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The New York Times/ - Politics, Seg, 02 de Abril de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Supreme Court)
A Favored Son Returns to Uphill Battle in
Nebraska
LINCOLN, Neb. — Bob Kerrey, the former governor
and two-term senator from Nebraska, has returned to
his native state after a decade in New York City to try
to reclaim his Senate seat.
The state’s once-favored son — a bridge in Omaha
bears his name — now finds himself recast as a
carpetbagger, navigating a landscape both familiar and
foreign after 12 years of political vicissitude.
He was welcomed back with an immediate challenge
to his residency, a barrel of snark and an inability to
find so much as a frying pan in his modest, hastily
acquired home.
“I am managing the personal transition,” Mr. Kerrey,
68, said as he sipped a coffee in a shop here.
“My first homecoming was in 1969,” he said, referring
to his return from Vietnam, where he served as a
member of the Navy SEALs. “I don’t have to be
reminded of the importance of home and community.”
Whether voters will again cotton to Mr. Kerrey, who
decided to seek the seat after a fellow Democrat, Ben
Nelson, opted to retire, will hinge largely on who
succeeds in defining him over a short but almost
certainly animated race, upon which the control of the
Senate could turn.
Is he, as his advertising campaign suggests, the
charismatic war hero and longtime public servant just
itching to return to his beloved Nebraska, a state still
smarting from its politically charged place in the
negotiations over President Obama’s health care law?
Or is he, as his detractors contend, a shameless
opportunist culturally sullied by a decade in Manhattan
(insert image of overly chic reading glasses and
cappuccino here), where he served as president of the
New School, now capriciously trying to give his party a
whisper of hope?
“Nebraska has become more conservative, and Bob
Kerrey has become more liberal,” said Mark A.
Fahleson, chairman of the state’s Republican Party,
which tried, unsuccessfully, to keep Mr. Kerrey off the
ballot. “This is a state that forced a man to return to
private life over a single vote on Obamacare. Plus this
is a presidential election year, and Nebraska is a red
state.”
Polls show Mr. Kerrey badly trailing the three
Republicans vying for the nomination, and he
concedes that he is six months behind on organizing
his campaign and raising cash. His is a decidedly
uphill battle.
“I kind of liked Bob Kerrey,” Terry Reeh, 55, said in an
interview in a bar in West Omaha. Mr. Reeh said he
voted for Mr. Kerrey for governor and for senator but
would not again.
“I’m going to vote Republican down the line,” he said,
“because I am a pretty good Republican. I think most
people in Nebraska are.”
The stakes of this race may be higher for Washington
and Nebraska than for Mr. Kerrey. Democrats, buoyed
by the coming retirement of Senator Olympia J.
Snowe, Republican of Maine, are beginning to believe
that they may be able to retain a thin majority in the
Senate if one or two races go their way. So Mr.
Kerrey’s campaign here has become an urgent
matter.
For Nebraska, the race could also be defining: Should
Mr. Kerrey be defeated, the Democrats will be left with
a single statewide elected official for the first time in
recent memory. “I could basically hang up my hat after
that, huh?” Mr. Fahleson joked.
The way that Mr. Kerrey entered the race can perhaps
best be described as daft. After Mr. Nelson announced
in December that he would not seek re-election,
speculation about Mr. Kerrey was sparked. Yet he
waited for several weeks, finally saying he would not
run.
Then he decided just days before the filing deadline
that, in fact, he wanted to go for it, setting off rumors
around Washington that Democrats had begged him or
prodded him with a promise to restore his seniority and
give him choice committee assignments.
But only his wife, Sarah Paley, with whom he has a
10-year-old son, has that sort of influence on him, he
said. “We were watching the Oscars,” he said, “and
she knew the filing deadline was coming up and she
said you’ve got to run.”
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