It was Sunday night, Sept. 18, and the dozen or so top aides to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy gathered at his condominium in Boston's Back Bay were anxious. The primary was two days away, and Mitt Romney, who trailed Kennedy by up to 20 points in various mid-summer polls, had pulled even in a variety of surveys, including the senator's own. Now they had to decide how to deal with the Romney threat. Among those present were the senator's wife, Victoria; her father, Edmund Reggie, a retired Louisiana judge who had managed presidential campaigns in his home state for John, Robert and Ted Kennedy; Michael Kennedy, the senator's nephew and campaign manager; John Sasso, who had run Gov. Michael S. Dukakis' 1988 presidential campaign; and Bob Shrum, Sen. Kennedy's political alter-ego and ex-speechwriter turned media consultant.
"It was tense, but Teddy was not panicked," recalled one adviser in attendance. "He was laughing, making a few jokes. . . . I studied him very carefully. I was fascinated to see if the pressure was getting to him. He was looking down the abyss, but I had the feeling he could go on with his life if he lost."
The Sept. 18 meeting -- and the decisions made there -- helped turn the tide in the most expensive campaign in state history, one that drew coverage from as far away as Japan and Finland. It triggered a dogfight of deceptive ads and behind-the-scenes maneuvers, pitting experience against youth, blue- collar against white-collar, and city against suburb. The contest between the tarnished legend and the handsome newcomer unfolded in private meetings, strategic memos, and religious and cultural conflict, often far from the television klieg lights.
In the end, the race proved the adage that a lion is most dangerous when cornered. By calling in every available operative and chit, Kennedy outmanned, outspent and outfoxed Romney.
For his part, Romney broke a basic rule for Massachusetts candidates: It's fine to pretend to be a non-politician, but fatal to be one. Relying too much on a small group of handlers, and too little on his own instincts, he could not counter Kennedy's assaults.
"What I learned in this campaign is that you're running against the Democratic Party in the United States when you run against Ted Kennedy," said Romney's campaign manager, Robert Marsh. "For the Democrats, this was like the presidential election of this year."
The Sept. 18 meeting was Kennedy's wake-up call. Tom Kiley, Kennedy's pollster, presented his latest numbers and admitted he hadn't anticipated the Romney surge. But Kennedy was not looking to cast blame. He quickly agreed that the campaign's old budget was inoperative, and they would have to spend a lot more money, about $10.5 million as it turned out. A field organization -- dormant since his reelection in 1970, the year after Chappaquiddick -- would have to be ginned up. Then there was the matter of "defining" Romney, the multimillionaire Prince Charming with the Midas touch in business.
Shrum read scripts from several TV ads he had produced, and urged Kennedy to air them the day after the primary. The spots would demonize Romney as a corporate raider with a nice smile but no soul.
Kennedy had never been forced to go negative in a Senate campaign and was mildly uncomfortable at the notion. But having been torched by Romney in a tough crime ad, the senator gave his approval, prepared to do whatever it took to win.
Romney, 47, was ready for a fight too, but within limits. He would attack Kennedy's voting record, not the senator's personal life. "I made a decision not to bring up his personal weaknesses," Romney said in an interview. "Winning isn't everything."
As it turned out, the Romney campaign's only allusion to the 62-year-old Kennedy's lifestyle would be a rakish photo used in a six-minute video played at house parties and other fund-raisers. The photo, given to the campaign by a Republican Party official, shows the senator in sunglasses and shorts at a Cape Cod yacht club.
Late in 1993, Romney hired pollster Richard Wirthlin to explore his chances against Kennedy. He found that while voters appreciated Kennedy's Senate service, more than half felt it was time for a change. These results dictated Romney's strategy. If he could establish himself as a credible alternative, voter fatigue with Kennedy could sweep him into office.
But Romney first had to gain the nomination of a party he had just joined in October 1993, after formerly being an Indepedent. "We knew nobody," said his wife, Ann. "We did not know a single Republican activist."
Romney worked hard, driving through blizzards to meet the party faithful. Mostly through business associates, he raised $256,000 by the end of 1993, anointing him as the Republican front-runner.
Romney assembled a campaign team. Strategist Charles Manning, who worked for Joe Malone against Kennedy in 1988, came from Gov. Weld's political team. Press secretary Ann Murphy came from Weld's press office. Campaign manager Marsh, a former state representative from Wellesley, had run Rep. Peter Blute's race for Congress in 1992.
