IN HER OCCASIONAL ARTICLES for the Washington Monthly, the first of them years before she entered public life, Townsend has displayed bold, contrarian impulses, thumping the left for being anti-religious, as well as for secularizing lefty icons like her father when it was precisely his religious faith that lent him his moral vision. As Monthly founder Charlie Peters, a Townsend fan and mentor, says, “She is smart like Jack, and has Bobby’s passion. Liberals typically pissed all over religion. She [took them on], and at a time when it was still very unfashionable to do so.” (To those who assume all this was the work of Kennedy family wordsmiths, I’d say show me a Kennedy speechwriter who defends the Religious Right.) But in her political life, she has displayed very little of the same moral courage. For her loyalty to Glendening, she has been thrown an endless bounty of feel-good puppy treats. She offers something not to offend everybody, taking bold stands against auto theft, drunk driving, teenage heroin use, and “domestic violence in the workplace.” Likewise, Townsend is for child-safety seats, improving our state sewage systems, and having students read lots of books. Occasionally, she takes an apparently principled stand. She has emphatically nixed Ehrlich’s “slots for tots” proposal, for instance, an effort to boost Maryland’s ailing horse racing industry by installing slot machines at the track, then using part of the proceeds to fund education. Townsend says this will increase crime and moral degeneracy, which is fine, but not logically consistent with Maryland’s state lottery and endorsement of everything from Keno to video poker. When Townsend has already staked out a position on a serious issue, she’s displayed a knack for convenient election-year fence-sitting. Unlike most of her family, she has long supported the death penalty. But she recently encouraged Glendening to call for a moratorium until a University of Maryland study could be completed to see whether executions were racially skewed. The result: a delayed execution of a black purse-snatcher who shot a woman in the head in front of her two grandchildren, and whose guilt has never been questioned. To be sure, Glendening has granted more responsibility to Townsend than is entrusted to the average lieutenant governor. Paying constant tribute to St. Luke’s admonition that from him to whom much is given, much is required, Townsend has been a fanatical booster of voluntarism and service to one’s country (at one point in the ’80s, she came out for reinstating a peace-time draft, which she said should include women). She has been a driving force behind mandating character education and community service for public high schoolers. Though the latter is often derided as “compulsory volunteerism,” and the former as exercises like drawing pictures of Smokey the Bear, most people find her rhetoric agreeable, and at the very least, it won’t hurt her. But in good neoliberal fashion, her flagship issue and campaign-r sum -enhancer has been crime. Here, she has met with qualified successes and spectacular failures. Her Police Corps program, the brainchild of RFK speechwriter Adam Walinsky, is modeled after Uncle Jack’s Peace Corps. It attempts to draw college graduates into police work in exchange for college tuition. The program has received generally positive reviews, even if participation has been anemic. Townsend also boasts of her HotSpots program, which she claims has reduced crime in dangerous areas by allocating more police and community resources to pockets where crimes occur disproportionately. Others aren’t convinced. Last year, Baltimore’s lauded police chief Edward Norris, under whom homicides have dropped below 300 a year (in a city with 60,000 drug addicts), derided HotSpots as a “failed policy” that distracted police from surgically addressing crime as they saw fit. Baltimore’s Democratic mayor, Martin O’Malley, who’s criticized Townsend for her “vacuum of leadership,” also derided HotSpots as being “more effective as a jobs program” than a crime-fighting measure. O’Malley, a young, good-looking political comer who displays RFK-style feistiness when it comes to picking fights with his own party, was Townsend’s last serious Democratic rival. But like other state Dems who couldn’t match Townsend’s 3-to-1 fund-raising advantage or 98 percent name ID, the mayor elected not to run. (A good thing, too, says Ehrlich spokesman Shurick: “O’Malley is a political stud. He could out-Kennedy a Kennedy. I think we would lose badly to him.”) If there has been one unmitigated disaster on Townsend’s watch, it is her stewardship of the state’s juvenile justice system, her chief responsibility. Since 1997, Townsend has championed military-style boot camps to deal with young offenders. Late in 1999, the Baltimore Sun, after a year-long investigation, began relentlessly detailing abuses prevalent throughout the system. The camps teemed with anecdotes of wardens beating teenage inmates, of rampant drug use among graduates (one teenager was photographed with a needle in his arm), and of skyrocketing recidivism. Townsend was first notified of all this in August 1999, at which time she told the head of the juvenile justice agency (a Glendening appointee) to make sure any violence stopped. But abuses kept occurring right up to the time the Sun’s series was published in December. Townsend said she was sickened by the reports, even as she failed to disclose the conversations she had had on the subject with the governor, citing their “zone of privacy.” Meanwhile, with several investigations underway, the boot camps continued to suffer so many problems that they had to be shut down. As the Sun documented, however, the juvenile justice system remained an underfunded morass of incompetent bureaucrats and corrupt administrators overseeing decrepit facilities rife with violence, staff-sanctioned fight clubs, and inmate suicides. While there have been some cosmetic improvements, and Townsend has said, “I take responsibility,” her numerous critics would like to know how exactly she’s done so. “She did nothing noble here,” says one source intimately involved in the story. “She really did not handle it. It was taken over by Glendening right away. It was his flack and their office who took over damage control. Where she really fell down in the first place was that she never followed up, she didn’t make the phone calls.” Nobody thinks that juvenile justice is going to be a make-or-break issue in the campaign. Still, Townsend’s performance has given fodder to her critics, many of them Republicans in the General Assembly who say she’s been largely AWOL during legislative sessions throughout her tenure. For good reason, they say: She has no