This is a very good article that explains a little bit more about what goes on in family fights in MA. This election is also a family fight in MA.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040802/pierceMassachusetts politics never has been about conservatives and liberals. The same people who listened religiously (you should pardon the pun) to the radio ravings of Father Charles Coughlin, and the same people who cheered on Joseph McCarthy, still voted in stunning ensemble for the local Democratic Party. Even though the state's last four governors have been Republicans, the GOP hasn't been able to elect anyone to much of anything else, and the Democratic Party still holds a three-to-one advantage in registered voters. And all four of those governors--William Weld, Paul Cellucci, Jane Swift and Romney--were notably silent on the hot-button social issues, until the state's Supreme Judicial Court forced Romney's hand on gay marriage last fall. The tide of "Movement conservatism" elsewhere in America rolled back at the Massachusetts border.
Massachusetts politics always has been about established power and the reform impulse, and, since the beginning of the last century, that struggle has taken place within a liberal Democratic context. That is the tradition that produced John Kerry, and it's not a bad tradition to come from when you're running against an Administration that seems to stand for power, and for its exercise, and for very little else.
Many years ago, almost everybody in Massachusetts was a liberal, even the Republicans, although the Republicans didn't know they were liberals at the time. The successive waves of immigration--most particularly, the nineteenth-century flood tide from Ireland--set up a dynamic that locked Massachusetts Republicans forever into the position of established power based on inherited privilege and high-end Protestantism. Considering that these people were the historical heirs of the radical abolitionists of the mid-1800s, when the movement against slavery began in Episcopalian, Congregationalist and (especially) Unitarian pulpits, it was quite odd for the children and grandchildren of the firebrands to find themselves cast as the defenders of an entrenched elite. However, the immigrant Massachusetts Democrats managed the not-inconsiderable feat of casting themselves as "reformers" while simultaneously perfecting virtually the entire gamut of modern American political corruption. Specifically, the very real discrimination that these immigrants felt from the Massachusetts establishment, and from the nativist mobs working at its tacit behest, created a political culture in which ethnic nepotism was transformed into self-defense and, thus, into a durable language of revolutionary reform.
The basic appeal of the legendary Boston political bosses--from James Michael Curley, to John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, to Martin "The Mahatma" Lomasney, who once explained, "Never write when you can speak. Never speak when you can nod"--was deeper than simply "Where's Mine?" There was more than a little bit of sticking-it-to-The-Man about it as well. This was echoed by the lesser satellites throughout the Commonwealth. In Worcester, my birthplace, a city with proud progressive Republican roots in both abolitionism and in the various movements for women's rights, the citizens once elected a mayor named John C. Mahoney, who campaigned on the slogan "Me hands are tied. Me back is to the wall. And the Protestants are after me." The constituent-service liberalism born when the immigrants came to power was, at its heart, extraordinarily reactionary.
This election is also about "sticking it to The Man" and that is a local fight.
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