Finally, Romney developed a field organization that, by going to town and city halls and identifying voters likely to take a Republican ballot, would help turn out 241,338 voters in the September primary, nearly 100,000 more than predicted.
After the September primary, though, Romney did not bring in enough experienced operatives to match the talent pouring into the Kennedy camp. Instead, Robert White, a longtime Romney associate with no political experience, was pressed into service coordinating staff and dealing with media questions about Romney's business record. Reflecting the relative scarcity of talent within state Republican circles, Manning also served as consultant to the campaigns of Weld, Malone and Blute.
Kennedy's re-election effort began early in 1992 in the aftermath of the Palm Beach rape trial of his nephew, William Kennedy Smith. The trial, late the previous year, had been a low point for the senator; his favorability ratings plummeted amid speculation about damage to his reelection chances.
"There had been a rush to bury Teddy before the trial that was premature," recalled Michael Kennedy. "He did well in his testimony, and we set about trying to underscore the positive things -- how people remembered him before Palm Beach."
If Palm Beach had conjured up the worst about Kennedy, his marriage seven months later to Victoria Reggie -- who had been active behind the scenes in Palm Beach and in helping the senator prepare for his personal mea culpa speech at Harvard in October 1991 -- was just the countervailing boost the Kennedy camp needed as it began looking to 1994.
But even as his personal image appeared on the mend, two books highly critical of Kennedy were published: "The Senator" by Richard Burke, a former aide, came out just after the marriage in 1992, and "The Last Brother," by Joe McGinniss, released the following year. Reviewers panned both books, and news accounts -- influenced by diligent Kennedy staff work -- focused on the personal foibles of Burke and McGinniss, undermining the books' credibility.
Then, just after Labor Day of this year, personal problems would flash again with news that Joan Kennedy was seeking to reopen her divorce settlement with the senator. But a month later she announced without explanation she was delaying her legal action until after the election. According to sources, she deferred the matter after being asked to do so by their three children -- Ted Jr., Patrick and Kara.
While voters were all too familiar with Kennedy's checkered personal history, the campaign's polling and focus group research suggested that they knew little about his Senate accomplishments. Part of the problem, Shrum felt, was that the senator had let his landslide 1988 reelection go by with virtually no advertising to remind voters of his record.
His advisers decided that the senator should spend more time at home as the election year approached, and his work in the Senate should concern itself largely with Massachusetts. A meeting at Kennedy's house in McLean, Va., in May 1993, produced the campaign theme: Kennedy fighting for the middle class and working families of the state. This Massachusetts-first strategy would have Kennedy in the state more than 100 days of the year in 1992, 1993 and 1994.
Following a tradition of asking members of his family to manage his campaigns, Kennedy tapped his nephew Michael in the summer of 1993. Michael, chairman of Citizens Energy Co. in Boston, had never run a campaign before and acknowledges he at first found the prospect daunting.
Other key people in the early stages of the campaign included Shrum; Kiley; Paul Donovan, the senator's chief of staff; Paul Kirk, the former Democratic National Committee chairman; and Charles Baker, a former Dukakis and Clinton operative who was the campaign's senior consultant.
Fund-raising dominated 1993. To demonstrate his commitment to reelection, and scare off potential opponents -- especially Weld -- Kennedy raised $3.6 million.
In a state where only 13 percent of the electorate is Republican, Romney's strategists wanted to avoid a campaign along party lines. Like Bill Weld in 1990, they believed, Romney needed to appeal to independents with a combination of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism.
Pollster Linda Divall, who joined the Romney campaign in May, identified 15 percent of the electorate as "battleground voters." Primarily suburban women aged 35-64, these voters were tired of Kennedy, but didn't know much about Romney. The campaign would target them through direct mailings, and ads on female-oriented, prime-time TV shows.
The Romney campaign's job, Divall said, was to paint a positive picture of the candidate before Kennedy could tarnish it. The first brush stroke came in May, a one-minute ad -- unlike the usual 30-second spot -- introducing Romney as a successful, Harvard-educated businessman.
To reinforce his non-partisan stance, Romney disassociated himself from out-of-state right-wing groups. He discouraged "family values" organizations and the Christian right from contributing money or producing their own anti- Kennedy ads.
