Whitehouse fighting for a chance to change D.C.
2006-10-23
Source: Providence Journal
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rss feedThey grew up in wood-frame triple-deckers and worked in Rhode Island's red-brick factories. They joined the military and fought the 20th-century scourge of fascism. They were married under vaulted church ceilings and moved to suburban split-levels, raised children and scraped to send them to college.
Now in life's twilight, many of them get together each afternoon for lunch at senior citizen centers; others live in high-rise apartments for the elderly.
At hundreds of these gatherings across the state, this is the season of grandchild-crayoned Halloween goblins, pastry-bearing political candidates - and dollops of campaign rhetoric.
Shortly before noon Tuesday at City View Manor, the aroma of baking fish filled the big dining room.
Playing headwaiter was Democratic U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, who announced that lunch would be lemon-pepper haddock. Then Reed fervently urged the elderly voters to support fellow Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse for U.S. Senate.
This banter comes easily to Reed; he is the Roman Catholic working-class son of Cranston, whose mother, he reminds the East Providence crowd, punched a cash register at the Rose Furniture store nearby.
Whitehouse, son and grandson of moneyed Protestant Yankee diplomats, molded by fancy prep schools and summers in Newport, has had to work diligently over the years to learn the mores of meet-and-greet retail politics in a state where blue-collar attitudes and ethnic rivalries once dominated elections.
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