Fall from grace

Part 4

by Dan Kennedy

Cellucci's political problems -- and the difficulties even a candidate as strong as Weld presumably would have in defeating Joe Kennedy -- have led to speculation about Cellucci's political future, some of it pretty wild. The wildest: that Malone would become Weld's running mate, and Cellucci, who lives in Hudson, would run for Congress in the Fifth District. In its fullest flowering, that rumor has incumbent congressman Marty Meehan, a Lowell Democrat, stepping down to run for attorney general.

But no one thinks that Weld, loyal boss that he is, would ask Cellucci to leave the ticket, and Cellucci says he won't volunteer. Rather, Cellucci insists that he'll be running for one of two offices in 1998: lieutenant governor or governor.

Of this there's no doubt: the Malone and Cellucci camps loathe each other. Malone's advisers emphasize their man's populist persona -- his refusal to accept a state car and a pay raise, in contrast to Cellucci, and his crackdown on such insider privileges as the State House bank. They whisper that the Cellucci camp is so worried that it's sent out feelers to explore the possibility of a Cellucci-Malone ticket, which they insist they're not interested in. (Cellucci says he knows nothing about any such overture.) And they chortle that when Malone becomes governor, the good times are going to end for such Weld-Cellucci-supporters-turned-lobbyists as Ray Howell, John Moffitt, Sandy Tennant, and Peter Berlandi.

Cellucci's supporters, in turn, call Malone a grandstander, a backstabber who's not averse to screwing fellow Republicans to get ahead. Exhibit A: State Senator Henri Rauschenbach (R-Brewster), who was acquitted of influence-peddling charges in 1995 despite Malone's testimony as the prosecution's star witness. Then, too, a number of legislators were less than thrilled when Malone lobbied against Keno, aggressively promoted its growth when the legislature approved its creation anyway, and then turned around and blamed the legislature when he came under criticism for allowing variety stores to become mini-casinos.

"I've seen the way he's operated," says a Republican critic of Malone's dealings with the legislature. "Maybe once or twice you can get away with that, but it seems to me that he does that all the time."

The hard reality facing Paul Cellucci, though, is that in politics that kind of naked careerism isn't necessarily a negative, especially in an intraparty Republican battle. "Cellucci definitely has a softer demeanor than Malone," says political analyst Lou DiNatale. "But by and large, Republicans don't get elected being soft and cuddly."

Then there's the ideological battle, fuzzy though it may be. Cellucci, by embracing welfare reform and the death penalty, has moved toward the right over the years, and Malone, by switching to a pro-choice stance in 1994, has moved toward the left. Still, there's a perception that Malone -- who got his start as a top operative for ultraconservative former state-party chairman Ray Shamie in the 1980s -- commands the loyalties of the party's conservative grassroots. Republican political consultant Ron Mills, a conservative who quarterbacked the party's 1990 surge in the State Senate, goes so far as to call Cellucci "a Dukakis Republican," which he defines as "an elitist, liberal, upper-middle-class, self-righteous twit."

Bill Weld has long been criticized for his inattention to party politics, and though Cellucci wins praise from some Republicans for attempting to fill that vacuum, he's likely to pay a penalty for Weld's inaction. Indeed, Cellucci was recently unable to stop the selection of Jean Inman, a Malone supporter, as the new state-party chairwoman. (Inman has taken a vow of neutrality.) And though Malone operatives say Cellucci might try to pack the 1998 GOP convention with Weld-Cellucci loyalists, it's likely that Malone will win the convention's endorsement.

As Cellucci (and Weld) showed in 1990, the convention doesn't mean much. But if Malone captures the Republican base, Cellucci would have to rely on independents on Primary Day, much as Weld did in 1990. And the excitement of a Joe Kennedy-Scott Harshbarger race -- unlikely to diminish even if Kennedy is well ahead -- would make it likely that independents would draw Democratic ballots.

But despite Malone's advantages, Cellucci has a few things going for him, too.

For one thing, he ended 1996 with $1.7 million in his campaign fund, nearly three times as much as Malone. And Weld's public indecision should give Cellucci a continued fundraising edge, since Malone, who's already said he won't seek re-election as treasurer, can't tell potential contributors what office he'll seek until Weld makes up his mind. (Despite this advantage, Malone managed to raise slightly more money than Cellucci during the first quarter of this year.)

For another, Cellucci's supporters insist he'll prove to be a better candidate than the cynics believe. "I think that people have a tendency to underestimate Paul. He's won every election every time his name's been on the ballot," says Mary-Lee King, Weld's chief policy adviser and an old friend and supporter of Cellucci's from Hudson.

Others in the Cellucci camp say the bad news about his personal debt will fade, especially if he can show by next year that he's taken substantial steps toward paying it down. "It clearly involved his personal finances. There was nothing to do with his public performance," says a prominent Cellucci adviser, who argues that the recent Globe Spotlight series on Malone's management of the state lottery may ultimately have more impact. Even though the only thing the public may remember about the series right now is that Malone had a bad haircut in the 1970s, this adviser insists that revelations about the lottery's over-aggressive granting of licenses and Malone's hiring his high-school buddies could come back to haunt him: "That could potentially undermine the whole rationale of Joe's campaign, which is, `I've been a great treasurer, and we have the most successful lottery in the country.' "

Still, Cellucci has to be seen as a long shot. If this is the end of the line, he seems pretty serene about it. He says he could go back to practicing law, which he gave up when he became lieutenant governor; the loss of income, he adds, is what was mainly responsible for his debt problems. He's a guy of fairly simple tastes. He likes baseball (he hit Fort Myers for a few days during spring training), and college football and basketball. Movies, once or twice a week. He likes horses, too, though he says he hardly ever gets out to the track anymore, and insists that gambling debts have nothing to do with his financial woes. He runs two miles a day, something he's been doing for the past 20 years. ("I'm not very fast, but I think I've got some endurance," he says; if it's meant as a warning to Malone, he doesn't let on.) His wife, Jan Garnett, is a school librarian in Worcester; their two daughters are in college (one at Harvard, the other at BC), but they live at home, which is exactly where he wants them to be.

Cellucci's a Catholic, and he graduated from Hudson Catholic High School, Boston College, and BC Law. And though he's had his clashes with the Church hierarchy over his pro-choice views (he once was disinvited from giving the commencement address at Hudson Catholic,), his own assessment of his political future -- assuming Weld ultimately decides not to run -- is imbued with a Catholic fatalism.

"To some extent it depends on the mood of the electorate," he says. "Certainly in 1990 the people of this state wanted an outsider. But that wasn't the case in 1994, and what the mood of the people will be in 1998, I don't know. I suppose that might be Joe Malone's angle -- `I'm the outsider, Cellucci's the insider' -- but we'll have to see how that develops.

"This is a very cyclical business. You've got to be ready, you've got to work hard, you've got to catch some breaks. And some years you catch the breaks, some years you don't."

If those don't sound like the words of a future governor, they certainly sound like those of a realist.

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