Romney did not invite prominent national Republicans to campaign for him. Consequently, while Kennedy's surrogates included the Clintons, Jesse Jackson, John F. Kennedy Jr. and even a group of TV soap opera stars who targeted elderly and low-income voters, Romney lacked big-name supporters.
In October, according to a Republican insider, Romney staffers asked Weld to offset the senator's surrogates by denouncing Kennedy. But the governor felt he would risk losing votes from Kennedy supporters and alienating urban Democratic machines that were quietly helping him. He refused.
Romney's strategy had a deeper flaw: his opponent was not John Silber. While Weld in 1990 had out-flanked Silber from both the right and the left, Romney may have alienated his conservative base in a doomed effort to expropriate some of Kennedy's issues -- especially those appealing to women.
Nor did Romney challenge Kennedy on a favorite conservative issue -- taxes -- until it was too late. While Christopher Crowley, the campaign's research director, had compiled Kennedy's votes for 69 tax hikes since 1962, including taxes on Social Security and heating oil, Romney did not use the material until the campaign's waning weeks. "If it was up to me . . ., I would have liked to hit more," said Crowley.
This past spring, Kennedy's staff wrote several memoranda advising the senator on how to deal with Romney and position himself for the election. A March memo warned that Romney's "time for a change" theme could be effective, and that to counter it, the senator should portray his opponent as a Reagan-Bush throwback. And since campaign polling consistently showed President Clinton to be far more popular in Massachusetts than in other states, Kennedy was advised to present himself as a loyal Clinton lieutenant fighting for deficit reduction, a crime bill and universal health care.
An April memo stressed the campaign should highlight Kennedy's clout for the state. To familiarize voters with Kennedy's record, the campaign spent $546,000 on a burst of TV ads in July touting his accomplishments. Then his strategists turned their attention to Romney's background.
"He was always the guy you don't want: lots of money, no record, good- looking and articulate," said Baker.
A criminal records search the campaign ordered turned up a minor incident in the early 1980s when Romney was charged with disorderly conduct. The charge was later dropped, but the campaign leaked the story to the Globe anyway, in an early display of hardball tactics that would culminate on election eve with aides gloating that they'd succeeded in driving Romney's negative ratings higher than his positives.
One difficulty the Kennedy campaign faced in conducting opposition research was that Romney, who had never run for office, had no voting record, only a business record. If part of the battle was to be waged in the world of mergers, acquisitions and leverage buyouts, the campaign needed outside expertise. So it hired Terry Lenzner, former assistant chief counsel to the Senate Watergate committee, now head of The Investigative Group, Inc., based in Washington, which conducts corporate research primarily for corporate clients.
Lenzner investigated Romney's company, Bain Capital, particularly its use of Michael Milken's junk bond unit and its connections with El Salvadoran investors related to death squad members. But both cases were deemed too tenuous to pursue.
As Lenzner's team slogged away, Romney took to television in August with a series of ads on welfare and health care. Kennedy was off the air, biding his time -- and money. Two weeks into Romney's buy, Kiley, Kennedy's pollster, found that the ads were hurting the senator: Romney had gained more than 10 points.
At a meeting in Kennedy's Washington office, aides argued for going on the air to counter the Romney spots. But Kennedy decided to stand pat. At the end of August, he did authorize airing one ad to give himself a brief TV presence amidst the Romney buzz. The ad lauded Kennedy's role in getting the crime bill passed.
But Democrats -- and Kennedy in particular -- are not perceived as crime- fighters. The Romney team quickly aired a spot ridiculing the notion of Kennedy being tough on crime.
The Romney ad resonated with the public, much the way George Bush's spot showing Dukakis atop a tank did: the picture didn't fit. Kennedy began tumbling in the polls, and soon after Labor Day, Romney had pulled even. "That Romney ad was devastating," said Michael Kennedy. "Crime is not our best issue."
Then, out of the blue, came the break that Kennedy needed.
It was the first week of September. Mark Brooks, special projects director for the United Paperworkers International Union, sat in his Nashville office, wondering how to help 266 union members who had just gone on strike against Ampad Corp.
Ampad had just bought a paper products plant in Marion, Ind., in July from SCM Office Supplies. The day Ampad purchased the plant, SCM fired the workers. All but 20 were offered their jobs back, but in many cases at reduced wages or benefits, so they went on strike Sept. 1.
