BOSTON—The late Congressman Joseph J. Moakley (D) would like the big field of candidates seeking to replace him in this Fall’s special election, says Fred Clark, a longtime Moakley aide.

Moakley’s death this spring after a protracted battle with leukemia kicked off the first open race in the Ninth Congressional District since the Nixon administration and has drawn national attention to the nine contenders—seven Democrats and two Republicans—seeking to represent the increasingly diverse district, a mixture of suburban communities and the working-class neighborhood of South Boston popularly known as “Southie.”

At stake is more than just a congressional seat—but the identity of one of Boston’s most storied neighborhoods. Only one candidate, State Sen. Stephen F. Lynch (D), lives in Southie. All the rest of the candidates live in the district’s suburbs outside Boston.

If Lynch loses, it would mark the first time in 73 years that the Ninth’s representative did not live in South Boston—and it would mark the first time in more than a century that no resident of Boston served in Congress, says Boston historian Thomas H. O’Connor, a history professor at Boston College.

The Legend

Many in Boston feel this Fall’s election as the ending of a political era for the city—an era of old-fashioned local politics promoted by Moakley and his close friend the late former Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill (D), who represented the neighboring Eighth District from 1954 to 1988.

“Moakley himself was an institution, a man who acted as a champion for the young Irish working class,” says Michael Dempsey, a political science student at Suffolk University who studies Boston politics. “There is no way any of these guys running could hope to fill Moakley’s shoes.”

“[Moakley] can’t be replaced. He is from another era,” says Clark, who as a former Moakley campaign manager and district staff director worked with the congressman for 18 years.

Clark explains that Moakley had an emotional attachment to his supporters.

“Voters want their representatives to be a little purer, a little smarter, and a little more competent than themselves. Yet they want their representative to be an equal. Moakley was all [of] this,” Clark said.

While no candidate may leap out of the crowd as a peer of Moakley’s caliber, neither Moakley nor O’Neill started out in Congress as legends, according to O’Connor.

“It’s really too early to tell what kind of congressmen any of the candidates would be. Moakley was relatively unknown and wasn’t that outstanding when he was elected. It took him many years to develop his expertise,” O’Connor says.

But despite his humble beginnings as an elected official, all the candidates venerate Moakley’s service for the district.

“Maybe, just maybe, if I work from sun up till sundown, I can fill one of Joe Moakley’s shoes,” says Lynch, who recalls Moakley reminding politicians to remember “the people upstairs, downstairs and across the back fence.”

If elected, Lynch hopes to serve the Ninth in the same vein, as he tells his supporters, “When I go to Congress, we all go to Congress.”

However, before Lynch can go to Congress, he has to beat eight other contenders in the crowded race for the Ninth.

Since supposed front-runner Max Kennedy dropped out of the race in June citing family concerns, the field of declared candidates has expanded quickly.

State Sen. Mark Pacheco (D-Taunton), Sen. Cheryl Jacques (D-Needham), Sen. Brian Joyce (D-Milton) and Lynch are considered the most competitive candidates at this point. But William Ferguson and housing activist John E. Taylor declared their candidacies last week, joining former Assistant U.S. Attorney William Sinnott to complete the Democratic primary field.

Republican candidates Sen. JoAnn Sprague (R-Walpole) and Bill McKinney are considered long shots.

Show Me The Money

Thus far, Joyce has dwarfed all of his opponents in fund-raising, but others are quickly catching up.

The Associated Press reported last week that the Joyce campaign had already raised $600,000 to the $575,000 raised by runner-up Lynch, who now hopes to benefit from the fund-raising and strategy skills of Democratic political operative Michael Whouley, a Dorchester native.

Pacheco and Jacques have raised $200,000 each and both Taylor and Sprague are hovering around the $100,000 mark.

Joyce’s tactics, though, have drawn criticism since he began fund raising for the race while Moakley was still alive. At the time, Moakley’s aides including Clark condemned the move as inappropriate in the press.

In the coming weeks, fundraising will become increasingly vital as candidates prepare to run ads in Boston—one of the costliest television markets in the country—in advance of the Democratic primary on Sept. 11 and the general election on Oct. 16.

Money alone will not win the race, though, and the candidates face another major hurdle in their race to represent the Ninth: voter turnout. With no other state or national elections being held this year, the candidates are on their own to get voters to the polls.

“Mobilizing their supporters will be key. If you can turn out the true believers that’s how you can win,” says Andrea L. Campbell, an assistant professor of government at Harvard.

