Michael Capuano is my congressman. He does not make me yearn for Joe Kennedy to return. That's the plus side.
He is now running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator, that is, for Teddy's seat. He is not the favorite. But neither is my candidate, Alan Khazei, an honest-to-God community organizer who co-founded City Year. The favorite in the polls is the Massachusetts attorney general, Martha Coakley, who is long on seniority in public office and a woman with common sense, sound political judgment, true rather than hyperbolic liberal values. At the same time, Khazei would bring a seasoned but fresh look at the Commonwealth's politics in its interface with the national government. Sort of like Barney Frank. Khazei would also be a new kind of mind in the Senate.
Before he was elected to the House of Representatives, Capuano was mayor of Somerville, a town nearly as diverse, skin-wise, as the United Nations. Maybe that's where he got his yen for foreign policy.
And right now he is trying to separate himself and his colleagues on the House Sudan Caucus from the Obama administration's new policy and new top staffer aimed to stop the misery in Darfur. Separate himself at least for campaign reasons. A letter from Capuano appears in Friday's Boston Globe. Read it closely. It wants you to think that the Caucus has been in existence for a long time. It hasn't. It's been around maybe, two weeks.
But its distancing itself from the new policy and new aide, Scott Gration, is also so hedged and deferential that the letter actually asks for nothing. The Obami have been oozing themselves into an appeasement policy for Sudan for almost the entire time they've been in office. We've been commenting on this continually. Let's face facts: nobody in Washington really cares about dead black children and adults, especially those murdered and persecuted by Arabs. Not the black caucus, not even a black president. So why should Michael Capuano be held to a higher standard? But, then, why doesn't he stop pretending?