Researching Ampad's corporate history, Brooks noted that it had been acquired two years ago by Bain Capital. And that the chairman of Bain Capital was Romney. And that Romney was running for the Senate against labor's own, Ted Kennedy.
In fact, Romney had no direct involvement in laying off the Indiana workers. He had taken a leave of absence from Bain Capital six months before Ampad acquired the Indiana plant. But politics is about emotion, not logic, and the Ampad issue would taint Romney as a ruthless corporate raider and drive working-class Democrats and independents back to Kennedy.
Brooks called the senator's campaign, and was referred to research director Caitlin Sherman. After their talk, she read Indiana news accounts of the Ampad strike, which she found "powerful."
The Kennedy campaign then arranged for the union to tell the Indiana press about the Romney connection. That way, it could later tell reporters in Boston that the story linking the strike to Romney had broken independently in Indiana, and was therefore worth investigating.
In late September, the campaign dispatched a crew to Indiana to film the workers for a TV commercial. Tad Devine -- a former Dukakis operative and now a partner with Shrum -- flew to Marion and talked to the workers on camera. He had a text prepared for them to read, but when he tested them he found their responses so compelling that the script was scrapped.
The campaign screened those spots and others planned for its post-primary offensive against Romney for a focus group. All the ads tested well, but the Ampad workers elicited the strongest reactions.
When the Ampad commercials began airing in late September, their effectiveness was enhanced by news coverage in newspapers and on television. The paper workers union decided to send a group of Indiana strikers to Massachusetts as a "truth squad" that would inject itself into the Senate race and hound Romney.
The six workers drove east, and when they hit Massachusetts during the first week of October, they were met by the state AFL-CIO, which arranged their schedule and helped them get media coverage. "The Kennedy people didn't want it to look like they were orchestrating this thing, so they handed it off to us," said Joseph C. Faherty, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, a strong Kennedy supporter. "We did this because we knew it was a chink in the armor of Romney's story. It showed that Mitt Romney was not just a guy who created jobs. He ruined jobs."
The Romney campaign's response was both slow and indecisive. Since Romney had gone on leave from Bain Capital, his campaign had not monitored the company's activities for political impact. Pollster Divall first noticed that the Ampad ads were having an impact because voters were responding to open- ended questions by calling Romney cold-hearted. But since his favorability rating remained high, the campaign decided to ignore the issue.
Romney never fought back with an ad giving his side of the story. In fact, his TV admen were only told days later that Romney had been on leave from Bain Capital at the time of the layoffs. Instead, he aired an ad criticizing Kennedy's opposition to the death penalty. But the Ampad story would not fade. The strikers passed out leaflets hammering Bain Capital, depicting Romney in executioner's garb.
"It's something we should have anticipated, maybe not Ampad specifically, but an attack on his business record," says Marsh, Romney's campaign manager. "I do blame myself for not reading the signals. That's what I get paid for."
Initially, Romney reinforced his ruthless image by justifying the layoffs as economic restructuring. On Oct. 7, strikers jousted with Manning outside Bain Capital's office in Copley Square. A Democratic operative then sent Manning, who used to write a column on wrestling for the Boston Herald, a basket of flowers with a card that read, "This is not the WWF (World Wrestling Federation). This is about real lives."
On Oct. 9, Romney finally decided to meet with the strikers in a Newton hotel, where he diagrammed Bain Capital's corporate structure to show that he was not responsible for their plight. Afterwards, Romney said, he called Ampad and begged them to settle the strike. But Ampad lawyers replied that Romney could not intervene because he had a conflict of interest -- politics was clouding his business judgment.
Romney later tried to turn the tables by attacking Kennedy's investments. His campaign leaked material to the Herald about a deal in which the senator acquired Washington real estate. The campaign tried to capitalize on the story with TV and radio ads, but it miscalculated that voters would believe that Kennedy, whatever his other faults, could be financially corrupt. Also, unlike Romney during Ampad, Kennedy responded. His campaign identified factual problems with the Washington story and got former Sen. Paul Tsongas to denounce the Romney ads, blunting their impact.
In retrospect, Romney said, Kennedy's victory was "overwhelmingly related to his bringing in strikers from a company I wasn't involved with. He characterized me as a cold-hearted, unfeeling robber baron. Lies are hard to dispel. If this were the business world, Kennedy would be facing a pretty serious lawsuit."
