patrick Kennedy still wrestles with his own inner challenges. He has suffered from bouts of depression for years--a condition he acknowledged publicly for the first time this year. Appearing with Tipper Gore, wife of the vice president, at a forum on mental illness in February, he disclosed that he was taking medication and undergoing therapy for depression.

Sniping Attributed to Kennedy Haters

Kennedy believes that, in the wake of that disclosure, his every misstep--such as the airport shoving incident--is viewed by critics through the lens of mental illness.

“My eyes have been opened ever since by the extent of the stigma,” he says. “Now everything I do is cast in that light. The [response to the] L.A. incident was ‘Oh, he’s not taking his medicine.’ ”

He attributes such sniping to die-hard Kennedy haters, who he assumes will always harass him. But there are plenty of hard-core Kennedy lovers who treat him like a hero when he returns to his district in the eastern part of Rhode Island. Portuguese women hug him like a son as he works a crowd in East Providence. One points to her cheek to show him where to plant a kiss.

“I love my Kennedys!” squeals Tina DaSilva, who says that photos of Kennedy’s uncles and father hang in her husband’s office. “I don’t care what they say. I love you guys.”

His 1988 entrance into elective politics was so important to his father that the elder Kennedy postponed his own swearing-in to another Senate term in January 1989 to come to Providence to watch his son being sworn in.

The Legislature of the smallest state in the nation was a small pond for a Kennedy. But it gave him a way into public life less intimidating than his father’s world of national politics.

“I didn’t think I could compare myself to my uncles or my fathers,” Kennedy says. “I wanted to feel things out.”

After six years in the state Legislature, he ran for Congress in 1994--and an array of national political figures rallied to his side. President Clinton and House Democratic Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) came to campaign for him, helping Kennedy get elected despite that year’s Republican tidal wave. He arrived in the House at age 27, the youngest member of Congress and saddled with a boatload of low expectations.

“He came in with lots of baggage. . . . No one would have been surprised had he not been a star,” says Jane Harman, a former Democratic House member from Los Angeles’ South Bay who is running for her old seat this year. “But he dispelled all of that very quickly.”

Adopting Gephardt as his mentor, Kennedy immediately began traveling across the country to appear at fund-raisers with his colleagues--one of the fastest ways to win friends and influence people in the House. As a freshman, he formed a political action committee and gave $31,000 to other Democrats in the 1996 election cycle, as well as $25,000 to party committees, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

A New Job Keeps Kennedy in the House

When the House campaign committee chairmanship opened up after the 1998 election, Gephardt passed over more senior members seeking the job and awarded it to Kennedy. In accepting the job, Kennedy chose to remain in the House--disappointing the hopes of many, including his father, that he would run for the Senate from Rhode Island in 2000.

Kennedy says he made that decision in part because he prefers the give and take of the House over the formality of the Senate. “That’s an old man’s place,” he says. And as chairman of the campaign committee for this crucial election cycle, he says, “I have a front row seat where the action is.”

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has not always been the center of political action. For many years, it was a sleepy backwater devoted to keeping incumbents safe.

“In the old days, [the committee] raised small amounts of money, doled it out to people who didn’t need it and sat back and waited to see who would win,” says Thomas Mann, an expert on congressional elections at the Brookings Institution.

But capping a trend that began in the 1980s, the committee now is the center of action in the current fight for the House, a modern-day equivalent of the old-fashioned political machine. The committee is raising record sums of money, recruiting candidates, even trying to anoint the party’s nominees in contested Democratic primaries.

And under Kennedy, it not only has surpassed its own fund-raising records but closed the gap between the parties that traditionally has given the GOP the financial edge in congressional elections. As of March 31, the Democratic committee had almost $29 million in the bank. Its Republican counterpart had $18.2 million.

The Democratic fund-raising success is not solely because of Kennedy. Contributors have given record sums because the stakes are so high: Democrats need to pick up only six seats to win control of the House. And part of the fund-raising credit goes to Gephardt, who abandoned his own presidential ambitions last year to devote his energy and his own vast national network to the House battle.

Still, much of the committee’s growth has been in money raised in “road shows”--out-of-town fund-raisers. And Kennedy’s star power has been an important draw for new donors at these events. “Because he was here, I made a special effort to attend,” says Norman Pratt, an engineer who came to the New Jersey fund-raiser where Kennedy shared the spotlight with Levin.

Levin is one of many candidates Kennedy personally recruited to run for the House this year. Like the others, she fits a profile that Kennedy believes gives Democrats their best chance at winning potentially competitive seats. As mayor of Cherry Hill, Levin is a well-known elected official with an impressive fund-raising record. That could give her a shot at unseating incumbent Rep. Jim Saxton (R-N.J.) in a district stretching from the Philadelphia suburbs to the Jersey shore.

To boost Levin’s candidacy, Kennedy spent a day campaigning with her across the district, helping her collect $35,000. A breakfast fund-raiser drew more than 100 contributors who paid $250 a head--top dollar for a Levin event, according to campaign manager Brian Weeks. Kennedy accompanied her to a middle school where they talked with seventh- and eighth-graders about violence and gun control--issues about which Kennedy feels particularly passionately.

Some Republicans dismiss Kennedy as a political lightweight, a celebrity front man for Gephardt’s political strategy. But they offer grudging admiration for his ability to give the GOP a run for its money.

“I don’t think he was picked to be an intellectual or strategic match for me,” says Rep. Thomas M. Davis (R-Va.), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, a little-known House member who is a master of political detail. “But he was put there to raise money and he’s doing better than expected.”

Republicans are also infuriated by Kennedy’s decision to file a civil racketeering suit against House Minority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas), accusing him of extorting campaign contributions and funneling them through secretive political organizations that do not have to disclose their contributors. Critics say it was a questionable use of racketeering law, an election-year ploy to harass DeLay. Even some Democrats decry the action, calling it a misuse of the legal system for political ends.

Kennedy says he has no second thoughts about the suit and argues that it has helped spotlight the growth of a controversial form of political group that does not have to disclose its contributors. Indeed, legislation designed to force disclosure on those groups, known as 527 committees, named for a section of the federal tax code, recently was approved by the House and Senate.

“We’re starting to see some vindication for what we are doing,” Kennedy says.

The same partisan passion that rankles Republicans is firing up Democrats around the country.

After Kennedy met with Democratic activists in the South Bay, Harman said: “He made them feel as though the Democratic Party is a party that is worth spending every waking moment for. . . . That’s part of Patrick’s magic.”

The real test will come in November. If Democrats take control of the House, Kennedy says he looks forward to moving quickly up the power structure of the House Appropriations Committee--an inside track to clout within the institution.

But that might not be the limit of an ambition that is sometimes belied by his unpretentious demeanor.

“He definitely aspires to a much grander role for himself,” says West, the biographer. Like Kennedys before him, he possesses “a hard, driving ambition.”