employment- jobs and career

Keating wasn’t his neighbor, or even a close friend, but Ed Schnurr’s childhood home was imprinted on the candidate’s mental map of the mail routes in Sharon he had run four decades earlier. It was testimony not only to Keating’s youthful industriousness — he put himself through college working for the US Postal Service — but also to his early political ambition. Becoming a friendly postman helped him beat two local selectmen for a seat in the state House of Representatives at age 24.

“He made so many friends along the postal routes, filling in for different people,’’ his close friend and former law partner Joel Fishman recalled.

Keating, who has never lost an election, is now embroiled in a tight race with state Representative Jeffrey D. Perry, a Republican from Sandwich, to replace retiring US Representative William Delahunt in the 10th Congressional District. But Keating’s old mail routes will not won’t help, nor will a great portion of the political base he has he’s built since; only three of the 10th’s 41 communities are in Norfolk County. Keating rented a house in Quincy, where he will campaign next Saturday with Vice President Joe Biden, to seize the rare chance to run for an open congressional seat.

Keating, 58, has amassed a substantial record on criminal justice, public safety, and environmental protection in his eight years in the state House, 14 in the state Senate and 12 as Norfolk district attorney. But in a volatile election year in which anti-establishment Tea Party candidates are appealing to a frustrated and short-tempered electorate, his biggest liability may be the political resume he spent a lifetime building.

So Keating has tried to make the race about trust.

In virtually every public appearance, he steers the conversation to Perry’s role in illegal strip-searches of two teenage girls by an officer under his command in the early 1990s, when Perry was a sergeant in the Wareham Police Department. He seems genuinely incredulous that Perry — who also has previously misstated his academic credentials and inaccurately described the strip-searches on his bar application — is doing as well as he is.

Keating’s candor seems involuntary, if not always politically adept. At the Oyster Festival, where he was struggling to gain ground with Cape voters, he was asked whether he liked oysters.

Surrounded by briny samples of the town’s pride piled in dinghies, simmering in stew, emblazoned on sweatshirts, and painted on crockery, he said, “No.’’