| projo.com | The Providence Journal

11.8.2000 01:29
Langevin, Kennedy win

Secretary of State James R. Langevin's victory takes him from an office with little power to the U.S. House of Representatives.

By ARIEL SABAR
Journal Staff Writer

Secretary of State James R. Langevin was elected yesterday as Rhode Island's newest congressman, capturing a landslide of votes at the end of a race that held little drama after the September primary.

Langevin, the Democratic nominee, won 62 percent of the vote in the 2nd Congressional District, trouncing his nearest opponent, independent Rodney D. Driver, who drew 22 percent.

The victory comes after an even-keeled campaign with little flash in which Langevin traded on his record and name recognition over 14 years in elected office.

With his election, Langevin, 36, becomes only the second secretary of the state in Rhode Island history to win election to Congress. His victory marks an unusual leap from an office with little power or public exposure, but one that Langevin turned into a bully pulpit two years ago with a report exposing secret meetings at the General Assembly.

His election is notable in another sense, as well. Langevin will be the only one of 435 members of the House of Representatives to use a wheelchair, something other Democratic leaders seized on yesterday as remarkable.

"With Langevin, we're seeing history here," Sen. Jack Reed said last night. "He will be a symbol not just for Rhode Island, but for communities nationwide."

Langevin will go to Capitol Hill next year with Rhode Island's only other U.S. representative, Patrick J. Kennedy, who easily won a fourth term yesterday in the 1st Congressional District. Kennedy defeated Republican Stephen Cabral, a Tiverton boiler operator who has never held elected office, 67 percent to 33 percent.

Langevin drew wild cheers yesterday when he took to the stage in the Garden Room at the Providence Biltmore, the Democrats' Election Night headquarters.

"It doesn't get any better than this," Langevin said to the boisterous crowd, as he sat on a stage flanked by members of his family and by Reed and Kennedy. "The people have spoken tonight, and now is the time to let the journey begin."

He said that he aspired to fill "the big shoes" of his predecessors in the seat -- Reed and Robert A. Weygand, who gave up his seat to run for Senate this year. And he vowed to press in Congress for improvements in health care, schools, Medicare, and gun control.

In distant second place in the 2nd Congressional District was Driver, a retired math professor and former state lawmaker with an eccentric streak. Driver pulled off the most successful of his three bids for Congress since 1990, capturing 22 percent of the vote and outflanking the Republican candidate, Robert G. Tingle.

"It's interesting that an independent candidate was able to outpoll one of the major party candidates," Driver said in an interview from Chelo's restaurant in Warwick, where he was watching the returns with about 20 campaign volunteers. "That sends a message that maybe there's a place for independents."

Tingle, of Hopkinton, a pit boss at Foxwoods Resort Casino who has never held office, earned 14 percent of the vote. And Green Party candidate Dorman J. Hayes Jr., a woodcutter and prohibitionist who lost a race for the North Kingstown Town Council two years ago, won 2 percent.

LANGEVIN'S ELECTION will leave a mid-term vacancy in the secretary of state's office. The state Constitution requires the General Assembly to appoint a successor until the 2002 elections.

Langevin entered public life in 1986 as a delegate to the state's Constitutional Convention. He was elected to the General Assembly as a representative from Warwick two years later, and compiled a record as a government reformer and advocate for people with disabilities.

He won election as secretary of state in 1994, and in his first term hauled the secretary of state's office into the computer age. He replaced lever-operated voting machines with electronic ballot readers and launched state government's first Web site.

But Langevin made his biggest splash with a 1998 report titled "Access Denied" that publicized secret General Assembly meetings and angered state lawmakers, who eventually made reforms to keep the public better informed of its meetings.

The report thrust Langevin's name into the headlines and earned him awards from two of the state's prominent government watchdog groups, Common Cause of Rhode Island and Operation Clean Government.

Langevin was reelected in 1998, but term limits would have barred him from a third term.

