Eager to provide the White House with a 60^th vote for health care this fall, the overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts legislature voted to change the state's succession law just after Kennedy's death in August to allow Governor Deval Patrick to make an interim appointment while a special election played out.

Patrick signed the law change, snubbed Michael Dukakis, and picked Paul G. Kirk, who has attracted little notice since his September swearing-in--while providing the filibuster-killing 60th vote to bring Harry Reid's health care legislation to the floor last week.

Technically, Kirk's successor--who will hold the seat at least through the 2012 election, the end of Kennedy's unexpired term--won't be picked until the January 19 special election. But this is Massachusetts, where Republicans are as scarce as Yankees fans, and tomorrow's Democratic primary is all that really matters.

There really isn't much suspense. Barring a spectacular upset, Martha Coakley, the state's first-term attorney general, will top the four-candidate field and become the state's first-ever female senator.

Until now, female candidates in Massachusetts have enjoyed their only successes in down-ballot contests: for A.G. (Coakley in 2006); treasurer (Shannon O'Brien in 1998); lieutenant governor (Evelyn Murphy in 1986, Jane Swift in 1998, and Kerry Healy in 2002 - all running on tickets with men); and the U.S. House (Margaret Heckler from 1966 to 1982; Louise Day Hicks ("You know where I stand!") from 1970 to 1972, and Niki Tsongas since 2007). Success in top-tier races has eluded them: Murphy, O'Brien, Swift and Healy all failed in gubernatorial bids (Swift and Murphy didn't even make it to Primary Day).

So a Coakley win would be historic. But it wouldn't mean much else. The only candidate to enter the race with statewide name recognition (and the sole woman running), Coakley has waged a deliberatively low-key front-runner's campaign--heavy on platitudes and boilerplate rhetoric, light on specifics and innovative ideas. Her most notable pronouncement has been that she will vote against final passage of any health care bill that includes the abortion-restricting Stupak amendment.

Coakley may also benefit from a last-minute campaign appearance by Bill Clinton--part of his effort to repay politicians who stood with his wife in last year's Democratic presidential race. Interestingly, Clinton also made a late trip to Massachusetts the last time there was a competitive Senate race--back in 1996, when he pitched in for John Kerry two days before the election. Kerry pulled away late in that race, defeating then-Governor William Weld by seven points.

If one of the other three candidates is going to pull an upset, it will be Mike Capuano, the 11^-year congressman who has run aggressively and gobbled up some noteworthy endorsements (Dukakis, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and most of the state's House delegation). Capuano can be a compelling speaker, but he hasn't done enough to differentiate himself from Coakley--and he's resisted opportunities to confront her in debates.

Her position on the Stupak amendment, for instance, offered Capuano a chance to score points by arguing that health care reform is too important to be held hostage by single-issue constituencies. Instead, he ended up echoing her position - and making himself look like a flip-flopper in the process.  

For political junkies, Capuano's pending defeat will be a disappointment. With a win, his 8^th District House seat--representing one of the most heavily Democratic districts in the nation--would open up, prompting a wide-open Democratic race to succeed him. The last time the seat was open, when Joe Kennedy left the house in 1998, Capuano topped a 10-way field that included former Boston Mayor Ray Flynn with 22 percent of the vote. There's plenty of pent-up ambition among 8^th District politicos; but it looks like it won't be unleashed anytime soon.

The race for third place could be close, with two other candidates heading in opposite directions. Stephen Pagliuca ("Pags," as he prefers) began the race with zero name recognition, but quickly purchased it with an unrelenting television ad blitz. A Boston Celtics co-owner and venture capitalist, he pushed his support into the high teens in some polls, but revelations about his past donations to Republicans and the conduct of some of the companies he's invested in halted his momentum.

In the meantime, Alan Khazei, who co-founded City Year and helped Clinton establish AmeriCorps, has gained traction with the Volvo-driving and NPR-listening wing of the state's Democratic Party. Through his national contacts (including Michael Bloomberg), he's had surprising fund-raising success and he even won the endorsement of the Boston Globe (for what that's worth). If the primary was limited to voters in Left Fields, Khazei might have a chance to win. Instead, he'll do well to crack double-digits and outpoll Pagliuca.

The Republican candidate will almost certainly be Scott Brown, one of only five G.O.P. state senators in the commonwealth. He is being challenged in the primary by Jack E. Robinson III, who is better known in state political circles as "The Tongue," the nickname bestowed on him by a woman who said he showed up drunk for a blind date, guzzled a bottle of champagne, and then groped and forcibly French-kissed her as she tried to escape to her car.

Republicans hope that Brown can parlay a respectable showing in January into a run for a more winnable statewide office next year--possibly state treasurer.

The final day of Michael Dukakis’ final—and most improbable, unconventional and just plain bizarre—campaign for political office began on a bad note Wednesday morning.

Influential Democrats in Washington, reacting to The Boston Globe’s endorsement of Dukakis for an interim Senate appointment a day earlier, had fought back by telling The New York Times that the 75-year-old former governor “was out of the running and would not be named” by Governor Deval Patrick to replace Ted Kennedy, as the paper reported it.

Instead, The Times and other national outlets suggested that Patrick was likely to settle on Paul G. Kirk, a close Kennedy family friend, former D.N.C. chairman and longtime Washington insider to hold the seat until next January’s special election.

This basic tension has come to define the non-campaign campaign that was kicked off by the State Legislature’s readiness to abide by Kennedy’s dying wish that the state’s succession laws be amended to allow for an interim senator—who could then provide the critical 60^th vote for what Kennedy called the cause of his life, health care reform.

On the one hand, Congressional Democrats fear that Dukakis would be “too independent” as a senator and that the brutal Republican caricature of him from his 1988 White House campaign would haunt their health care efforts this fall.