Just as the good news on Ampad was building for the Kennedy campaign, the senator overshadowed it by telling Andy Hiller of WHDH-TV that it was appropriate to scrutinize Romney's religion.
This was the latest in a series of mistakes and flip-flops by the Kennedy campaign on Romney's Mormonism, starting with its pledge in June not to raise the issue. After the primary landslide Sept. 20 by the "millionaire Mormon," as Liz Walker referred to Romney that night on WBZ-TV, US Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II told the Herald that blacks were excluded from the Mormon priesthood. In fact, the church lifted that prohibition in 1978.
These missteps reflected a fundamental ambivalence on the Mormon issue within the Kennedy campaign. For the record, it agreed with John F. Kennedy that religion is a private matter. Off the record, most senior advisers felt it was fair to hold Romney accountable for his actions and statements as a leader in a church with controversial positions on race and gender. The difficulty was the campaign couldn't raise questions about these issues without appearing to be attacking Romney's religion. So Kennedy aides privately urged reporters to take on the task, even as the Romney camp lobbied them to squelch the issue.
Both campaigns believed that the Mormon issue ultimately helped Kennedy by contributing to a sense that Romney was culturally alien in largely Catholic Massachusetts. Because the church opposed the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion, the Romney camp felt, his faith hurt him among independent women, a key battleground. "Every time it's brought up, it makes women think, 'Is he really pro-choice?' " said Crowley, Romney's research director.
Two days after his comments to Hiller, Kennedy backed off the issue in a statement drafted by Sasso. The Romney campaign decided it was unnecessary to air a television ad it had prepared in which a shirt-sleeved Romney said: "All my life I've been guided by a set of strongly held beliefs. One is my religion. Another is tolerance of others. John Kennedy's election should have meant an end to religious bigotry in politics. Unfortunately, some in this campaign have chosen to use religion against me."
Jack Corrigan, former operations director in the Dukakis presidential campaign and now a Norfolk County deputy district attorney, coordinated polling and advertising. Ranny Cooper, Kennedy's longtime chief of staff who resigned last year, helped administer the campaign. David Burke, an early administrative assistant to the senator and former CBS news president, served as the "body man," riding with Kennedy on the campaign trail. Robert "Skinner" Donahue, a veteran Democratic organizer who had worked for Jimmy Carter against Kennedy in the 1980 Democratic presidential primary, oversaw and expanded the senator's field organization.
Decisions now usually required a consensus of eight people: Michael Kennedy, Baker, Cooper, Shrum, Corrigan, Donovan, press secretary Rick Gureghian and operations director John Giesser. On major moves, Sasso and Kiley were included.
Sasso and Corrigan, who both had worked for Kennedy in his 1980 run against Carter, wrote a strategic memo in late September to guide the campaign's final weeks. According to aides, it urged Kennedy to stress his accomplishments, to listen to voters and not get annoyed by "moronic" queries from the press. Kennedy, while not running away from his liberal core, should underscore his support of workfare, the elimination of parole, and the line-item veto.
And since his TV ads had already sullied Romney's image, there was no need to overdo the negative, the memo advised. Rather, Kennedy should simply engage Romney on policies where they differ. He should also give a major framework speech, which turned out to be an Oct. 16 address at Faneuil Hall.
On Tuesday morning, Oct. 25, Romney received an anonymous phone call at his Belmont home, warning him not to eat or drink at Faneuil Hall before his first debate with Kennedy, that night.
The threat didn't rattle Romney, who had prepared for the debate the previous weekend in his family room. State Secretary of Human Services Charles Baker, who had played Kennedy for Malone in 1988, assumed the same role for Romney.
The mock debates followed the format planned for Faneuil Hall. First, choosing from a list of 100 questions they had prepared, Romney strategists acted as a panel of journalists interrogating the candidates. Then, preparing for the Lincoln-Douglas portion of the debate, Romney and Baker went head to head. Anticipating Kennedy's strategy, Baker tried to expose Romney's inexperience. When Baker asked Romney about health care costs, Romney shot back, "Since when do you care about costs?"
"Generally speaking, Kennedy didn't say a thing in the first debate that I didn't say to Mitt Romney," Baker said.
