The Boston Phoenix
June 11 - 18, 1998

[Democratic Convention]

Mean and meaner

Democratic AG candidates Lois Pines and Tom Reilly are the Republicans' best friends

by Dan Kennedy

As their bile-filled encounter in Worcester last weekend made clear, the Democrats' humorless, self-righteous candidates for attorney general may disembowel each other long before the September 15 primary. And that, in turn, has transported a once-ludicrous proposition -- that the state's next attorney general could be a Republican -- into the realm of possibility.

It's not that the Democratic candidates, state senator Lois Pines and Middlesex County district attorney Tom Reilly, have gone negative too early in the campaign. After all, in 1990, then-Middlesex DA Scott Harshbarger and then-AG Jim Shannon went at it hot and heavy in the Democratic primary -- and Harshbarger, the winner, dispatched an anonymous Republican named William Sawyer that November without breaking a sweat.


Spin city

And from last week

Party hardly
Life of the party


The difference this time is that Pines and Reilly, unlike Harshbarger and Shannon, have been one-dimensional candidates whose attacks on each other serve only to underscore their limitations. When Reilly denounces Pines as a career politician with no courtroom experience, and when she retorts that he's taking money from the very special interests that the attorney general regulates, they're both right. Which is why the Republican candidate, former federal prosecutor Brad Bailey, is feeling better about his chances today than he was before the Democratic State Convention.

"There's a well-roundedness to my résumé that neither candidate can compete with," says Bailey, who, in addition to his experience in the US attorney's office in Boston, has served as a prosecutor in New York City, as sheriff of Middlesex County, and most recently as executive director of the Governor's Alliance Against Drugs.

Losing the attorney general's race for the first time since the 1960s would be a devastating blow to the Democrats. With the party's candidate for governor a long shot to knock off Acting Governor Paul Cellucci this fall, the AG's post is a last redoubt from which the Democrats can articulate an alternative vision for the state. A Bailey victory would solidify the Republicans' image as the party of governance and the Democrats' as the party of the bickering, do-little legislature -- an institution that remains highly unpopular with voters, according to a recent Boston Herald poll.

Of course, it's far too early to predict a Bailey victory. The Democratic candidate will have an enormous advantage in fundraising, political experience, and just plain inertia: with the exception of the governor's race, voters tend to go with Democrats out of habit.

Then, too, Bailey brings his own negatives to the race. Appointed sheriff by then-governor Bill Weld to take over for the prison-bound Democratic incumbent, John McGonigle, in 1996, Bailey immediately came under fire for larding the payroll with his political supporters and for blowing his budget. Bailey lost that fall to Democrat Jim DiPaola, whose political consultant, Michael Goldman, now advises Pines, and who is itching for another shot at Bailey. But Democratic state auditor Joe DeNucci later cleared Bailey of financial mismanagement, and Bailey says he'll deal with what he calls "exaggerations and false allegations" this time by "aggressively responding back and denying them."

On paper, at least, Lois Pines would appear to be a reasonably strong candidate. An 18-year veteran of the legislature, she's been a leader on issues such as the environment, health care, and civil rights for lesbians and gay men. She's been endorsed by the state's biggest police unions, and she was introduced to the convention last Saturday by a phalanx of cops -- a contrast to the politician's introduction Reilly got from US representative Marty Meehan. Finally, Pines is a staunch opponent of the death penalty. That position may be unpopular with a majority of voters, but it should win her points for courage and principle. (Reilly, who's for the death penalty, says it's not an important issue in the AG's race. But in the not-unlikely event that capital punishment becomes the law in Massachusetts, it is the attorney general who would have to defend it against a constitutional challenge.)

In her convention speech, Pines outlined a coherent vision of the attorney general as "the people's lawyer" and promised to stand up to greedy insurers, polluting industries, and employers who renege on agreements to pay prevailing union-level wages -- a particularly big hit with the delegates, many of whom had labor ties. By contrast, Reilly did little more than emphasize his prosecutorial experience and refer to himself as "the mainstream Democrat" on issues such as crime, education, and equal opportunity. It was a transparent attempt to paint Pines as a flaky liberal, and it didn't help when his campaign consultant, Mary Breslauer, was unable to name any differences between Reilly and Pines on issues other than the death penalty. Pines's campaign has also been somewhat less negative than Reilly's, although she has blasted Reilly in recent weeks for taking campaign donations from the tobacco industry and other special interests.

Despite these strengths, Pines -- an intense, driven sort with few political allies -- can't seem to help getting herself in trouble. As one Democratic wag puts it, the race is Pines's to lose, and she's eminently capable of losing it. Just before the convention, the Boston Globe rocked her with a story charging that she sought to intimidate Reilly contributors by warning them of the retribution she could wreak as attorney general. (A Democratic elected official quips that Pines's new campaign slogan should be "Lois or Else.") On the morning of her nomination, the Globe reported that she had accepted more than $50,000 in contributions from health care executives, a seeming contradiction of her pledge to eschew special-interest money.

