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.