On the other, countless Democrats back in Massachusetts still revere their onetime governor for his rectitude, his uncommon humility and his staunch refusal in a two-decade political retirement to cash in on his stature and connections. No one, they are adamant, has earned the honor of a four-month Senate appointment more than Michael Dukakis.

“He ran for president 21 years ago,” noted Warren Tolman, a former state senator who ran for governor in 2002. “He’s 75 years old. There has never been a question about his integrity or his honor. And he’s been elected three times—he must have done something right.”

Patrick, it is assumed, will make his formal announcement on Thursday. The word among Democrats in Massachusetts on Wednesday afternoon was that the governor would inform the state’s Congressional delegation of his pick late that night. As you’d expect, he’s been tight-lipped on the subject; perhaps more surprisingly, so have those around him. There have been few leaks about where he might be leaning—until Wednesday.

The Times’ story was followed quickly by news that news Kennedy’s widow and two sons were leaning on Patrick to choose Kirk. The stampede, it seemed, was on. Even some Dukakis admirers admitted that their man seemed destined to come up short.

But by the end of the day, Democrats in the state were suggesting that a backlash against Washington’s intervention—and against the perceived heavy-handedness of the Kennedy family—was taking hold and that Dukakis might suddenly be back in the mix.

The resentment is easy to understand. Kirk, 71, is the consummate backroom player. He served on Kennedy’s Senate staff in the 1970s and went on to chair the Democratic National Committee—after besting Nancy Pelosi in an ugly campaign—from 1985 to 1989.

He briefly toyed with running for governor of Massachusetts in 1990 but passed. He has never been elected to public office, his name is unknown to virtually everyone in the state, and his most enthusiastic backers—outside of some Kennedy family members—live and work in Washington.

Dukakis, on the other hand, has put his name before the state’s voters many times—for lieutenant governor in 1970, governor in 1974, 1978, 1982 and 1986, and for president of the United States in 1988. Three of those races he won.

But the real contrast lies in the life each man built after leaving day-to-day politics. Kirk took a very conventional route, launching a consulting firm and signing on to several corporate boards. In other words, he cashed in.

Dukakis didn’t. He left the State House in January 1991 at the age of 57 and went to work as a college professor. Every day, he gets up early and walks two miles from his home on Perry Street to Northeastern University’s Meserve Hall, where he occupies a tiny office at the end of a hallway in the political science department. He answers his own phone and leaves his door open for students with questions about internships and add-drop forms. He is a real teacher. He sits on no corporate boards and does no lobbying or consulting.

In the late afternoon on Wednesday, The Globe posted on its Web site a fresh column from the venerable Joan Vennochi, who bluntly labeled the push for Kirk “typical backroom politics. And, it's being done with typically sharp Kennedy elbows.”

The question, as the sun set, was whether the pushback was resonating at all with Patrick.

Those who know him believe that, in a perfect world, the governor would choose Dukakis, who—along with his wife, Kitty—was with him from the early days of his 2006 gubernatorial campaign, when the rest of the Democratic establishment was dismissing Patrick as a quixotic afterthought. Kirk and the Kennedys were nowhere to be found back then.

And since Patrick took office, Dukakis has played an informal—and very low-key—role advising Patrick, on issues close to Dukakis’ heart (like transportation) and on the vicissitudes of the job.

But Patrick’s personal fondness for Dukakis is complicated by his weak political standing. He won in a landslide in ’06, but never really recovered from a series of early stumbles. Now, with the economy battered and voter anxiety rising, he is endangered as he prepares to seek reelection next year. Already, Republicans have found a strong candidate—the likable Charlie Baker, an old Bill Weld hand—and early polls show a dead heat.

The climate reminds many of 1990, when a brutal economy fed anti-incumbent fervor and spawned the best Republican year in Massachusetts in decades. Dukakis, of course, was the lame-duck governor back in ’90, forced by the worst poll numbers of his career to swear off seeking another term. Patrick, many believe, has grown sensitive to comparisons between 2010 and 1990—so why, some ask, would he want to link himself so publicly to a man who reminds many voters of that annus horribilis?

Plus, Republicans—in Massachusetts and Washington—are licking their chops at the prospect of one of their all-time favorite punching bags returning to the public stage. Sure, it’s been a long time since Dukakis was in office, and the attacks might fall flat all these years later; but does Patrick, with his weak numbers, really want to take that chance?

It’s enough to leave Patrick, who endorsed the law change that allowed him to make this appointment, without an obvious choice.

“This is an impossible situation for him,” said Michael Goldman, a longtime Democratic consultant. “There’s a lot of support for Michael. But there’s also a lot of support for Kirk.”

For his part, Dukakis has said barely a word about the seat. But there’s no doubt he wants it. More than 21 years ago, in the wee hours of November 8, 1988, he wrapped up his presidential campaign with a rally in the bitter cold in Des Moines, then got some rest and prepared to learn his fate from the voters. There were no speeches for Dukakis to make last night: just lots of waiting for a phone call from the governor.

But she forgot where she was: Dorchester, Mass., the most parochial neighborhood (with the possible exception of Southie) in the most parochial city in the country. The ladies of Savin Hill and Neponset didn’t embrace the ambitious, unmarried, Berkshire-born prosecutor as one of their own; instead, they treated her with the same cool indifference that anyone who’s not OFD—Originally From Dorchester—gets. On Election Day, Coakley finished a dismal fourth in the five-way field.

And now here she is, all these years later, the only woman vying to fill Ted Kennedy’s vacant Senate seat. The field isn’t as crowded as initially expected—South Boston Rep. Stephen Lynch stunned the Massachusetts political world by pulling out on Tuesday—but Coakley will still probably end up facing two or three male candidates in the December vote.

