Something to prove

Treasurer candidate Michael Duffy is a talented young Republican in the mold of Bill Weld. He's also gay.

Talking Politics by Michael Crowley

A young Bill Weld.

That's the phrase a certain redheaded, job-hunting former governor used last week to describe Michael Duffy, his party's newly announced candidate for the office of state treasurer.

The phrase captures much of what makes Duffy one of the most interesting young faces on the state political scene: a Weldian blend of social liberalism and fiscal conservatism; an articulate, highbrow flair; a white-hot core of ambition.

But if Weld was a study in contradictions, Mike Duffy does him one better. He is best known to the state's political establishment as an apparent oxymoron: a gay Republican.

Now Duffy is trying to succeed incumbent treasurer Joe Malone, who is running for governor next year, and become the nation's second openly gay official elected to statewide office. Suddenly, the race for the ho-hum managerial job of treasurer has become an unlikely testing ground for public attitudes toward gender and sexuality.

That's because Duffy's almost certain opponent is former state senator Shannon O'Brien, of Easthampton, whose candidacy has been billed as Massachusetts's best chance to elect its second woman ever to statewide office.

The irony is that the treasurer's job offers few opportunities for social policymaking, or major political change of any kind. Its primary responsibilities are overseeing the state's $17 billion in pension-fund investments and running the lottery.

For Duffy, though, this race isn't so much about history and social change as it is about establishing himself. With seven years' experience under his belt in the Weld-Cellucci Administration -- as director of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) and now of the state Department of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation -- Duffy is finally looking to make a leap into the political big time on his own. The potential for success is vast for a telegenic and amiable 34-year-old aiming to win over the moderates and independents who swing Massachusetts elections, and who made Weld a political superhero.

But Duffy is still unproven. He has been prone to political miscalculation over the years. And he is still defining his political identity -- searching for a solid base of support somewhere between the Republicans who can't stomach his sexuality and the gays who can't stomach his Republicanism. What's more, it's not even clear that Massachusetts is ready to elect an openly gay candidate: it's one thing for Newton to send Barney Frank to Washington, but a statewide race is another matter.

"That's the big question," Duffy says. "Are they going to be able to get past my sexual orientation?"

Duffy has the clout of Weld and Acting Governor Paul Cellucci behind him, but he joins the race as a major underdog. Shannon O'Brien is a smart, likable, seasoned candidate who has made this run before, learning the ropes during an unsuccessful 1994 campaign against Malone. In a race that will easily cost a million dollars, O'Brien has a huge fundraising lead, with some $235,000; Duffy is starting from scratch. And though it looked for a while as if O'Brien would face a trying primary fight, her expected opponents are gradually skipping out. (The latest is former House majority leader Richard Voke, of Chelsea, who told the Phoenix last week that he has ruled out a bid.)

But even if Duffy doesn't win, this race offers a real chance for political advancement. That's how it worked for Joe Malone in 1988: he staged a kamikaze candidacy against Senator Ted Kennedy that introduced him to voters and allowed him to smash O'Brien in 1994. Similarly, O'Brien is counting on her prior run as a major asset this time around. So Duffy doesn't need to steamroll O'Brien. What he must do is run a strong and skillful campaign to allay fears about his political judgment and doubts about his apparent contradictions. If he accomplishes that -- and if Massachusetts voters can warm up to a liberal gay Republican -- Duffy may be on his way to becoming the Next Big Thing in the state Republican Party.

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Duffy's seven years in Massachusetts politics have often been controversial, and he has his enemies -- especially in the most liberal quarters of the gay community. But he joined the treasurer's race last week to plenty of kind words about his record.

"I'm a Democrat, but of all the Republicans I've ever dealt with, Mike Duffy is the best," says Vin McCarthy, an attorney and long-time gay political activist. "He's a gentleman, and he's a real nice guy."

Mike Duffy's political activism dates back to his undergraduate years at Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut, where he founded a conservative student newspaper. An Irish Catholic born in New York City and raised in Florida, Duffy came to the Boston area after college and earned a public-policy degree from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. (Duffy, who had been out of the closet since college, founded a gay student group at the Kennedy School.) After running the 1987 congressional campaign of moderate US Representative Christopher Shays (R-Connecticut), he returned to Boston for a career in Massachusetts politics.

