Presidential race not Weld’s last hurrah
Tom Brady is a lot like Bill Weld.
He doesn’t’ know when to quit either
Whether in sports or politics, it is wise to leave when you are on top, or when your time is up, or both. The time to leave is when the sound of the fans is still ringing in your ears.
If you don’t, you risk quietly exiting out the back door, the way Weld, a former popular Massachusetts governor, did the other day when he dropped his strange Republican primary campaign for president against President Trump.
It most likely will be the way Brady will leave the NFL after relinquishing his star role — if it was not taken from him — with the New England Patriots to play for another team in another time and in another place.
“Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?” was Bill Belichick’s message for Brady, the football icon, as though he were the guest who stayed too long. It is a cold business.
“And don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” the
Massachusetts voters told Weld, a governor they once looked upon warmly. Politics is also cold.
It did not have to be that way. In 1994 Weld was on top of his game. Four years earlier Weld, running as a moderate Republican in a heavily Democrat state defeated Democrat John Silber in a close contest to become governor. Running for re-election four years later he whipped Democrat state Rep. Mark Roosevelt by a huge margin.
In doing so Weld’s victory was by the largest margin in state history. Weld got 1,533,390 votes, or 71%, to Roosevelt’s 611,650 votes, or 28%.
That victory, in a state where there were only 419,120 registered Republicans, was Weld’s Super Bowl. It was like Tom Brady driving the Patriots to victory over the Los Angeles Rams in the 2019 Super Bowl.
He was a popular and effective governor, if a bit unusual. He wrote and published a couple of novels on the side. Eccentric? Perhaps. He was the first governor to dive fully clothed into the Charles River to demonstrate its cleanliness.
Once on top, though, this year Weld ended up on the bottom in Massachusetts’
March 10 Super Tuesday presidential primary,
Granted there were differences in time and the office between then and now, but some 1.5 million Weld voters disappeared. In the presidential primary he got 25,182 votes, or 9%, compared to 236,692 votes, or 87.7%, for Trump.
Weld and Brady being the men they are, always wanted more.
Instead of concentrating on being governor, Weld two years after his record-breaking victory, ran against incumbent Democrat Sen. John Kerry and lost. A year after that, in 1997, he resigned as governor to seek to become President Bill Clinton’s U.S. ambassador to Mexico.
However, that appointment was blocked by conservative Republican Sen. Jesse Helms, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who sought to settle an old political score.
Weld moved to New York in 2000 and practiced law. In 2006 he ran for governor of New York but withdrew when the Republican Party endorsed John Faso.
Unable to sit still, Weld left the Republican Party in 2016 to become the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential candidate on a ticket headed by former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson. It went nowhere.
Like a journeyman NFL quarterback looking for a home, Weld moved back to Boston and ran for the
Republican nomination for president. He won one convention delegate before throwing in the towel and heading home in campaign debt.
Tom Brady is no journeyman quarterback, for sure. He will do well with the Tampa Bay Bucs. But it will not be the same. He will never be cheered the way he was cheered in New England, just as Weld was never cheered the way he was when he was governor. It is what happens in time.
Still, Bill Weld at age 74 outlasted all the Massachusetts politicians who ran for president in 2020. He was the only Republican in the group, which made him the longest of long shots.
He outlasted U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton of Salem, former Gov. Deval Patrick and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, all Democrats.
Ordinarily it would be Bill Weld’s last hurrah. But you never know. Politicians like quarterbacks always seem to find a home. Witness Brian Hoyer.
And surely Weld has another book in him seeking to come out.