Now or never

Patricia McGovern is a Democrat with good ideas, a good record -- and the best shot at taking the governorship from the Republicans. Will her campaign ever get off the ground?

Talking Politics by Michael Crowley

At the campaign headquarters of the woman who wants to become the first female governor of Massachusetts, a busted fluorescent light flickers in a dilapidated, airless office. It's hardly the ideal place to impress a visiting interviewer. Yet the candidate, long on determination but short on money, insists that her slow-starting campaign has its best days before it.

For Patricia McGovern, a former state senator from Lawrence, the ramshackle setting is a long way from the elegant State House office she occupied as the powerful chairwoman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee. But the road ahead, to the chandeliered corner office now held by Acting Governor Paul Cellucci, is even longer.

And yet Pat McGovern, a dark horse today, may be the Democrats' best hope in the 1998 governor's race. She has the experience, the policy expertise, and a gender advantage that make her an extremely appealing candidate.

For months, McGovern has been little more than a gnat buzzing around the margins of the race. And with just seven months to go before a September primary that she says could cost $2 million, she's got a paltry $266,000 in the bank. Worse, she fared poorly in last weekend's Democratic caucuses: few of her supporters were elected as delegates to the party's June nominating convention.

But McGovern downplays the caucus results. A late entry into the race, she argues that all she has ever hoped for is the 15 percent support from convention delegates -- hundreds of whom remain uncommitted -- that it takes to make it onto the primary ballot.

Events of the past few weeks suggest that McGovern will make the ballot -- and that she is a real threat to win the Democratic nomination. Consider these developments:

Financially, McGovern appears to have turned a corner: her $172,000 January fundraising effort was her best to date. In December, she won the endorsement of EMILY's List, a national organization that solicits donations for pro-choice women candidates, and from which she might reap up to $300,000.

Organizationally, she has assembled a crack campaign team, an all-star lineup that includes former Paul Tsongas aide Phil Stanley as campaign manager; veteran operative and Tom Menino adviser Bill Carrick as media consultant; renowned pollster Irwin "Tubby" Harrison; and Alan Solomont, a former fundraising wizard for the Democratic National Committee who has already begun to solve her financial woes.

And her campaign is at last emerging in the public eye, with sharp jabs at her opponents and a growing policy agenda. Democrats also now report that on the stump, McGovern is delivering a home run of a speech.

In an interview at her Temple Place campaign offices last week, the 56-year-old product of working-class Lawrence (since moved to Andover) seems energized by her new momentum.

"This primary is wide open," McGovern declares with her rapid-fire cadence and impatient, no-bullshit manner. "This is a dead heat right now."

She's right. But the emphasis here is on dead. Kennedy's decision not to run drained the energy from the Democratic race, and three new candidates -- McGovern, and newcomers Ray Flynn, the former Boston Mayor, and ex-congressman Brian Donnelly -- have failed to restore it.

Nor has the clear front-runner, Attorney General Scott Harshbarger. Although he was the only candidate already running when Kennedy left the race, and despite his $1.25 million campaign account, wide name recognition, solid record -- and the fact that he appears to have won enough caucus delegates last week to guarantee himself a place on the primary ballot -- Harshbarger has failed to inspire widespread support.

That lack of enthusiasm is McGovern's opening. Although she joined the race only in September, a Boston Globe/WBZ poll of Democrats last month showed McGovern close behind Harshbarger, with 17 percent to his 21 percent, with long shots Flynn and Donnelly lagging far behind. In a head-to-head matchup, the poll showed, McGovern and Harshbarger are deadlocked.

Could Pat McGovern be the antidote to the Democratic Party's ennui? She has her flaws, to be sure -- including newly raised questions about her recent service for corporate clients. But McGovern brings many strengths to this race: her 12 years dealing with the dense policy and political hardball of Beacon Hill may make her the best-qualified candidate. Her platform of child care, education and health care is thoughtful and appropriate for the times -- although marred by a popular but fiscally irresponsible tax cut. She gives a state that has elected just one woman to a statewide office a chance to catch up with the nation. And, perhaps most persuasively, she may be the Democrat best able to win back the governorship.

But unless her candidacy continues to gather steam, McGovern could fizzle out before most voters even hear about her.

"Pat McGovern may be the most dangerous candidate in a general election," says Lou DiNatale, a senior fellow at UMass Boston's McCormack Institute of Public Affairs. "Her biggest problem is winning the primary."

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The main office of McGovern's campaign is a classic underdog's bunker. Four aides are crammed into a cluttered space, toiling beneath reminders of the challenge before them. On one wall hangs a chart labeled HARSHBARGER: RHETORIC VS. RECORD. On another, the "Sun Tzu thought of the day": "He who is patient and lies in wait will be victorious over he who is not."

McGovern certainly felt like an underdog three decades ago, as a rare female law student at Suffolk University (which she also attended as an undergraduate), and in her years as a public defender in Lawrence.

But for most of her 12 years in the state senate, she was one of the legislature's top power brokers. Named chairman of the Ways and Means Committee by then-Senate president Billy Bulger in 1985, she remains one of the most powerful women Beacon Hill has ever seen.

It was in that post that McGovern built her solid record as a policy junkie with a knack for hammering out tough compromises. Her pragmatism often frustrated progressives, however, particularly when it came to paring the state's human-services budget in the late 1980's, and she was often assailed for carrying Bulger's water.