Unlike her first foray into politics, though, Coakley enters this campaign as the clear front-runner, and for good reason. No one named Kennedy is running, for one thing, and none of her prospective opponents has the statewide reputation she already enjoys thanks to her role as A.G. And, wince the jury isn’t limited to OFD’s anymore, this time her gender is a big help.

Yes, we should repeat the cliché that lots can happen between now and Election Day.

With Lynch’s departure, Coakley’s main rival figures to be Michael Capuano, an 11-year House veteran from Somerville, a city about evenly divided between old school “white ethnics” and liberal, educated newcomers. The next most likely entrant is a surprise: Stephen Pagliuca, an owner of the Boston Celtics who is being advised by Tad Devine, Joel Benenson, and Doug Rubin (who ran Deval Patrick’s winning gubernatorial campaign in 2006). John Tierney, the congressman from the North Shore, might possibly jump in, along with Alan Khazei, the founder of City Year.

It’s between difficult and impossible to conceive of a winning formula for any one of these men, but who knows?

Right now, though, it’s more than likely that on the night of December 8, Martha Coakley will be accepting the Democratic nomination for Kennedy’s Senate seat—which in Massachusetts in 2009 is the same thing as winning the general election.

A Coakley triumph would, first and foremost, mark a breakthrough for female candidates in Massachusetts, where no woman has ever been elected to the governorship or the U.S. Senate. Evelyn Murphy and Jane Swift both won the lieutenant governor’s office, but they ran on tickets with male gubernatorial candidates. Swift actually inherited the governorship when Paul Cellucci skipped town two years into his term, but she struggled mightily and Republicans pushed her aside long before the 2002 primary.

It would also mark the culmination of a decade of shrewd maneuvering by Coakley, who, after the humbling denouement of that ill-advised ’97 campaign, really hasn’t made a bad political move.

A native of North Adams, a small western Massachusetts city that’s a lot closer to Albany than it is to Boston, she graduated in 1975 from Williams College in next-door Williamstown, then headed off to law school at Boston University. After stints in private practice and with the Justice Department, she made her way in 1989 to Middlesex County District Attorney’s office—which has long-served as an incubator for future Massachusetts political talent (John Kerry is among its alumni).

Because Middlesex is the largest and most diverse county in the state (and because of its proximity to Boston), its D.A.’s office handles a disproportionate number of sexy cases—the ones that attract the kind of media coverage that can be very helpful to a prosecutor with political aspirations. Coakley’s first boss, Scott Harshbarger, was elected attorney general in 1990 and narrowly lost the governor’s race in 1998. Her second boss, Tom Reilly, made the move to A.G. in 1998—which created a perfect opportunity for Coakley, months after the Dorchester fiasco, to take another shot at elected office.

So she moved to suburban Arlington, a recovering dry town that, unlike Dorchester, is actually in Middlesex County. Reilly, who’d richly earned a reputation as a publicity hound, threw his support behind Coakley, but she drew two opponents in the Democratic primary: Michael Sullivan, a Cambridge city councilman, and Michael Flaherty, the son of a former state House Speaker who’d resigned two years earlier after being charged with federal tax fraud.

The primary was a low-key affair, but Coakley did take some heat for one Reilly P.R. move that backfired: the aggressive 1997 prosecution of Louise Woodward, a 19-year-old British au pair whom Reilly charged with first-degree murder after the eight-month old boy in her care died of brain swelling caused by shaken baby syndrome.

The fall ’97 trial, which was followed locally and nationally, turned the public’s sympathy toward Woodward. Perhaps she’d handled the boy too aggressively, most concluded, but surely she didn’t mean to kill him. Reilly, who was known to prosecute high-profile cases himself, handed off the prosecution to his assistants, most prominently Coakley—making her the public face of an effort many voters disagreed with strongly.

Ultimately, the jury convicted Woodward of second-degree murder, a decision that was quickly overturned by the trial’s judge, who reduced the crime to involuntary manslaughter and sentenced the au pair to time served.

Unpopular though it was, the Woodward prosecution didn’t hurt Coakley much at the polls: She won the September 1998 primary handily, with 47 percent. (On the same day, Reilly edged out state Senator Lois Pines by four points for the Democratic nod for A.G.). Neither Coakley nor Reilly had any trouble in November.

Coakley’s stewardship of the Middlesex D.A.’s office is a case study in effective political positioning. Her two predecessors, Reilly and Harshbarger, had both parlayed the gig into the A.G.’s office and Coakley made it clear right away that she intended to follow their lead.

While tending to her day job, which afforded her plenty of on-air time on local newscasts, she assembled a powerful financial machine, relying on her deep contacts in the state’s legal community (here, her says of private practice came in handy) and cultivating a network of female donors—to whom it was made clear that they were investing in a woman with potential to go much farther than the D.A.’s office,

When the 2002 governor’s race ended with Republican Mitt Romney winning, it became apparent Reilly would run for the office in 2006—meaning that the A.G.’s job would be open. Several other Democrats were interested, but they quickly backed off: Coakley had money, unusual (for a D.A.) name recognition, and had effectively sealed off the logical fund-raising avenues for potential rivals. She won the nomination unopposed and coasted in the general election.

And from the moment she was sworn in as A.G., the only question was whether her next move would be a run for governor or for the U.S. Senate. After all, seven of her eight immediate predecessors ended up seeking one (or both) of those offices (and the only one who didn’t, James Shannon, surely would have ultimately done so had he not been defeated for re-nomination in the 1990 Democratic primary).

Kennedy’s grim May 2008 diagnosis essentially resolved the matter of Coakley’s next move. There is said to be some resentment within the Kennedy family of Coakley’s posturing during the senator’s 15-month cancer battle (and of the speed with which she entered the race after his death), but it hasn’t hurt her with the public.