She cites the example of Cambridge’s own representative. Michael G. Capuano (D), then the mayor of Cambridge, who edged his opponents in a crowded race for the Eighth District largely because he attracted the support of ethnic communities in Somerville.

Clark, who has watched Boston politics closely for many years, agrees.

“This race really is similar to the Eighth district race. Candidates in this race will not only have to identify their supporters, they will have the added challenge of making sure their voters get out to vote,” he says.

O’Connor predicts that the race would yield a modest turnout of no more than 20 percent.

The low expected turnout might favor Lynch, according to Clark.

“Lynch can easily identify his supporters because they are more geographically compact, he can rely on a more tightly-knit voter base and especially unions that will dig out voters on Election Day,” Clark explains.

But Joyce’s spokesperson, Doug Ruben, deflects any claims that Joyce will encounter trouble trying to collect votes in his stomping ground of Milton, just outside Boston.

“Joyce actually represents a large chunk of the city. I don’t anticipate us having trouble in getting our voters to the booth,” Ruben says.

The district has changed so much—both ethnically and physically, having undergone three redistricting plans after the 1970, 1980 and 1990 censuses—this is hard to make any predictions since the district has undergone a sea change since Moakley was first elected.

The District

When Moakley, then a Boston City Councilor, ran for Congress in 1972, South Boston was primarily white, Irish and Catholic, O’Connor says.

Moakley would represent the district during some of the most tumultuous times in its history. Two years after his election the community would be rocked by riots after a federal court imposed mandatory busing to desegregate the schools.

Over the next decade drugs and mobster Whitey Bulger would exact a heavy price on the community, before the area began a revival that would bring people of many races and nationalities to the area.

Ethnically some analysts say the district is still probably the most heavily Irish congressional district in the nation. But now the district is culturally and economically diverse, loosing the vestiges of its old Irish neighborhoods, O’Connor says.

“The Ninth is one of the most diverse districts in the country. It’s a rainbow district of Hispanic, black, white and Asian constituents,” Clark says.

Candidates must also contend with an expanding district, which extends to Easton to the southwest, Braintree to the southeast, Brockton, the old shoe manufacturing town, and the textile mills of Taunton.

Democrats outside of Southie now outnumber those inside Boston’s borders, 102,333 to 81,749 registered voters.

John, a 42 year-old Boston firefighter, typifies the old face of the district.

The soft-spoken yet articulate John, who declined to give his full name, stays busy raising four children as a single parent and says his main concern for the election is education.

He holds a second job at a wholesale building supply store and works overtime at the fire station to help send his two daughters to a private Catholic school.

“The [public] schools are lousy and I pay a lot of money to send my girls to a private school to get a decent education,” John says.

He’ll be supporting Lynch in the fall, he says.

While the fire-fighter may represent the district that elected Moakley, Sayurra Ozawa, a 24-year-old native of Japan, represents the next generation of the Ninth. She has only lived in her Dorchester apartment for a year.

Though she did not know the names of the candidates seeking her vote, Ozawa hopes that the next congressman will devote considerable attention to making her neighborhood safer.

“I have a lot of Japanese friends who think this is a bad place to live. I know it’s not that bad and people are nice, but there is some crime,” says Ozawa mentioning that her friend’s car was stolen off the street recently.

O’Connor explains that voters are interested in the “bread and butter” issues: they want a congressman who will “bring home the bacon.”

“They are not so much concerned with international issues as they are with making sure that bridges and court houses are built and that everyone has a job,” he says.

That type of constituent-oriented politics was pioneered by Moakley and O’Neill, who entitled one of his memoirs All Politics is Local.

And in true local form, Southie seems to be pulling out all the stops to elect their ‘hometown boy’ to Congress.

While voters in the suburbs have largely ignored the race, South Boston is littered with Lynch signs and campaign paraphernalia. He has secured the endorsements of about 40 local trade unions and is considered to have a solid working-class base, say many observers.

O’Connor agrees with Clark that the district’s changing face will benefit Lynch. However, Lynch will need to raise his visibility beyond Southie in order to appeal to suburban towns in the district. Likewise, Joyce will need to engage voters outside his suburban base of Milton.

Reaching out across racial and socioeconomic classes is a lesson that anyone who hopes to represent the Ninth will have to learn, Dempsey explains.

“[Moakley] showed that we all have a lot more in common than we thought or might be willing to accept,” he says.