Heading South: Massachusetts Political Insider Chooses Edwards Over Kerry

by Becky Evans

WASHINGTON - Gerry Kavanaugh knows politics. And he knows Massachusetts.

The Dartmouth native has worked as chief of staff to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and as a policy director at the Democratic National Committee. He ran Kennedy's last two re-election campaigns. He has organized city council and mayoral campaigns in Quincy, Salem and Boston.

So when it came time to choose sides in the current presidential race, it would seem natural for Mr. Kavanaugh to sign onto the campaign of another Democrat from the Bay State, Sen. John F. Kerry. Instead, Mr. Kavanaugh is working as a senior policy adviser to John Edwards, a Democratic senator from North Carolina.

He picked the candidate he thought had the best chance to unseat President Bush.

"If we want to win the presidency, we need to win Southern states," Mr. Kavanaugh explained in an interview last week. "And I think we need a Southern candidate to do that."

Mr. Kavanaugh, 49, also said he has a personal relationship with Edwards, and so chose him early this year over Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, the only other Southern Democratic candidate in the race until retired Gen. Wesley Clark of Arkansas entered the fray last month.

"I have known Edwards since we worked together in the Senate and decided to coalesce behind him because I thought he could win Southern states," Mr. Kavanaugh said. "At the time, the only other senator that could do that was Graham, but I didn't think he was a strong enough candidate."

Edwards' press secretary, Jennifer Palmieri, who also worked with Mr. Kavanaugh at the Democratic National Committee, said he was not rejecting Sen. Kerry so much as sustaining his "special bond" with Sen. Edwards.

"They share the same sort of blue-collar upbringing and a lot of the same values," Palmieri said. "Their parents worked hard and wanted a better life for their children. They feel a real kinship."

Sen. Edwards, who on the campaign trail promotes his working-class roots - his father was a mill worker - entered the Senate a millionaire trial lawyer.

Chris Black, spokeswoman for Sen. Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, said Mr. Kavanaugh also might have been applying the basic law of supply and demand.

"Anyone who gets a seasoned political operative is lucky. Kerry has a lot. We grow them here, so it's not surprising that some would end up working for candidates from other states," said Ms. Black, a summer resident of Marion who for years covered Sen. Kennedy as a reporter for the Boston Globe.

Kelley Benander, a spokeswoman for Sen. Kerry, agreed: "Massachusetts is a big state with hundreds of political operatives, many of whom signed up with our campaign and many who have not."

Bristol County District Attorney Paul Walsh, who grew up playing basketball with Mr. Kavanaugh in Buttonwood Park, said joining Edwards' campaign is merely a reflection of his friend's free-thinking personality.

"You would think logically being a Mass guy he'd go with Edwards, but Gerry is a tough guy, and he makes very independent calls," Mr. Walsh said. "He is strong in his opinions."

He might be campaigning for a Southerner, but Mr. Kavanaugh has lost neither his Boston accent nor his Northern roots.

The walls of his Washington office are decorated with New England mementos, including a large New Bedford map, colored prints of Boston Harbor and a black and white photograph of his junior high school all-star basketball team crowded around Celtics' star Bob Cousy.

His mother recently passed away, but the blue-eyed, white-haired Mr. Kavanaugh still returns to Dartmouth to visit some of his six brothers and sisters. He said he is most impressed by the real estate growth that has taken place since he left the New Bedford area in 1972 to attend Lafayette College.

City-planning issues fascinated Mr. Kavanaugh as a child. His father, who owned a small furniture store on Union St., talked often at the dinner table about the changing business district.

"One of the big, big, big decisions was whether to close off Main St. and make it into a pedestrian mall," he said. "They did that and it had a dramatic effect on my father's business."

After earning a master's degree in urban planning at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978, Mr. Kavanaugh worked as a city planner in Quincy and Salem. But he soon gravitated toward politics. He described the transition as a matter of necessity.

"I realized that in order to get things done, you had to be as much a part of the political process as a part of the policy process," he said. "That's how I got involved in politics and became very active in campaigns and elections."

Following his 1994 campaign, Sen. Kennedy asked Mr. Kavanaugh to be his chief economic adviser. Three years later, Mr. Kavanaugh became the senator's chief of staff, a job he said was "all consuming but incredibly rewarding."

"Kennedy is really a national figure and the head of a huge and well-known family. So his chief of staff has to have impeccable judgment," Ms. Black said. "Besides public policy, you need to look out for the political family and the state. It's an enormously difficult jobáAfter you've done that you can do anything."

For some, the next step might have been a run for political office. But Mr. Kavanaugh said he never thought about it. "I guess it's because I like my privacy," he said.

In 2001, Mr. Kavanaugh left Sen. Kennedy's office to work at the DNC, a move spurred by former Vice President Al Gore's defeat in the 2000 presidential election. Gore, who is from Tennessee, lost most Southern states.