Who knows, she might even do well in Dorchester this time around. Even back during that hopeless ’97 campaign, the publisher of the neighborhood’s weekly paper—a man who proudly and transparently dedicated every page of his publication to the election of one of Coakley’s opponents—watched the spunky non-OFDer in a debate and had to admit: “This girl can go places someday.”

That’s probably the reaction of many Massachusetts Republicans to the news that Andy Card, best known as George W. Bush’s chief of staff for five years, may soon join the special election race to fill Ted Kennedy’s vacant Senate seat.

Card, 62, actually has a long history in Massachusetts politics. He was a state representative for four terms in the late ’70s and early ’80s and sought the Republican nomination for governor back in 1982, losing a three-way primary to John Winthrop Sears, a former Boston city councilman (who was trounced by Michael Dukakis in the fall).

Back in those days, Bay State Republicans could talk seriously about winning House and Senate races. They were almost always underdogs, but the right candidate—i.e. someone from the moderate-to-liberal tradition that produced the likes of Leverett Saltonstall, Frank Sargent and Ed Brooke (like Card is, or at least was back then)—running in the right year could have a shot.

That is no longer the case. No Massachusetts Republican has won a Senate election since Brooke was re-elected to his second and final term in 1972. And since 1996, when two Republicans who had lucked into office in 1992 thanks to scandal were swept out, the state’s 10-member House delegation has been all-Democratic—the largest single party House delegation in the country.

The struggle for Massachusetts Republicans has gone from difficult to hopeless thanks largely to the national G.O.P. revolution in 1994. Prior to that, middle-of-the-road Bay State voters, who tend to be more liberal on cultural issues and less so on fiscal ones, could tell themselves that they had a place under the G.O.P.’s Big Tent. But the sudden primacy of Newt Gingrich and Southern-flavored evangelical conservatism sent them fleeing, and they’ve never returned.

Consequently, the quality of the candidates the G.O.P. has run for federal office has declined—sometimes rather comically.

This was the case back in 2000, when state Republican leaders enthusiastically sent word that they’d found a dynamic, exciting political newcomer to take on Ted Kennedy: Jack E. Robinson III, a 39-year-old black Republican and entrepreneur who was willing to spend more than $1 million of his own money.
It took about 24 hours for the press to learn that, among other things, he’d previously committed plagiarism, his ex-girlfriend had filed a restraining order against him, he’d been arrested for drunk driving, he probably wasn’t the multimillionaire he’d hinted to Republican leaders he was, and he wasn’t prepared to spend much money on his own campaign. Also, while calling in to a radio show to defend himself against these revelations, a distracted Robinson drove off the road, becoming the first known candidate to get into an auto accident on live radio.

Then, in an episode still snickered at in Massachusetts, a second ex-girlfriend came forward to tell The Boston Globe about her “date from hell” with Robinson a few years earlier—in which (she alleged) he showed up drunk, guzzled a bottle of champagne, and then, on the way to his car, groped and forcibly French-kissed her. The legend of “Jack the Tongue” was thusly born.

Republican leaders withdrew their support from Robinson, but couldn’t find another candidate for a kamikaze run against Kennedy. Robinson petitioned his way onto the ballot, won the G.O.P. nomination without opposition, and finished with 13 percent in November—just one point ahead of the Libertarian nominee, and 62 behind Kennedy.

That was undeniably the low point for the post-’94 G.O.P. in Massachusetts, but other years haven’t been that much better. In 2002, the party failed to find a candidate to oppose John Kerry, and in 2006 and 2008 it fielded only token opposition to the Democratic incumbents.

It is in this context that Card’s current interest in a Senate campaign is peculiar.
A close Bush family friend, he transitioned from state to national politics after his ’82 gubernatorial run, ultimately serving as the first President Bush’s deputy chief of staff and, later, Transportation secretary. After a lucrative stint with the American Automobile Manufacturers Association, he returned to the White House in 2001 as the second President Bush’s chief of staff.

Even as he’s played on the national stage, though, Card’s name has periodically been connected to various offices in Massachusetts. It’s always been expected that, sooner or later, he’d come home and try to complete the unfinished business on 1982.

But running for the Senate in 2009? Surely, Card should recognize the futility. When it comes to federal office, the G.O.P. brand is toxic in Massachusetts. And while the old Andy Card—the moderate state representative—might once have been marketable across the state, he’s now seen only as a key player in the Big Bad Bush Machine. In other words, if there is a Republican who can win a Senate election in Massachusetts (which there isn’t), it certainly isn’t Card.

Perhaps he’d have more luck running for governor, an office the G.O.P. has controlled for 16 of the past 19 years. Even as Massachusetts voters were fleeing Republican Senate and House candidates, they kept electing moderate (Bill Weld and Paul Cellucci) or moderate-seeming (Mitt Romney) Republicans to the corner office. And they could do so again next year, with Democratic Governor Deval Patrick’s poll numbers looking very ominous.

But the state G.O.P. establishment has already rallied around Charlie Baker, a former Weld lieutenant and Harvard Pilgrim CEO, for the governor’s race, so there’s really no room for Card. And the G.O.P. is happier to have Baker for that race, since he doesn’t have Card’s Bush baggage. So Card, if he really wants to take another statewide shot, is stuck with the Senate race.

That ’82 gubernatorial campaign was supposed to be a shakedown cruise for the up-and-coming Card, a way to build a name for a future run. He thought he’d accomplish the same thing by heading off to Washington, making a name there, and then triumphantly returning to claim the governorship or a Senate seat. But he miscalculated, and it shows just how much the appeal of the national G.O.P. has narrowed: A few decades ago, service in a Republican administration could be an asset even in Massachusetts. Today, it is nothing but a lethal liability.