Duffy's uneasy relationship with his party was evident from his first days on the local scene. He was fired from the staff of the state Republican committee after disputes with GOP chairman Ray Shamie, a hardened social conservative. In 1990, he was kicked off the South End GOP ward committee he vice-chaired -- simply because he is gay, Duffy says. (Duffy has since found a home with more like-minded GOP activists as a member of the state chapter of the Log Cabin Club, a national gay Republican organization.)

If Republicans condemned him for his sexuality and his liberal politics, many gay activists derided him for being too conservative. When Duffy ran against the popular South End State Representative Byron Rushing (D-Boston) in 1990, the gay community split its support, and Duffy lost with 46 percent of the vote. ("If you're not a lefty, they can't stand you," says WBZ talk radio host David Brudnoy, a friend of Duffy. "I know that feeling.")

Yet Duffy helped deliver the gay vote for Bill Weld, who appointed him to head MCAD. At first the choice stunned many gay activists and civil libertarians, who pointed out that Duffy, then just 27, had little experience and had opposed affirmative action just a few years before.

But in the seven years he has since spent in state government, Duffy has proven his competence and smarts. At the same time, he's earned a reputation for grandstanding and publicity-mongering.

On the one hand, Duffy is widely credited with revitalizing MCAD, which had become disorganized and ineffective. He whittled down a massive case backlog, instructing his staff to reach more settlements and giving them copies of the book Getting to Yes as a guide. Publicly, Duffy raised the profile of the agency with tough investigations and record-setting awards of up to $250,000.

Duffy's tenure was also defined by a passion for press conferences, TV cameras, and undercover stings. But his flashy tactics sometimes backfired. He quickly came to be known, as the Boston Globe once put it, for a tendency "to shoot accusations first and ask questions later."

Duffy's defining trigger-happy moment came in 1994, when he announced discrimination charges against Boston's Four Seasons Hotel. After two black bellhops claimed they had been forbidden from serving the visiting Indian prime minister, Duffy called three press conferences in five days to denounce "widespread and ongoing" discrimination by hotel management. It was a PR nightmare for the Four Seasons.

But Duffy quickly backtracked. He later admitted to airing the bellhops' charges without giving hotel management a chance to respond, and conceded that the "widespread" discrimination claim was unfounded (although the hotel did eventually settle the bellhops' cases with a $70,000 fine).

Duffy's taste for high drama was also evident in a 1992 MCAD report warning that the state's cities "may burst into flames" as race riots turn the streets into "urban funeral pyres." So was his sometimes brusque style: Springfield officials were furious when he visited a Hispanic neighborhood there to hold a press conference on the report but neglected to contact them.

Since his move to the inherently less turbulent Office of Consumer Affairs, his tenure has been calmer -- but similarly defined by a mixture of accomplishment and controversy.

In a business-friendly administration, Duffy hasn't been afraid to cross big corporations. "He is one of the strongest consumer advocates that has been in that office in a long time," says Deirdre Cummings, consumer program director at MassPIRG, who cites his work fighting bank ATM surcharges and administering the state's "lemon law."

But when Duffy left MCAD, he didn't leave his flair for showmanship behind. After public outcry over the recent drinking-related death of MIT freshman Scott Krueger, the Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission, an agency Duffy oversees, staged a highly publicized sting operation last month to confiscate a single keg delivered to an MIT fraternity house.

And now Duffy is fending off charges that he used taxpayer money to jack up his name recognition for political purposes. Last month, Duffy's office launched a $430,000 public-awareness campaign targeting fraudulent contractors. Duffy is prominently featured in the television and direct-mail ads, which are financed with taxpayer money. The state Democratic committee has accused him of launching an early campaign blitz under the guise of public advocacy, and even the GOP-friendly Boston Herald blasted him for "wasting public money."

MassPIRG's Cummings defends Duffy's high visibility: "There may be all these great consumer benefits or laws on the books, but unless consumers know about them, they can't take advantage of them. That office for a long time has been negligent in getting that information out to consumers." Indeed, Duffy says, calls are now pouring in to his office from people taking advantage of the campaign by applying for fraud relief.

Duffy has grown accustomed to criticism that he is publicity-obsessed. "I plead guilty to being aggressive in courting the media on behalf of issues I care about," he says.

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Duffy's MCAD and Consumer Affairs posts rarely forced him to commit to ideological specifics. From what we know about his record, however, it can be hard to tell that he is a Republican at all. He has voted for Bill Clinton twice. He supports abortion rights and gun control, backs government antidiscrimination measures, and in the past has taken a moderate line on taxes.

