Family ties pushed to the forefront
The personal stories of Tsongas, Ogonowski play key role in Fifth District contest
The campaign ad for Republican congressional candidate Jim Ogonowski strikes a deeply emotional note. As a patriotic hymn plays gently in the background, the screen fills with the image of smoke billowing from the first tower struck at the World Trade Center. The second hijacked airliner is about to strike.
"You see," a deep-voiced narrator says, "on Sept. 11, Jim's brother was the captain of Flight 11, which ended at the World Trade Center."
Ogonowski's use of his brother's tragic death points to a common feature for the two major-party candidates in the race for an open seat in the Fifth Congressional District. Neither has held public office, but each has a deceased relative with a compelling emotional narrative. In their successful primary campaigns and now in the special election Oct. 16, the candidates have not been shy about seizing on the political appeal of those stories.
While Ogonowski has focused on his family link to the 2001 terrorist attacks, Niki Tsongas a Democrat, has been reminding voters of her popular husband, the late US senator Paul Tsongas, who represented the Fifth District in the House in the 1970s, served one term in the Senate, and won the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary in 1992.
Tsgonas's campaign website is topped by a black-and-white photograph that depicts her standing in front of a station wagon with a smiling Paul Tsongas and their three daughters. Her campaign biography references Paul 20 times, and in television ads the campaign released last month, their daughters, now adults, sit on a bench as one of them says, "My dad was sick for a very long time, and our mom was the one who held us all together." Paul Tsongas died in 1997.
These personal stories have taken a prominent role in the campaign, given the candidates' lack of political experience.
"If you don't have the track record or held elected office, the personal story is paramount," said Garrison Nelson, a congressional historian and political science professor at the University of Vermont. The race, he said, is broadly shaping up as "9/11 versus poor Paul."
Tsongas has contended that she is better positioned to represent the district because she can draw on Washington connections developed during her husband's political career. But at one point during the primary, she went too far, saying of the district in a July debate, "I represented it in Washington for 10 years. I know how Washington works."
After her comments were posted online in a 13-second clip on YouTube, her campaign aides said that she misspoke and that she had meant to focus on the work she did during her husband's congressional tenure. During the time the family lived in Washington, Niki Tsongas ran a dessert catering business out of their home and raised her children.
In an attempt to finesse the issue of her husband's popularity, Tsongas's aides talk about the candidate's transition "from knowing Tsongas to knowing Niki" as she has highlighted other aspects of her biography: serving on local boards and nonprofit organizations, and for the past 10 years, working as the dean of external affairs at Middlesex Community College.
"You look at the name Niki Tsongas, and there's two pieces to it, the Niki part and the Tsongas part," Tsongas said in an interview. "My name is my name. It's a life lived, and a shared life lived, and it reflects who we were together and who I am as an individual."
The story of pilot John Ogonowski helps his brother Jim, a veteran and a farmer, keeps voters focused on terrorism and security. The message is infused throughout his campaign, including the first sentence of his biography.
"Jim Ogonowski first came to the nation's attention on 9/11, when the plane his brother John was piloting was hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center," the biography begins. "That day, Jim spoke on his family's behalf, and on behalf of our grieving nation."
The biography goes on to list Jim Ogonowski's lifelong ties to the district, his Air Force career, his work in airlifting supplies after Hurricane Katrina. Since his brother's death, Ogonowski has continued tilling his brother's farm and aiding his wife and children.
"We are all the product of our environment," said Ogonowski, explaining his approach to his brother's legacy. His brother's death at the hands of terrorists, he said, was one of the reasons he decided to run for office.
"That was a significant day in the country's history, but also my family's history," he said. "My family tree is missing a significant branch today."
Ogonowski's campaign has been particularly sensitive to the link to the terrorist attacks because for the first time in four years Ogonowski was left out of State House ceremonies commemorating the attacks. Ogonowski, who canceled all campaign events Tuesday, said in an interview that "the evidence suggests" that his exclusion was a political snub from Democrats at the State House. Organizers said it resulted from a change in direction and a decision to not have any family members speak.
Other candidates have sometimes triumphed politically after a family tragedy. A notable example: US Representative Carolyn McCarthy, a Democrat from Mineola, N.Y., won a seat in the US House in 1996, three years after her husband was killed when a gunman opened fire on a commuter train. In a district that had consistently sent Republicans to Washington, she defeated a one-term incumbent largely by focusing on her husband's death, and her opponent's opposition to gun control measures.
Forty-six women have succeeded their late husbands in Congress, including Edith Nourse Rogers, who became the first woman elected to Congress from Massachusetts in 1925 when she won a special election in the Fifth Congressional District. The Republican from Lowell ran after her husband, John, died of cancer while in office, and she held the seat for 35 years.
The difference for Tsongas and most other successful political spouses is that she is running more than a decade after her husband's death. Only two widows have followed their husbands into Congress without directly succeeding them: Ruth Hanna McCormick, an Illinois Republican, in 1929 was elected to the House five years after her husband died; Leonor Sullivan, a Missouri Democrat, in 1953, two years after her husband died, also in the House.
The Fifth District general election race also includes independent candidates Patrick Murphy, a bricklayer from Lowell, and Kurt Hayes, a Boxborough businessman, as well as Constitution Party candidate Kevin Thompson.
Matt Viser can be reached at maviser@globe.com 