Furious that copies of True Compass had gotten out despite clear instructions to booksellers not to display them before the on-sale date, officials at Hachette have taken the rare step of hiring a private investigator to look into how the leaks occurred. Hachette corporate spokeswoman Sophie Cottrell confirmed that a P.I. was on the case, but would not elaborate on his or her identity or specific objective.

The move, not a major surprise to those who have followed the 56-year-old Kennedy’s career closely, means three things:

1) Joe Kennedy will never actually launch that statewide campaign we’ve been talking about for years.

He had a clear shot at the Democratic gubernatorial nomination back in 1990, when Mike Dukakis stepped down and a host of uninspiring would-be successors—Evelyn Murphy, Francis X. Bellotti, and Jack Flood—stepped forward. When their deficiencies became apparent in late 1989, party leaders tried to nudge Kennedy into the race. He toyed with it, then passed, and the Democratic vacuum was instead filled by John Silber, the outspoken Boston University president—whose temperament cost him a winnable general election race against Republican William Weld.

With Weld’s popularity soaring, Kennedy wisely passed on the ’94 governor’s race (which Weld ended up winning by a record-shattering 42 points), then set his sights on 1998. All systems were go (facing token opposition and running in one of the safest Democratic districts in the country, Kennedy poured more than a million dollars into fancy television ads for his ’96 House campaign) and with Weld skipping town for an abortive bid to be ambassador to Mexico, Kennedy was the clear favorite to win the state’s top job.

But scandal—in the form of his ex-wife’s claims that he bullied her into seeking an annulment from the Catholic Church and charges that his brother Michael had slept with his underage baby-sitter—caused him to reconsider and bow out. Kennedy went a step further, too, and also decided to give up his House seat and to return to Citizens Energy, the non-profit company he’d run before entering Congress.

Since then, Kennedy has maintained visibility (he stars in Citizens’ ads) but passed on every chance to jump back into the game: He said no to a gubernatorial bid in 2002 (the Democratic nomination was wide open), showed no interest in the 2004 jockeying for John Kerry's Senate seat (back when it looked like Kerry might win the presidency), and sat out the 2006 governor’s race.

The political ambition that fueled him in the late '80s and early '90s was apparently cooled by the scandals of 1997. If ever there were a moment for Joe Kennedy to return to politics, this is it: He’d still be young enough to rack up some seniority in the Senate and his family name will never be more of an asset than it is now. With this decision to pass—the fourth time he’s said no since leaving the House 11 years ago—we can safely say that Joe Kennedy is no longer a future candidate for anything.

2) The race becomes inviting for many more candidates.

Well, at least on the Democratic side—the only side that really counts in a state that last sent a Republican to the Senate in 1972. (The very moderate, if not liberal, Ed Brooke.)

Before today’s announcement, two Democrats had already taken steps to run: Attorney General Martha Coakley and Congressman Stephen Lynch. These are the only two candidates who would have been willing to run against Joe Kennedy—Coakley because she could (theoretically) rally the women’s vote, and South Boston’s Lynch because his cultural conservatism and blue-collar background makes him (potentially) appealing to the old Ed King wing of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. (Plus, Lynch is unafraid of taking on legacy candidates: His political career was made, in part, by beating the son of the legendary Billy Bulger in a State Senate race in South Boston in 1996.)

Had Kennedy run, he would have been the third and final entrant. There simply wouldn’t have been oxygen for another candidate. Broadly speaking, Coakley would have had women and good-government suburbanites; Kennedy would have had senior citizens, blacks and the Kennedy-legacy vote; and Lynch would have had the culturally conservative white ethnics. Other candidates might have appeal to some of these groups, but they would have suffocated.

Now, though, the doors have been flung wide open. Not only are more voters up for grabs, but without a Kennedy in the race, it will be far easier to raise money and get noticed. In particular, look out for:

* Ed Markey: Conventional wisdom says to scratch him, since he’s carved out a real power center in the House (he’s been there since 1976) and because—at 63—he won’t want to trade that clout for the rank of freshman in the Senate.

But conventional wisdom doesn’t remember the spring of 1984, when Ed Markey was a 37-year-old up-and-comer with a bright future in statewide (and maybe even national) politics. That year, Paul Tsongas, diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, unexpectedly decided not to seek re-election to his Senate seat, and Markey jumped in the race to succeed him. But so did a lot other Democrats—like John Kerry (then the lieutenant governor), James Shannon (Markey’s rival up-and-comer, a 32-year-old congressman), David Bartley (a former state House Speaker) and Michael Connolly (then the Massachusetts secretary of state).

Markey blinked. If he lost the Senate primary, he’d be out of politics completely, since he’d have to give up his House seat. So he decided to wait for another day. But for the next quarter-century, another day never came, and during that time Markey went from young-up-and comer to aging House lifer. This is the first time a Democratic Senate nomination had been open in Massachusetts since then.

Markey may pass this time. But it’s worth noting that, for all of his clout in the House, he doesn’t chair a standing committee. He let the girl get away in 1984, something he’s surely thought about a few times since then. Now he has one more chance. This decision probably won’t be as easy for him as many believe.

* Michael Capuano: The sixth-term congressman from Somerville won a 10-way Democratic primary to replace Joe Kennedy in 1998. (Full disclosure: As an idealistic college student, I was a worthless functionary in the campaign of one of Capuano’s opponents in that race.)

Capuano has long been interested in moving up, though he passed on the governor’s race in 2006. He will almost surely enter the Senate race now, especially since he won’t have to risk a House slot.

