or once, all the cliches were apt. It was a nail-biter of a campaign, a cliffhanger, a breathless race to the finish line. Not in a generation, maybe not in two, had Americans experienced a political year like this one. Some elections are foregone conclusions; they come, they go, and little changes. But this year, everything was at stake - the presidency, the Senate, the House - and no one could say how it would all turn out.
There were marquee struggles all over the country. Hillary's lunge for the open Senate seat in New York. John Ashcroft's battle with a dead man in Missouri. Would Al Gore lose his own home state? Could Jeb Bush deliver Florida for his brother? Would Clinton's loyalists take out Jim Rogan, Bob Barr, and the other House managers of the impeachment trial? Tense contests everywhere went down to the wire. Some are still undecided.
Campaign 2000 climaxed in a great rush of adrenaline. From the massive final rallies to the deluge of TV ads, the excitement was felt everywhere.
Everywhere but Massachusetts.
Here in the cradle of American democracy, Election Day was a dud. The whole campaign was a dud. There was never a mystery about who would win the state's 12 electoral votes, of course; Gore had the Bay State locked up the day he declared his candidacy. But there was also no mystery about who would win virtually every other office listed on Tuesday's ballot. For only one political party takes elections seriously in Massachusetts. The other is a sorry joke.
Once upon a time, Republicans were a force to be reckoned with hereabouts. Well into the 1950s, they accounted for half the Massachusetts congressional delegation. When Tip O'Neill became speaker of the Massachusetts House in 1949, he was the first Democrat to do so since the Civil War.
But the party of Sumner, Lodge, and Saltonstall is long since vanished. Today Massachusetts is represented by exactly zero Republicans in Washington and by not many more than zero in the state Legislature. And to judge from their performance in the campaign just ended, their invisibility suits them just fine.
On Tuesday's ballot, not one of the Bay State's 10 Democratic congressmen faced a serious Republican challenge; five faced no GOP challenge at all. Sure, Ted Kennedy's reelection was foreordained, but where was it written that the Republican standard-bearer had to be a preposterous blowhard whose campaign couldn't pass the giggle test?
There are 40 seats in the state Senate. The Republicans fielded candidates in 15 of them. There are 160 House districts. The Republicans bothered to run in 58. Do the math: Republicans were no-shows in nearly two-thirds of the state's legislative races. And so it went all the way down the ballot. Of eight Governor's Council seats, the GOP contested two. Of 12 clerk of court races, the GOP participated in four. Republicans didn't lose this election - they threw it.
What a disgrace. All over this state, there are conservative foot soldiers just itching to give the Democrats a fight if only they had some Republican officers to lead them. But the foremost Republican in Massachusetts - Governor Paul Cellucci - shows no more interest in leading his party than Bill Weld did before him. Weld's lack of interest in building up the GOP was a matter of selfishness; he figured he had more to gain personally from cutting deals with Democrats than butting heads with them on matters of principle. But Cellucci is supposed to be different. And it's hard to understand why he stands immobile as the Massachusetts Republican Party rusts into oblivion.
The explanation cannot be that he fears a fight or thinks he can't win one. In the battle over Question 4, Cellucci took on the entire Democratic power structure - and clobbered it. He knows that voters will support a Republican, even in Massachusetts, if the Republicans give them candidates they admire. Last winter, thousands of Bay State Democrats switched their party enrollment so they could vote for John McCain in the presidential primary. Republicans can win in Massachusetts. But only if they run.
After his election in 1998, Cellucci took direct control of the state GOP and vowed to restore two-party competition. So far he's restored nothing. There has been no fund-raising to speak of, no effort to build a farm team, no outreach, no candidate recruitment. Result: The Massachusetts Republican Party is all but dead. Unless something changes fast, it will soon be extinct. Expect the funeral in 2002.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
