Historic??
Yes, we claim this US senate seat and house district as the most historic (and possibly hysteric) in the land. The 8th Massachusetts house district is the fabled haunt of
The heart of the 8th Mass. district used to be the 11th, and has not been won by a Republican since 1872.
Honey Fitz (1890s)
Boston Mayor James Michael Curley (1910-14, 1942-46)
Congressman, Senator & President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the JFK of "Camelot" fame
Speaker Tip O'Neill (1952-86), and the retiring Crown Prince of Camelot,
Joseph P. Kennedy II (1986-98)
plus America's oldest and best-known college, Harvard (est. 1636), FDR's major source of New Deal braintrusters in the Great Depression, and home of braintruster-come-lately and Crown Prince of Keynesianism, John Kenneth Galbraith (Age of Uncertainty, p.218).
Add to that America's best-known technical school, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology),
home of econ-principles-text king Paul Samuelson, plus 46 other colleges, giving the 8th Mass. district the most intellectual and influential constituents of all the nation's 435 congressional districts.
In his first two weeks of collecting signatures in late February '98, Phil signed up two Nobel laureates in economics without even trying - Franco Modigliani in front of the Belmont Star Market and Hendrik Houthakker at the Mt. Auburn Star. Phil (quite a lad with the ladies) also signed up the wives of Governors Bill Weld and Mitt Romney, and the widow of organist E. Power Biggs. (Phil just missed classical cellist YoYo Ma.)