In theory, Capuano should have wide appeal among Democratic voters. His House district includes a mix of culturally conservative, working-class areas and neighborhoods populated with affluent liberals. But he’s only really been tested in that district once—the wild ’98 primary, which he won with 22 percent of vote (thanks to massive support in Somerville, where he was then mayor).

* Marty Meehan: The former congressman from Lowell gave up his seat in 2007, seemingly out of boredom with the House, where’d served since 1993. But it was clear that he retained statewide aspirations: He took a post as the chancellor of UMass-Lowell and opted to retain his hefty campaign war chest, worth nearly $5 million.

Because of his new job, Meehan has to be very careful about picking the right moment to jump back into politics: His employer doesn’t want him running for every available office and then returning to work when he loses. That’s a big part of the reason why he would have stayed out if Kennedy had run: The odds would have been too long.

But now there’s a lot more room. The Greater Lowell area would give Meehan a nice base, and his reformer credentials (campaign finance reform and tobacco were his two pet issues in Congress) would make him marketable to the same good-government types that Coakley will be counting on. If Meehan seems like a credible candidate—something his war chest will help him become—those good government voters may give him a look.

* Wild cards: The rest of the state’s all-Democratic House delegation will probably stay out of the race, and down-ballot statewide officials (like Secretary of State Bill Galvin) and members of the State Legislature will probably be intimidated by the big names that are already out there. But with Kennedy out, the field should swell now. We could be surprised at who else joins the fray.

3) Martha Coakley is now the clear front-runner.

The field may be wide open, but Coakley—barring a surprise—will be the only female in it. This is particularly significant since Massachusetts has such an awful track record of electing women to statewide office. Women’s groups have already rallied around Coakley, and you can expect their efforts to intensify. With multiple male candidates likely to run (but none of them with Kennedy’s star power), Coakley chances of victory look very good right now.

As expected, Democrats have sought to use the emotions unleashed by the passing of a man who called universal health care the cause of his life to inject their push for a comprehensive overhaul with some Let’s-do-it-for-Ted purpose and urgency.

“If people are truly interested in honoring his legacy,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the day after the senator’s death, “the best possible legacy is to pass health reform this year and get President Obama a bill he can sign.”

And grass-roots progressives wasted little time launching HonorKennedy.com, an online petition that declares: “Ted Kennedy was a courageous champion for health care reform his entire life. In his honor, name the reform bill that passed Kennedy's health committee ‘The Kennedy Bill’—then pass it, and nothing less, through the Senate.”

It was Kennedy’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that passed a bill containing the public option provision that the left covets—and that conservative Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee (possibly with quiet support from the White House and Senate leadership) are trying to kill.

But, proceeding on three different tracks, the right is also making Kennedy a central figure in its effort to defeat the Democrats’ reform effort.

First, conservative opinion-shapers like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are accusing the left of “politicizing” Kennedy’s death, trying to stir up the same popular backlash they manufactured after Paul Wellstone’s rollicking memorial service days before the 2002 midterm elections. (It matters not, of course, that after Ronald Reagan’s 2004 death, Limbaugh and others encouraged their flocks to support George W. Bush as a tribute to the Gipper.)

Others see Kennedy’s passing as fodder for more death panel fear-mongering. If President Obama gets his way, Mike Huckabee fraudulently asserted, then people in Kennedy’s position—diagnosed with a terminal illness—will in the future be told that they “might want to consider just taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them.”

And then there’s the most popular tactic: insisting that Kennedy, who was in constant communication with Senate leaders about health care strategy in the final months of his life, would never have pursued reform the way Obama and Congressional Democrats have and that there would be genuine bipartisanship had he not been sidelined by illness.

“Kennedy could bring together all of the base groups of the Democratic Party,” Orrin Hatch, one of Kennedy’s closest Senate friends, said on Sunday’s This Week. “In every case, he fought as hard as he could, but when he recognized that he couldn’t get everything he wanted, he worked with the other side. If he was here, I don’t think we’d be in the mess we’re in right now.”

This is the same Hatch, mind you, who demagogued a universal health care plan introduced by Kennedy in 1994—the last time Congress was actually in position to pass reform—as “nothing more than a pasteurized version of Clinton's blueprint for socialized medicine.”

Other Republican senators, particularly John McCain, have been pressing this same argument, in effect using Kennedy’s legacy as a rationalization for the same reflexive opposition they exhibited when he was alive and well.

In terms of the health care debate, it doesn’t really matter that the right’s arguments are badly disingenuous. In today’s political culture, virtually every major event is immediately subjected to two diametrically opposed interpretations, one courtesy of Fox News, the other from MSNBC. In the case of Kennedy’s death, the right now has its talking points, and it’s doubtful either side will win many new converts.

The former Massachusetts governor’s name has been widely circulated this week as a possible interim successor to the late senator—someone who would hold the seat until next January, when the state’s voters will choose a new senator in a special election.

It’s been more than 18 years since Dukakis took the “lone walk” out of the Massachusetts State House and into political retirement. Back then, he didn’t have much choice. He’d come home from his 1988 presidential campaign intent on pouring himself into state business, but almost nothing went right. A souring economy and gaping budget deficit conspired to wreck his popularity, so running for reelection in 1990 wasn’t an option, and since then he’s largely contented himself in academia.

But if ever there was a time for a comeback, this is it.

Already, Phil Johnston, who chaired the Massachusetts Democratic Party for seven years and who also served as a cabinet secretary under Dukakis, has floated the former governor’s name, and with good reason. If there’s going to be an interim senator, there really is no more logical choice.

At 75, Dukakis long ago exhausted his political ambitions—a prerequisite for any interim senator, who would be expected to swear off running for a full term. As a former governor and national figure, he’d bring stature to the role. Plus, health care policy—the major issue the interim senator will have to address—has long been a passion of Dukakis’. As governor, he actually steered a universal coverage plan through the Massachusetts Legislature, although it was later nullified by his successor, William Weld.

