U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano running for late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s seat

Journal Archive

BOSTON

I used to be a mild-mannered sort, but no more. Michael Capuano has ignited my sense of grievance.

Mike, you see, is running for the U.S. Senate on behalf of all of us who have been put down or pushed aside or sneered at, or told the good life was meant for better sorts than us hardscrabble Eighth District folk.

“How many of you in your lives have been told you can’t do this, you’re not entitled to do this?” he asked at a recent campaign event. “Somebody else can do this, but not you?”

That’s me to a T. Most recently, it happened when I suggested I might take some of my unused vacation time and go somewhere warm to windsurf this winter. It turns out my wife thinks some decade-delayed home renovations have a more pressing claim on domestic resources. Not only has my windsurfing idyll receded like a mirage into the distance, but I’ve been spending every free hour ripping down paneling and prying up infinite layers of splintery plywood in ceaseless search of an authentic wood floor.

So, my frustration at fever pitch, I hung on my congressman’s every syllable.

“And how many of you said, ‘Oh, sure, thank you very much’?”

As it happens, I said something equally acquiescent. But let me tell you, if I were one Michael Everett Capuano, I surely wouldn’t have.

“When people tell you no,” he proclaimed, “you should stand up and . . .”

Well, honestly, by this time the crowd was clapping so loudly that I couldn’t hear what you should do. Why, I haven’t felt so much vicarious resentment since millworker’s son-cum-multimillionaire populist John Edwards related how, when he went away to college, some Southern grandees looked at him and jeered: “Water yew dune hair?”

I know Mike has endured the same kind of disdain, because when he was invited to give the commencement speech at Boston University last spring, word got out that some of the seniors had hoped for someone more famous than a mere congressman. How that must have stung! However, after treating the kids to a little congressional condescension, Mike rose manfully to the task of generating graduation-day platitudes.

But back to his recent campaign event. Listening, I couldn’t help thinking of one of my favorite literary characters, Willie Stark, the angry populist in Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” who rallies the common folk by telling them “whatever a hick wants, he’s got to do for himself.”

Warren wrote the novel some six decades ago, but the parallels are eerie. It’s almost Lincoln-Kennedy stuff.

Consider: Willie’s wife was a schoolteacher. Mike met his wife when they were being taught in a school.

As governor, Willie paved roads. As mayor, Mike filled potholes.

Willie fought some monied special interests. Mike sought some special-interest money.

As with Willie, everyone scoffed at Mike’s desire to be somebody. Who, you ask, were those soul-slaying naysayers? “Lots of people. Society in general, including people in my high school,” Capuano says.

Thankfully, there were a few exceptions. Like, say, the admissions folks at Dartmouth, as I believe the obscure New Hampshire college he attended is called, and Boston College, the little law school that saw a glimmer of promise in this unpolished pearl. And, of course, the thousands of Somerville voters, who elected him mayor at 37 and later helped propel him to Congress. And Nancy Pelosi, who has made him speaker’s pet.

I know, I know, hearing that litany, some cynics will say that Mike is laying it on a little thick with his working-class shtick and pugnacious populism.

Not me. I mean, come on. Mike has only one home, plus one vacation home, and two rental properties. His assets are a mere $1.4 million to $3.1 million.

What? You say that he’s apparently second wealthiest among the Democratic candidates, after Steve Pagliuca?

Egad. That can’t be. After all, Mike is a populist, and populists don’t like the well-off.

So please don’t tell him, okay? He’s already bristling with anger at everyone else.

The last thing we need is to have him mad at himself, too.

Scot Lehigh is a columnist for The Boston Globe.