"Mike is a good hybrid of relatively-small-government philosophy with a liberal, do-goodist nature," says David Brudnoy.

But it's been seven years since Duffy last detailed his beliefs in a campaign. Early signals suggest that he is sharpening the edges of his fiscal conservatism and his partisan rhetoric -- bringing him more in line with the winning model of Bill Weld. Duffy isn't coy about his image-crafting, either. "I'm a Weld Republican," he declares.

For starters, Duffy is embracing some red-meat GOP issues. He is backing a $1.2 billion per year rollback in the state income tax, from 5.95 percent to 5 percent, and he supports the death penalty.

He's also shrewdly looking to capitalize on popular opinion in the wake of this fall's IRS-bashing in Congress, vowing that he would reform the state's Department of Revenue.

But Duffy is also finding a way to pepper his platform with that vital ingredient, social compassion. He says that as treasurer he'd look to invest the state's pension funds in "socially conscious" places, such as economically depressed areas of the state. And he calls divestment of state dollars from tobacco companies "an excellent idea."

As for the lottery, Duffy sees little need for reform, despite a culture of abuse and addiction revealed by a Boston Globe investigative series earlier this year. "I think there was a lot of smoke there, but I don't know that there was any fire," he says.

But he saves his choicest words for his opponent, O'Brien, whom he skewers as just another crony of former Senate President Billy Bulger.

"She was very much in lock step with the Democratic establishment in the State Senate," he says. "She was very loyal to Bulger" and is supported by "very conservative elements of the Democratic party."

Duffy is apparently attacking O'Brien this way in an effort to underscore his own liberal tendencies. But it's a stretch. O'Brien's record includes strong support for gay and women's rights, education, and health care; if anything, her real weakness is a vulnerability to charges of fiscal excess. Duffy's charges could be a warning sign that he won't be able to contain his penchant for risky hyperbole in a campaign.

The harshness of Duffy's rhetoric suggests that he's willing to play rough. But Duffy appears to have preempted at least one potential campaign controversy. Despite reports that he had been meeting with conservative consultant Arthur Finkelstein, Duffy says he will not hire the famed operative -- an engineer of vicious and antigay campaigns for the likes of North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms.

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Although a handful of openly gay officials serve in state legislatures nationwide, only one has ever been elected to a statewide office like the one Duffy is seeking. Last year, Vermont auditor Ed Flanagan was reelected for the third time -- but for the first time since announcing he is gay. (The state treasurer in Maine is a lesbian, but she was elected in a special ballot last year by the state legislature, not the voting public.)

Mike Duffy says his campaign will be about "my qualifications, my experience and ideas," not his sexuality. But he concedes it is difficult to know whether the state electorate will judge him on that basis. (According to Duffy, there has been no polling on whether voters will accept a gay candidate.)

If the state as a whole is a question mark, the Massachusetts gay community is sure to split, as it did during Duffy's 1990 run for the state legislature. Many gay political leaders say that Duffy can expect little support on the basis of his sexuality. "I don't expect that there will be an automatic allegiance for voters who are gay or lesbian," he acknowledges.

"Our community has become quite sophisticated, and we will cast our votes based not upon a candidate's sexual orientation but his political orientation," writes Michael Greene, president of the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights lobby, one of the state's more moderate gay-rights groups, in an e-mail statement. "Michael's challenge will be in articulating how his fiscal policy will affect us as citizens of the Commonwealth."

He adds that "as a Republican, Michael's initial support from the gay community will be marginal."

Duffy's gay support could be even more limited because of O'Brien's record as a leading supporter of gay rights in the legislature.

"Right there you have an attractive candidate on the other side of the aisle who is good on our issues," says Don Gorton, former chairman of the Greater Boston Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance.

Gorton suggests that the electorate as a whole will be guided neither by sexual orientation nor by partisanship. Instead, he says, voters will ask: "`Do I agree with this candidate, and do I think he or she can do a good job in the office?'"

That's what Duffy, and any sensible person, must hope will happen. And therein lies the key to Duffy's success. If the poison of voter prejudice doesn't stop him, he will be ideally positioned to win over the state's independents, a group uninterested in political labels and moved instead by a taste for balanced budgets, low taxes, and progressive social policy.

Duffy will have a hard time winning this race. But by waging a fair, energetic campaign, and by keeping publicity gimmicks in check, he might just position himself as an heir to the coveted Bill Weld legacy in Massachusetts.

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.