After those elections, I continued to return to the Commonwealth as much as the Senate schedule allowed to meet with various constituency groups and visit more cities and towns.But despite our hard work, there were red flags. When campaign workers were gathering signatures to qualify me for the ballot, they found the electorate to be less receptive than in other years. A changing world had transformed Massachusetts into a quite different state from the one I'd known as a boy, or even as a young senator.Textiles and shoes had been the twin anchors of the Commonwealth's economic stability and working-class hopes back in Honey Fitz's day. But the redbrick factories and mills that once seemed as natural to the landscape as cranberry bogs had been declining even before World War II, and now were shuttered, losers to outsourcing and overseas competition. Mass production of shoes in America had begun in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1885, but Ronald Reagan's favorite, the Bostonian, was being made in China and India now.
