TUESDAY, AUGUST 20, 2002 — The state Republicans have made their first strategic mistake in this year’s gubernatorial campaign. They have attacked Treasurer Shannon O’Brien’s claim that she " blew the whistle on the Big Dig " in radio ads.

It’s obvious why the Republicans want to chip away at O’Brien’s role in revealing Big Dig cost overruns: her decision to delay signing an important bond offering helped pierce the aura of invincibility surrounding Massachusetts Turnpike Authority chair James Kerasiotes, who was in charge of the project, and brought his creative bookkeeping to light. It’s a key plank supporting her claim that she’s a fiscal watchdog. But the Republicans may have started a discussion they cannot win. In the law of evidence, they call this " opening the door. "

Consider Boston Globe writer Scot Lehigh’s August 16 column on the question of whether O’Brien overstated her role in getting the Cellucci administration to release the real Big Dig figures. The names in the column read like a potential Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) witness list, if not a target list: former governor Paul Cellucci and Kerasiotes himself. (Remember, the SEC launched a still-open inquiry into the question of Big Dig cost overruns.) These are the people who brought us the cost overruns and then hid them from the public.

According to a March 2001 report from the Inspector General’s Office, Big Dig officials (and, presumably, Cellucci), were calculating ways to lessen the political impact of the cost overruns as early as May 1999 — nine months before they announced the latest overrun of $1.4 billion. You can take issue with the inspector general, Robert Cerasoli, as O’Brien’s critics do. You can call him a politically motivated hack, for instance. But you can’t argue with his evidence. Included on page 73 of Cerasoli’s report was a document showing Big Dig administrators — we don’t know exactly who — plotting key highway events, such as the opening of interstate highways 90 and 93, against political events, such as the 2000 and 2002 elections. That’s not the kind of document a bureaucrat has any use for. Rather, it’s the kind of thing a politician would use in deciding when to go public with negative information.

The only person the Republicans have not trotted out in their latest offensive is Cellucci’s predecessor, the guy who first backed Kerasiotes to head the Big Dig: former Governor William Weld. In a May 2000 profile, Weld cavalierly acknowledged that both Weld and Cellucci were aware of the overruns: " When Cellucci and I were out on the hustings in Central and Western Massachusetts, we didn’t want to tell the town fathers and mothers that we were going to take all their statewide road and bridge money and use it to pay for the Central Artery Project. " This was prior to his 1996 Senate race against Senator John Kerry, during which Weld took down tollbooths on the Mass Pike.

Here’s where the Republicans’ political miscalculation comes in. None of this is anything the current Republican gubernatorial nominee, Mitt Romney, wants to talk about. When I asked him a couple months back about Weld’s decision to take down those toll booths despite his possible knowledge of cost overruns, Romney didn’t want to talk about it. " No, I’m not going to get into that, " Romney said. " I have not studied Governor Weld’s decision. I am not going to spend any time trying to go back over eight years, 10 years, and say, ‘Gosh, he should have done this. I wish he would have done that.’ I just don’t think it’s productive. "

But now, thanks to the state Republican Party, Romney may be forced to get into it. Given that the Republicans are so eager to enlist the likes of Cellucci and Kerasiotes to tear down O’Brien, the Michigan native may have to own up to an unpleasant fact: the Big Dig gang are his folks now. So when the Democratic nominee — most likely O’Brien — opens fire on him during a future debate on the Big Dig, he’ll have to answer questions that a long line of Republicans in this state, from Cellucci on down, have tried to duck.