Perhaps most importantly, Dukakis has a well-earned reputation for rectitude. As a national candidate, he was ridiculed as cold, technocratic and aloof—but no one ever accused him of dishonesty, or of abusing his gubernatorial powers and privileges.

And his political retirement has been unusual for someone of his accomplishments. Instead of cashing in with a lucrative job with a law firm or lobbying outfit, he has devoted himself to teaching—and not as some figurehead professor who teaches one seminar a year. He’s a full-time professor who walks (or takes the T) to his small, cramped office on the third floor of Northeastern University’s political science department, where he answers his own phone and advises antsy students on what courses to add and drop.

It is this post-retirement humility that may be Dukakis’ best recommendation for the job. After all, Governor Deval Patrick will only be in position to appoint a senator if the Democratic Legislature agrees to change the current Senate succession law, which right now calls for Kennedy’s seat to remain vacant until the January special election. Republicans (and many in the media) will scream and howl if Democrats go forward with a law change; appointing someone with Dukakis’ integrity could be an effective response to their outrage.

Still, there are several ifs standing in the way of a swearing-in for Senator Dukakis.

The first is the simple matter of whether he’d even be interested. My attempts to reach Dukakis at his office and by email on Thursday were unsuccessful, and as of this writing, other media outlets apparently had no luck either.

Then there’s the question of whether the change in the succession law, which Kennedy personally advocated in a letter to Patrick that was released last week, will actually go through. When Patrick announced on Wednesday that he would sign the change, most assumed that the issue was settled, since Democrats enjoy ridiculous majorities in both the State House and Senate.

“I have a pretty strong feeling that they will do it,” Johnston told The New York Times. “The Republicans will say, ‘Isn’t this terrible,’ but the Democrats have nothing to apologize for as long as the temporary appointee is not a candidate for the permanent seat.”

Others in Massachusetts aren’t so sure. The biggest obstacle, perhaps: Therese Murray, the president of the State Senate. Murray, a Democrat (like just about everyone on Beacon Hill), has been publicly frosty to the idea of changing the law, signaling only that she could be persuaded to go along with it.

With Murray actively on board, the plan would easily clear the Senate, where Democrats control 35 of the 40 seats. And with House Speaker Robert DeLeo apparently fine with it and Patrick ready to sign it, it would then become law. But if Murray is ambivalent, she could slow the process considerably—and, thus, kill the plan.

Her reservations may be a mix of political and personal factors. Politically, some Democrats are nervous about next year’s elections. Patrick’s standing is shaky (a poll this week showed him trailing a potential G.O.P. candidate) and the Legislature just endorsed a sales tax hike. So why take a chance with a law change that voters may see as transparently political in nature?

Personally, Murray was a top Massachusetts backer of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign last year, and, some suggest, remains miffed at Kennedy for his pivotal pre-Super Tuesday endorsement of Barack Obama. She also has a history with Patrick, another early Obama backer: In 2006, Murray supported then-Attorney General Tom Reilly over Patrick in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.

The House and Senate aren’t planning to consider the law change until mid-September. The do-it-for-Ted urgency that is now fueling the push for the change may have died down by then, and Murray may have more latitude to stall. And the longer she can stall, the more pointless the idea of an interim senator will become, with the special election fast approaching.

A key factor will be the status of health care legislation in the U.S. Senate, where an additional Democratic vote from Massachusetts could be crucial. But just this week, Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold expressed doubt that there’d be any vote before the end of the year.

“If people genuinely believe that the health care vote is going to take place this year, I think there will be a lot more support for changing the law,” said Michael Goldman, a senior consultant at the Government Insight Group in Boston and a longtime Democratic operative.

If it does go through, Dukakis probably won’t be the only name Patrick considers. For instance, if Kennedy’s widow, Victoria Reggie, were interested in the interim appointment, Patrick would surely give it to her. The name of Scott Harshbarger, 67, a former attorney general who narrowly lost the 1998 gubernatorial race, has also been mentioned.

But here is no potential appointee who can match Dukakis’ resume, stature and reputation. If the stars align, he may soon get what he was denied nearly two decades a go: a chance to end his political career on a high note.

One conservative pundit told me today that the effort to associate the "liberal lion" with a bill that is already giving Republicans and moderate Democrats pause will further polarize the debate, and make winning support from Republicans and moderates harder.

Former New York governor (and liberal icon) Mario Cuomo disagrees.

“Tell that to John McCain. Tell that to Orrin Hatch. Tell it to Richard Lugar. Tell it to all the old Republican lions. They’ll probably be offended by that notion,” Cuomo told me in a brief telephone interview. He said Republicans that are praising Kennedy's legacy "are not just being nice," but rather, expressing genuine appreciation for life, work, and record of bi-partisanship.

Associating Kennedy with the bill, or even putting his name on it “is not going to have a magical effect. It’s nice,” said Cuomo, “but to say that it will make it as a bill, or kill it as a bill, is absurd.”

Cuomo said Kennedy's progressive record, is rivaled only by his record of winning support from those who did not share his ideology.

Remember Kennedy only as a liberal lion is “a brutal simplification” of his “basic operating principals,” Cuomo said. For Kennedy, there was “a place for ideology, but it was not first place. First place was for benign pragmatism.”

One is the question of health care strategy for Democrats in the U.S. Senate. Without Kennedy, Democrats will only have 59 votes—one short of the 60 needed to kill Republican-led filibusters.

This would seem, then, to strengthen the case for using reconciliation—the filibuster-bypassing legislative device that Democrats have been threatening to employ—to push health care reform through the Senate. Doing so would cause Republicans to scream their heads off (not that they aren’t already doing that), but it would allow the Democrats to pass a plan with just 50 senators and Vice President Biden breaking a tie.