With little organized opposition after the September primary, the outcome of yesterday's election was never really in doubt. But Langevin continued to campaign through Election Day, taking a short break after the primary before returning to the circuit of highrises for the elderly and festivals and fairs and taking his campaign back to television in the last week of the race.

Although Tingle and Hayes had tiny war chests and were unable to gain ground against Langevin, Driver poured more than $300,000 of his retirement savings into his campaign.

His commercials, notable for their use of cartoon animation, took direct aim at Langevin, grouping him among the state's "legislative sheep" for what Driver said was a lack of independence from the state's Democratic leaders and criticizing Langevin's acceptance of campaign contributions from political action committees.

Langevin faced his toughest fight in the four-way Democratic primary, when social worker and health-care lobbyist Kate Coyne-McCoy ran an edgy and animated campaign that mobilized the left flank of the party, including labor unions, social activists and abortion-rights supporters.

Coyne-McCoy devoted much of her campaign to attacking Langevin's opposition to abortion rights. But the strategy fell short, with Langevin winning 47 percent of the vote and Coyne-McCoy, 29 percent.

Langevin has not shied over the years from drawing attention to a gun accident at age 16 that severed his spine and left him paralyzed from the chest down.

Langevin has since used a wheelchair, and voters have said in interviews that they view Langevin as a symbol of triumph over hardship. The legal settlement from the accident left Langevin a millionaire, and he has tapped those riches to help bankroll his campaigns.

Langevin voted at 9:15 a.m. yesterday at Wyman Elementary School near his Warwick home, and took the opportunity to highlight the state's new tactile ballots for the blind.

The only other Rhode Island secretary of state to go to Congress was Samuel Eddy, of Providence, who was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1819 after 22 years as secretary of state.

KENNEDY, 33, elected in 1994 as the youngest member of Congress, saw his star soar two years ago when House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt named him chief of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The prestigious appointment put Kennedy in charge of what he described at the time as a "historic opportunity" to put Democrats back in charge of the House.

As chairman of the DCCC, Kennedy kept up a harried life of fundraisers and coast-to-coast flights as he raised money, strategized and campaigned on behalf of Democratic House candidates across the country.

He spent just a handful of days in Rhode Island, but he sought to make those visits count. In February, he drew plaudits from mental-health advocates with a speech in Woonsocket in which he acknowledged that he suffered from depression.

A month later, he gave an emotional speech at a black church in Providence, after the shooting of police Sgt. Cornel Young Jr., that earned praise from the city's minority leaders.

But Kennedy's cross-country travels also led to a scandal that proved a distraction to Kennedy's fight for Democratic control of the House. In March, a guard at Los Angeles International Airport accused him of shoving her during an argument over Kennedy's oversized luggage.

The authorities declined to press charges, but ordered Kennedy to attend a mediation session with the guard in Los Angeles that drew coverage in media outlets from the Los Angeles Times to Entertainment Tonight .

More legal troubles followed this month, when the owner of a Mystic, Conn., charter boat company threatened to sue Kennedy for allegedly damaging and abandoning a sloop he had rented this summer. Kennedy denies the allegations.

Kennedy told supporters at the Biltmore last night that he regretted that his work had kept him away from Rhode Island. But he said that the friends he had made among members of Congress from other states had helped him cut deals for Rhode Island and win important appointments on Capitol Hill.

He praised his Republican opponent for giving Rhode Islanders "a choice in the election." Then he called himself "one of the luckiest persons on the face of the earth."

"I have the opportunity to go back and do the job I love."

Cabral, for his part, last night called Kennedy "the number-one partisan basher" and urged Kennedy to spend more time in his district.

Kennedy voted yesterday afternoon at Birchwood School, in North Providence, near the Douglas Avenue apartment he is renting while waiting for his new, four-bedroom house to be built on a secluded former apple orchard on the Sakonnet River in Portsmouth.

He remained outside the middle school afterward to campaign with his mother, Joan Bennett Kennedy; his brother, Ted Kennedy Jr.; and his sister, Kara Kennedy Allen.

-- With reports from staff writers Jennifer Levitz and Elliot Krieger.

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