The Romney campaign also prepared what it hoped would be a bombshell. Since Kennedy ads had charged that firms in which Bain Capital invested, notably Staples Inc., did not pay health insurance to part-time workers, Manning checked whether the Kennedy-owned Chicago Merchandise Mart insured part- timers. He was told it did not.
Delighted, Manning set a trap. Romney's first question to Kennedy would be about the senator's double-standard on health insurance for part-time employees.
For his part, Kennedy had started early preparation for the debates in September at his house in McLean where Shrum, Donovan, legislative aide Carey Parker and David Smith, a former aide, gathered and threw questions at him.
The Kennedy camp viewed the debates as a potential stumbling-block against the younger, slicker, more telegenic Romney. On a Friday afternoon 11 days before the primary, the Kennedy campaign announced it had accepted two debates: Oct. 21 at Northeastern University in Boston, and Oct. 24 at Holyoke Community College -- two working-class colleges that were historically friendly to Kennedy. The first date was on a Friday night, when relatively few people watch television. And most of that audi ence, Kennedy aides anticipated before the baseball strike, would be watching the World Series.
The Kennedy camp also wanted the debates bunched closely together so that in the public's mind they would blur into one event; and they wanted as much time as possible between the last debate and Election Day so if Kennedy stumbled, there would be time to correct any mistake.
After Romney won the primary, he began pressing Kennedy for more neutral debate sites in prime time. Finally, the Globe took the unusual step of lining up the major television stations, as well as the Herald, behind two prime-time debates at Faneuil Hall the last week in October.
After a day of feverish meetings, the Kennedy campaign compromised, agreeing to the two newspapers' first Faneuil Hall date, Oct. 25, but insisting on Holyoke for the second debate just two nights later.
On the Friday before the first debate, a Kennedy team gathered in the second-floor conference room of the R.M. Bradley Co. in Boston. Company President John T. Fallon is a friend of Kennedy's and provided his facilities for the debate sessions, which continued over the weekend through Monday.
The core team consisted of Smith, who played Romney; Shrum, who acted as the moderator; and Sasso, Corrigan and Parker as the three reporters asking questions.
Kennedy kept the mood light with self-deprecating humor. Once, looking at the three-foot wide podium that his staff had negotiated to conceal the senator's ample girth, Kennedy cracked: "You could stay overnight in this podium."
Shrum, noting that the first debate would be a watershed moment in the campaign, asked Sasso to outline their strategy, which was to be "appropriately aggressive." Kennedy would press Romney on specifics, and try to dominate with his command of the issues and of the legislative process.
"The contrast we wanted to draw is between someone who is effective, committed and caring, versus someone who is ineffective, waffling and indifferent," according to one of the advisers present at the sessions. "It was pretty obvious to us that Romney was so offended by the attacks on his business record that he was going to come at Kennedy on that. His whole strategy was to say, 'I'm not a bad guy.' That was a fatal flaw, and we all saw it coming."
Another adviser present recalled how they settled on health care as Kennedy's main line of attack: "Kennedy just started asking Dave Smith, 'What's your position on health care?' Smith started in with some platitude that he wanted everyone covered. Kennedy bore down on him and started to eat him alive: 'What's covered and what's not? How much did it cost? How will you pay for it?' Smith, like Romney, didn't have the answer."
Having debated Republicans for 32 years, Kennedy believed he could predict Romney's answers. At one point, he and Smith switched roles, and Kennedy played Romney because he felt he could argue better against his own positions.
On the morning of the debate, a Herald poll put Kennedy ahead by 18 points, increasing the pressure on Romney. As they greeted each other on the Faneuil Hall stage, Romney asked Kennedy: "When is the fun going to start?" It was a reference to their first meeting in May at a Boston Chamber of Commerce luncheon, when Kennedy assured his opponent that campaigns can be fun.
Romney's strategists had anticipated all of the panel's questions, and he breezed through the first half-hour. But by the time the Lincoln-Douglas format began, Romney had already pressed the Merchandise Mart issue, and decided to substitute another question. Just as the Kennedy campaign had expected, Romney complained about the senator's ads. With a lordly wave, Kennedy told him to stick to the real issues.
From then on, Romney seemed to lose his footing. When Kennedy asked what Romney's health care plan would cost, Romney said he didn't know. What he had been briefed to say -- but forgot -- was that Kennedy's plan would be far more expensive than his.
"I knew he didn't . . . know what he was talking about" on health care, Kennedy said in an interview yesterday.