real grasp of the issues. Delegate Jim Ports says that the Democratic leadership bends over so far backwards to protect her that on one of the rare occasions when she came before his ways and means committee, the Democratic chair said, “She’s going to come and testify, but she doesn’t have time to answer any questions.” “We all know that’s a front,” says Ports. “That’s saying she’s too inept to answer questions.” After failing to get his questions acknowledged by the chair, Ports grew so frustrated, he said, that he actually followed Townsend out into the hall. “I walked out the door, and she stood there with people ooh-ing and ah-ing over her for 25 minutes,” he said. “But she didn’t have time to testify.” One would expect Ports to make such noises (Townsend spokespeople have called this a “made-up story”). He is, after all, minority whip in a legislative body where Republicans are often regarded as leprous stepchildren. But even some Democrats, out of sync with a leadership that champions Townsend at every turn, make similar complaints. “She’s a lightweight, but she’s the best they’ve got,” says one. “There’s not one honest Democrat that would tell you that she’s got any gray matter upstairs in terms of leadership. It’s a joke. Everybody knows it’s a joke. But what they say i
s, ‘She’s got money. She’s a Kennedy. And she can win.’ I feel bad, because she’s a nice person. But she hasn’t given me any reason to think she should be governor.” WHATEVER HER FAULTS, this critic grossly understates one point. Townsend is not just a nice person. She is perhaps the nicest person I’ve ever encountered in her line of work. She radiates warmth and humanity. Tagging along on a recent Ocean City campaign swing, I watch her address every girl, even the homely ones unattended by parents of voting age, as “pretty.” When she finishes doing a television stand-up on the boardwalk, she doesn’t just make off-air chat with the newsbabe, she also wanders over to shake the cameraman’s free hand. She is a devastatingly effective one-on-one campaigner, raising her hand like a cigar-store Indian, clamping it on the shoulder of whoever’s in front of her, then listening to them and peppering them with personal questions long after most politicians would have moved on to the next prop. She has a daffy sense of humor, a not-quite-with-it-ness that makes you wonder if she is joking about her family’s battle with the “Irish flu” when she walks into an Irish bar, is offered a beer from a patron, and says, “Oh, I feel right at home.” Throughout the day, there are small gaffes. At a volunteer firemen’s convention, she refers to the tragic events of Nine-Eleven as those of “Seven-Eleven,” before correcting herself. There are also moments of quiet grace. When extending sympathy to those who’ve lost family members in the line of duty, she says, “It is not true that good always comes from tragedy. And it is certainly not true that time heals all wounds. I know this from personal experience.” Though I’d been warned repeatedly that Townsend avoids protracted sit-downs with reporters, she readily agrees to have dinner with me and one of her aides. When I express surprise, she says, “Well, I’m hungry.” Over the course of half an hour, we talk about the race. Lately she has looked more vulnerable than ever, angering black Democrats who are sore that Ehrlich picked a black running mate while she didn’t. Likewise, her once formidable lead in the polls has dwindled to three points. I tell her that Ehrlich’s camp fully expects, in a close race, that she and Bob Shrum will trump up some charge that he’s a racist, a la Sauerbrey in ’98. Though she’s called “The Nun,” Townsend proves she’s not above a political knife-fight. “He must have something to worry about,” she says. “I’ll just say there’s plenty in his record for anyone to explore.” From there, our talk meanders to me (she asks as many questions as she answers), to Kennedy scandals (of her cousin Michael Skakel’s recent murder conviction, all she offers is, “It was very sad for everybody”), to books. She reads quite a bit, and did not like her latest political biography. She won’t allow me to print the title or author. It wouldn’t be nice. But the reason she disliked it, she says, is it’s too sterile, too clean. “There is ambiguity in all great people,” she says. “It makes for a more interesting biography. It shows a struggle. It makes you understand what life entails.” Inevitably, we talk about her father, and the note he sent her after her uncle’s assassination: “Dear Kathleen, You seem to understand that Jack died and was buried today. As the oldest of the Kennedy grandchildren, you have a particular responsibility now. . . . Be kind to others and work for your country. Love, Daddy.” Like most of the latest generation of political Kennedys, Townsend takes her best lines not from her own speechwriters, but from her father’s. “There are a lot of things he said that I carry in my heart,” she says. “We would take walks and he would quote Shakespeare or Aeschylus. He was a very serious person about who we were–what we needed to do with our lives.” Blair Lee IV, a longtime political commentator who himself hails from several generations of Maryland politicians, has also had a couple of extended chats with Townsend. Once, while they were seated at his regular lunch spot, a cook came to their table, saying that back in the kitchen a debate was raging about whether she was Bobby or Ted’s daughter. “She said, ‘Let me straighten that out,'” Blair recalls. “She went back to the kitchen, and shook hands with everybody there. I’ve had lunches with hundreds of politicians there over the years. Never had anybody worked the kitchen. There is something clearly driving her, the pressure, the memories of her father.” Unlike the rest of the politicians in her family, who tend to hit their “Quotable Kennedys” file every time a bill heads into mark-up, Townsend takes her legacy from her father seriously. Lee says this struck him when they talked about “the Bobby thing.” “I’m pretty hardboiled. But I don’t think she’s faking it,” he says. “The rest of them are faking it. She’s not. But that also raises questions about how close to the surface those nerve endings are. She’s the last potential Bobby Kennedy-nominee for higher office. She’s carried one helluva burden. It looks awfully heavy. But at some point, there’s got to be something else. If that’s why you’re running for governor, you might want to reinspect. Every campaign is a crucible. You get boiled down to what you are or are not. She’s never really had a job on her own. She’s going to be out there naked. And for the first time in her life, she’s going to have to earn it.” Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