"After the election, I saw that we, meaning the Democrats, really had to do lots of different things in order to stay competitive, so I went over to the DNC to try to affect the way some of that is done," Mr. Kavanaugh said.

Mr. Kavanaugh worked long hours at the DNC in his glass-enclosed office, affectionately named the "fish bowl."

He concentrated on three areas that he thought would make Democrats more competitive: increasing the number of small donors, getting Democrats to the polls and attracting swing voters.

"Gerry was the hardest worker in the campaign," said Peter O'Keefe, senior adviser to DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe. "That kind of dedication, coupled with keen political skills and his relationships, will make him a tremendous asset to the Edwards campaign."

Mr. Kavanaugh describes his work style as "never-ending."

"I try to be the earliest guy into work and the last guy out," he said. Mr. Kavanaugh, who is single, said he generally works from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.

He said he also prefers to stay out of the limelight, an unusual trait in the capital.

"There are not many people like Gerry in politics. Lots of people are out to promote themselves, but he couldn't be more private and old-schoolá.He is a wonderful soul and a nice person to be around," Ms. Palmieri said. She added that Mr. Kavanaugh relates well to people both politically and personally: "That is why he is so good at labor and union politics."

During his time with Sen. Kennedy, Mr. Kavanaugh developed deep ties to organized labor -- one of the reasons Sen. Edwards asked him to join his campaign in mid-2002.

"At the DNC, Gerry had exposure to business, labor, environmental, nonprofit, aging, and health groups. He put all those interests together and was a coalition-builder," Ms. Palmieri said. "His relationships from those days are important to us, they are important to Sen. Edwards."

Sen. Edwards' invitation to work on the campaign didn't surprise Mr. Kavanaugh. He already had been working for two years to raise money for Edwards' 2004 senatorial campaign, which the senator canceled last month in order to devote all his time to his presidential campaign.

Mr. Kavanaugh rejected theories that Sen. Edwards, who is trailing several competitors in the polls, dropped out of the Senate race in order to position himself for the vice-presidential nomination.

"Those who know John Edwards know he is doing this to become President, not Vice President," Mr. Kavanaugh said. "He wants to focus all his attention on this campaign, and did that so he could get a good Democratic candidate from North Carolina to run for that [Senate] seat."

Securing Democratic seats in the closely divided Senate is very important to Mr. Kavanaugh, who said he fears losing ground to Republicans. In congressional elections last year, Democrats lost control of the Senate. But the party still has enough members to filibuster and block GOP legislation, a power Mr. Kavanaugh would like to preserve.

"If we win the presidency, we could also win some Senate seats," he said.

Since joining the Edwards campaign in January, Mr. Kavanaugh has been wooing labor unions, particularly the AFL-CIO; National Education Association; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the Service Employees International Union.

"I've tried to make sure those unions understand what John Edwards is about and work to push them to endorse him," Mr. Kavanaugh said. "The other thing I do is coordinate policies of labor unions with Edwards' policies to make certain they are consistent."

Though based in Washington, Mr. Kavanaugh spends much of his time on the road with Sen. Edwards or at the campaign's headquarters in Raleigh, N.C.

He said he is not discouraged by recent reports that show fundraising for the senator has declined dramatically since the first quarter, when he raised $7.4 million. Sen. Edwards' aides have estimated he raised about $3 million during the third quarter.

"We planned it that way," Mr. Kavanaugh said. "We wanted to make sure we had enough to compete until February so we went out in first six months and raised more than everyone else. We will find out in a couple of months if we were right."

Mr. Kavanaugh conceded that Gen. Clark "totally shook everyone up" by joining the race in mid-September, but said Mr. Clark's campaign "has not really formed yet." The former NATO commander was the 10th Democrat to enter the race.

Still, the entrance of another southerner could shake up Mr. Kavanaugh's strategy to win the South.

"The litmus test will be who is most capable of beating Bush and the most capable of winning Southern states. We don't know how Clark will do, but when you look at the other nine and look at who could win red states -- Republican states that Bush won in 2000 -- we know that we can compete in those states just because of where we come from," Mr. Kavanaugh said. "I think the other candidates lack the ability to do that."

Although Sen. Edwards lags behind other Democrats in most key polls, Mr. Kavanaugh said he was pleased that a recent poll showed the senator leading the pack in his native South Carolina, the first Southern state to vote in a primary.

"It goes back to what I was saying about who can win Southern states," Mr. Kavanaugh said.

Though his strategy is to carry the South - and Sen. Kerry is widely expected to win Massachusetts - Mr. Kavanaugh said Sen. Edwards should appeal to New Bedford voters for three reasons: he comes from a working-class background; he grew up in the South during the Civil Rights movement; and he is a strong supporter of civil liberties.