The new congressman from the 10th District is Democrat Bill Keating, who won the open seat of retiring Democratic Rep. Bill Delahunt in 2010. Read More

The new congressman from the 10th District is Democrat Bill Keating, who won the open seat of retiring Democratic Rep. Bill Delahunt in 2010.

Keating’s father was a police officer and later a veterans’ services agent who assisted former soldiers with service-related disabilities. Keating put himself through Boston College by working at a post office. In 1977, at the age of 23, he was elected to the Massachusetts House. One of the first things Keating did was work on a law requiring smoke detectors in houses after a fire in a nearby town killed a family living in a house without detectors. In 1985, Keating was elected to the state Senate, eventually becoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the Committee on Taxation. He also was involved in environmental issues, sponsoring a bill to safeguard lakes and streams from pollutants by banning phosphates in household cleaners.

Keating was elected district attorney for Norfolk County in 1998. Four years later, his office became the first in the state to win a murder conviction in the absence of a victim’s body. In that case, DNA evidence taken from a saw helped to convict Joseph D. Romano Jr. of murdering and dismembering his wife. Keating also worked to curb bullying in schools, a hot-button issue in the state after a teenage girl in western Massachusetts committed suicide after being bullied. He also set up facilities for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, an issue that hit close to home; one of Keating’s uncles suffered from PTSD after World War II. And he helped create the Norfolk Advocates for Children, an organization for children who have been victimized by sexual assault.

Keating decided to run for Congress after Delahunt announced he would step down after seven terms. The district has been in Democratic hands for more than 30 years, but it is relatively conservative for Massachusetts. It gave Republican Sen. Scott Brown 60% of the vote in his upset victory over Democratic Attorney General Martha Coakley in the 2010 special election to fill the late Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy’s seat. Keating faced tea party-backed Republican Jeff Perry, a member of the state House.

Keating actively supported the Democrats’ health care overhaul, and he got help from Kennedy’s widow, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, who said that Keating shared her husband’s commitment to universal health care. Keating also was generally supportive of President Barack Obama’s $787 billion economic-stimulus bill, although he said he would have done it differently, doling out money “more slowly” and in a “more targeted” way. In contrast, Perry campaigned on a tea party platform calling for smaller government and smaller federal budgets. Part of Keating’s campaign strategy was to paint Perry, a police officer, as having a “troubled relationship with the truth,” pointing to a case in the 1990s in which an officer under Perry’s command was involved in illegal strip searches of teenage girls. Perry said he did not know about the searches at the time. In response to the attack ad, Perry’s campaign released a video of Wareham Police Chief Tom Joyce saying Perry was a good police officer.

Keating provided Democrats a rare moment of triumph on an otherwise dismal Election Night. He won with 45.6% of the vote to Perry’s 41.3%. Three other candidates divided the remaining votes.