Such accusations may be standard fare in a tough campaign, but Pines has gone out of her way to worsen their impact. She reportedly blew up -- off camera -- after she was asked about her fundraising practices during a WBZ-TV (Channel 4) interview last week. Since then, she's been kept under wraps. During a visit to the convention press room on Saturday morning, Pines smiled and allowed herself to be led away by an aide when asked about the "rough campaign," which made her look as if she needs to be protected from her own excesses. Asked about the fundraising charges at her halting postvictory news conference, she did manage to assert, "I have never threatened, intimidated, or warned anyone about their support for me or anyone else."

As it turned out, she was merely supplying more fuel for Reilly, who went ballistic at his own news conference a few moments later. Though Reilly turned down numerous invitations to call Pines a liar, his bill of particulars against her amounted to exactly that. He claimed he had heard from at least 10 or 12 people who'd been approached by Pines and had received the strong-arm treatment -- "some very heavy-handed calls in the middle of the night," he said. "People have been bothered, and they felt intimidated. That is not business as usual. That is not politics as usual. Other people do not do that."

In fact, other people do do that -- or were the Cellucci campaign's calls to Joe Malone's contributors after the Republican State Convention just friendly how-are-yas? Reilly may have a point when he says that candidates for attorney general need to be held to a higher standard. But his hands are hardly clean, given that he is taking money from special interests that the AG's office regulates -- something Pines's consultant, Goldman, asserts with a vehemence that matches Reilly's.

If Pines's relentlessness has alienated some Democrats, her intraparty sins are mild compared to those of Reilly, who is perfectly positioned to damage Pines while having little chance of winning the nomination himself. As district attorney of the state's largest county, and as someone whose job regularly lands him on the news inveighing against the bad guys, Reilly has the visibility to keep hammering away at his rival. But Pines's big fundraising advantage (she's raised $1 million, far more than Reilly), her experience in running statewide (twice previously), and Reilly's vague message all mean that the DA can hope for little other than a spoiler's role.

It's a role he doesn't seem to mind playing. During an interview on the convention floor on Friday night, Reilly disparaged Pines as a mere "politician" and cast himself as the candidate of integrity. "This debate is going to define the attorney general's office as it enters the next century," he said. "Is it a political office or is it a professional office? Once you enter that office you leave politics at the door. She has no intention of doing that." It was a breathtakingly broad indictment of a woman whose long political career has been free of corruption. It's also a line of attack that could make Pines vulnerable to Bailey, who, like Reilly, knows his way around a courtroom and supports the death penalty.

If Pines is limited by her lack of prosecutorial experience, Reilly is limited by his narrow, prosecutor's view of the way the world works. Reilly is trying to follow in the footsteps of his former boss Scott Harshbarger, who moved up from Middlesex DA to attorney general in 1990 and is now the front-runner for his party's nomination for governor. But though Harshbarger, too, is rigid and puritanical, he also has a more supple intellect than Reilly, and -- because of his enthusiasm for regulatory and consumer issues -- is actually a better AG than he was a DA.

Reilly, by contrast, is strictly a creature of the courtroom. He probably owes whatever viability he has to Judge Hiller Zobel, who freed British au pair Louise Woodward after a jury had sentenced her to life in prison for the death of a baby in her care. Zobel's action deflected anger from Reilly, who had been excoriated for charging Woodward with first-degree murder, to Woodward herself, who suddenly appeared to have gotten away scot-free.

"Lois Pines may not be lovable, but Tom Reilly is hardly huggable," says Republican political consultant Kevin Sowyrda. Adds Democratic consultant Mary Anne Marsh: "No one knows them, and what people do know about them is negative at this point."

Democrats can take comfort from parallels to the 1990 election, when the bitter war staged by Harshbarger and Shannon did not prevent Democratic victory in November. That race even featured the same consultants: Goldman, now working for Pines, was with Harshbarger, and Breslauer, Reilly's adviser, was with Shannon.

But there was another race that year that Brad Bailey's consultant, Charles Manning, says may be more relevant. With Democratic state treasurer Bob Crane retiring, then-House Speaker George Keverian and then-state representative Bill Galvin slugged it out for months for the right to succeed him. Galvin prevailed in the Democratic primary -- and was swamped by Republican Joe Malone, who was tanned, rested, and ready after having had no opponent in the Republican primary.

Brad Bailey is hardly Joe Malone. In his campaign for sheriff, and in a low-visibility challenge to US representative Ed Markey in 1994, Bailey showed a lot of energy, but he also veered into bombast and buffoonery. But neither is he Sawyer the Lawyer, the nobody whom Harshbarger creamed in 1990. At this stage of the campaign, Bailey has to be considered a distant long shot. But he's viable, and for that the Democrats can blame their own candidates' shortcomings and their negative, take-no-prisoners campaigns.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.

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