Latest Travel News:

Senate hopefuls vary in travel experience
November 30, 2010

Stephen Pagliuca speaks Dutch. Alan Khazei boasts of seeing South Africa with President Clinton. And US Representative Michael E. Capuano has traveled the globe, albeit often on the taxpayer dime, meeting with presidents, prime ministers, and American troops.

Attorney General Martha Coakley, who grew up in a family of modest means in Berkshire County and has worked for years in county and state government, is by far the least well traveled of the Democrats. Other than a summer trip to Normandy led by a group of nuns, she had not left the country before college, and since then her travels, to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, have been mostly for vacations.

In the short campaign to succeed Edward M. Kennedy - who spent part of his childhood in London and was a leading international voice on a wide range of foreign policy issues - the public discussion has focused mostly on domestic issues such as health care and the economy. But foreign policy is likely to take center stage this week, because President Obama plans to address the nation Tuesday night about Afghanistan, and the four Democratic Senate candidates in Massachusetts have a televised debate scheduled during the hour before the president’s speech.

A chief role of a US senator is to weigh in on matters that have an impact across the globe, including the ratification of treaties; the senior senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kerry, is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The four Democratic Senate candidates, who will face off in a primary election Dec. 8, have had no significant foreign policy differences, but bring very different kinds of personal experience to the debate.

Khazei, a social entrepreneur who cofounded City Year, has traveled the planet to discuss issues ranging from national service to nuclear weapons, visiting the Amazon rain forest with environmental activists, working at the US Embassy in Paris for a summer, and spending nine months on a round-the-world trip with his wife.

Pagliuca, who made a fortune as an investor and consultant and is now co-owner of the Boston Celtics, has lived in Holland, repeatedly visited Japan, and has been abroad so often making deals and speaking at his conferences that, asked about his travels, his staff sent the Globe a list compiled in part by scrutinizing his passport stamps.

Capuano had never traveled abroad before being elected to Congress - “Money is a limiting factor in life, isn’t it?’’ he says - but began traveling heavily shortly after his election, starting in his first summer with a visit to Armenia and Azerbaijan. His district includes Watertown, which has a significant Armenian population.

Coakley has not traveled in her role as attorney general, has taken only one work-related trip - an Anti-Defamation League-sponsored trip to Israel - and has traveled for pleasure to Europe, Egypt, India, and Japan.

Source :-http://www.boston.com