However, it’s possible that Kennedy’s seat will be filled very soon—if Kennedy’s dying request to change Massachusetts’ Senate succession law is granted.

As things stand now, a special election won’t be held for at least 145 days—January 2010, in other words. But Kennedy recently asked Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick to support a change to the law, which would allow Patrick to appoint an interim senator while the special election campaign takes place. The interim senator would pledge not to run in the election.

Hours after Kennedy’s death, Patrick announced that he would sign the proposed change. Democrats hold staggering advantages over Republicans in the Massachusetts House (143 to 16) and Senate (35 to 5), so it seems likely that the law will change.

But Republicans are fighting the move hard, noting that it would mark the second time in five years that Democrats altered the Senate succession rules to help their own political interests. And they’ve received considerable support from editorial writers and other opinion-shapers.

The question now is whether Kennedy’s death will prompt voters to shrug off these concerns and to accept the change as a tribute to Kennedy. If polls show solid support for the plan in the next few days, it will likely sail through the legislature and into law very quickly.

If that happens, then Patrick would presumably choose to appoint to the Senate some ambitionless elder statesman of the state’s Democratic Party. Michael Dukakis, the 75-year-year-old former governor and presidential candidate, would be a logical choice. So, perhaps, would Kennedy’s widow, Victoria Reggie Kennedy (although there is also talk that she might run in the special election).

The presence of that appointee in Washington would again make it possible—at least theoretically—for Democrats to pass health care without resorting to reconciliation. It would still be tricky, with a handful of conservative Democrats threatening to vote against a bill with a public option, but at least on paper Democrats would have the 60 votes they need to kill a filibuster and pass a bill with a simple majority.

Whether there’s an interim senator or not, there will be a special election between 145 and 160 days of today—middle to late January, in other words. Patrick will soon set the official date. The primaries will be held six weeks before the general election—late November or early December.

In reality, the new senator will probably be chosen in the Democratic primary. The state G.O.P. hasn’t fielded a competitive Senate candidate since Bill Weld challenged John Kerry in 1996, and it last won a Senate race in 1972, with Ed Brooke. The Republican bench is also exceedingly thin and the party will be much more focused on next year’s governor’s race—which has already attracted two Republican candidates and which the G.O.P. has a legitimate chance of winning.

So the action will be on the Democratic side. And the shape of the field will depend greatly on the decisions of two Kennedy family members: Victoria Reggie, Ted’s widow, and Joe, Ted’s nephew (and Bobby’s son) and a former six-term congressman.

The consensus among Massachusetts Democrats now seems to be that Joe, who has maintained public visibility by starring in glitzy television ads for the non-profit energy company he runs, is far more likely to run than Victoria.

In many ways, it would be the campaign that Bay Staters have been waiting for him to run for years. In 1986, at the age of 34, he won the House seat of the retiring Tip O’Neill. Back then, the main question was when he would give it up to run for statewide office. He skipped the 1990 governor’s race, wisely sat out 1994 (Weld ended up winning re-election with 71 percent that year), then set his sights on 1998.

With Weld on his way out (he ended up resigning for an abortive bid to be the ambassador to Mexico in 1997) the path seemed clear for Joe, but a series of scandals—one involving his divorce from his wife, one statutory rape allegations against his brother Michael—prompted him to abandon the campaign. Shortly thereafter, he decided not to seek re-election to the House in 1998, either.

While it’s been more than 10 years since his name was on a ballot anywhere in Massachusetts, Joe would be the clear favorite to win his uncle’s seat if he were to run. The sentimental appeal of his candidacy would be strong. However, he only represented a fraction of the state in Congress, and with independents free to participate in Democratic primaries, there would probably be room for other candidates.

Martha Coakley, who was elected attorney general in 2006, would be very likely to enter the race. The Massachusetts A.G.’s office has been a rich breeding ground for ambitious politicians (seven of the past eight A.G.’s have gone on to run for either governor or the U.S. Senate). She has privately communicated a strong interest in the race and, especially if multiple male candidates enter, would benefit as the sole female aspirant.

Also keep an eye on Marty Meehan, who represented the Merrimack Valley (Lowell area) in Congress from 1992 to 2007. Meehan nearly ran for governor in 2002 but backed out at the last minute. He resigned from the House in 2007 to become the chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, but many saw the move as a way of getting out of a job he was bored with while keeping himself in play for any future statewide openings.

The 52-year-old Meehan has more than $5 million in the bank from his House days and his good government credentials—campaign finance reform and tobacco regulation were his pet issues in Congress—play well with the suburban voters who could swing a crowded primary.

The special election would also be a free shot for any of the state’s ten Democratic congressmen, all of whom could return to their safe House seats if they were to lose. Especially if Joe and Victoria Reggie Kennedy opt not to run, the race could look very attractive to some of them.

In particular, Stephen Lynch, a 54-year-old socially conservative Democrat from South Boston, is worth watching. Lynch actually announced his candidacy for the Senate on Election Night 2004, when exit polls initially showed Senator John Kerry winning the presidential race. In a crowded field filled with liberal Democrats, Lynch could monopolize the old Ed King wing of the party, which could be enough to win. But the presence of a Kennedy in the race would eat severely into his base.

Barney Frank, 69, and Ed Markey, 63, were also ready to run back in ’04, but their situations are different now: With Democrats back in control of the House, they suddenly occupy relevant and powerful positions there. The Senate may be more prestigious, but would either really want to give up his current clout to be a freshman?

Other House members, like Jim McGovern and Bill Delahunt, would be less likely to run. But in a wide-open field, who knows?