As a Senator, McGovern wrangled with crushingly complex policy issues. In 1988, she authored a sweeping bill that guaranteed health insurance for every resident of the state (opponents stalled funding before ultimately repealing the law). And when recession struck the state in the late 1980s, McGovern was a chief fiscal surgeon. She was the one who identified the five "budget busters" that were bleeding the state's finances to death, who refused to accept Governor Michael Dukakis's unbalanced budget, and who was then a main architect of painful spending cuts and tax hikes.

McGovern left the Senate in 1992. And after five years with the Boston law firm of Goulston and Storrs, she's returned with a softer image. Now, with her campaign mantra of child care, health care, and education, McGovern's image is more that of a doting nanny, not a budget-crafting power broker.

McGovern, who is unmarried herself, offers several child care remedies for "stressed-out" parents: keeping schools open later to keep latchkey kids occupied, creating all-day kindergartens, and offering tax incentives for daycare programs in the workplace.

For an education system gripped by what she calls "confusion and chaos," McGovern wants a close review of the state's massive spending on school reform. She stresses the importance of adult job training. And she says recent quarreling within the state Board of Education, and last week's surprise resignation of education commissioner Robert Antonucci, expose Cellucci's weak leadership.

Then there's her updated approach to health care, which might have been scripted by Bill Clinton himself. Like the president, McGovern still believes in the principle of universal coverage, but has abandoned the idea that one sweeping bill can deliver it. "I don't think the times would allow for that," she says. She favors an "incremental, calm, moderate" approach instead. And she worries about HMOs, where "bureaucrats and technocrats are deciding what kind of health care we're going to get."

McGovern is still short on details -- but so are most of the candidates. Yet without pandering, she's clearly hit upon themes that promise success not just with Democrats, but also among the suburban independents who swing statewide races.

Which is what makes her such a strong candidate. Indeed, one of the best arguments on behalf of Pat McGovern comes from the Cellucci camp, where McGovern is said to be feared more than any other Democratic opponent.

That's because in today's supermarket of American politics, women fly off the shelves. The 1998 election comes at a time of economic comfort and social distress. During a recession, voters may want a mean old man to pinch their pennies. But with social programs inching back into vogue, a caring woman is just the tonic.

Paul Cellucci knows this -- look at his recent political posturing. In his January State of the State address, he fixated on education, proposing to hire 40,000 new teachers. His budget plan includes $40 million for daycare. And last week, in perhaps the clearest indication yet of whom he's trying to impress, Cellucci named a woman, Jane Swift, to be his running mate.

"I think that was a great compliment," McGovern says with a wry grin. "I'm happy. I want my campaign to drive these issues."

If the election does come down to issues like child care and education, McGovern will have an edge. This is political turf on which women simply have more credibility.

"The fact is that everyone's going to agree on what the issues are this year," says Democratic consultant Mary Anne Marsh. "And if that's what people are going to base their votes on, then Democrats in general, and Democratic women specifically, will have the advantage." But it's an advantage Democrats may lose if they face Cellucci (or his primary opponent, state treasurer Joe Malone) with the starchy and prosecutorial Harshbarger, who has yet to show any chemistry with the electorate.

To be sure, McGovern's candidacy has baggage of its own. Republicans will portray her as a political Lazarus rising from the recessionary late 1980s to bury the business community with regulations and taxes (the hated "service tax" in particular). They will lampoon her as a pawn of Billy Bulger.

More troublesome, however, may be what she's done since leaving the Senate. McGovern hasn't shamelessly exploited her State House connections like some former colleagues, but as the Globe's Brian Mooney pointed out Wednesday, she did earn a healthy $51,000 lobbying in 1995-1996 for clients such as Massachusetts General Hospital, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, and the textile manufacturer Malden Mills. Mooney also notes that, as a board member of the utility giant Massachusetts Electric in 1996 (she has since resigned), McGovern approved a sweeping utility deregulation plan the industry had worked out with Scott Harshbarger's office. As a candidate, however, she has used that deal to pummel Harshbarger, saying he sold consumers short. Nothing sinister here, but McGovern will have to answer the question Mooney posed: Which side was she on?

And, like Harshbarger, McGovern faces bitterness within her own party. She has sought to cast herself as something of a feminist heroine, challenging the glass ceiling of state politics. But some women still resent her refusal as a senator to join the Women's Legislative Caucus, and remember her reluctance to play gender politics. "I never defined myself as a `woman senator,'" she told the Globe in 1993. "I was a senator who was a woman. There's a real difference." To some critics, for McGovern to now ask women to cast gender-based votes reeks of insincerity.

A more substantive problem is McGovern's support for a $1.2-billion-per-year tax cut, which she explains by saying she feels bound by a "promise" -- some on Beacon Hill dispute the characterization -- that a 1989 income tax increase would be temporary.

Though she can't be faulted for wanting to keep her word, McGovern's tax cut is at odds with her ideas for expanding social programs. Clearly recognizing that she can't have it both ways, McGovern has lately been playing down the proposal. "It's almost a conditional tax cut," she says, a plan that phases in a rollback over five years -- and then only if unemployment rates don't rise. "This repeal is the most conservative one on the table. It doesn't happen unless the economy is doing very well."

That's somewhat comforting. And the sad truth is that the '98 campaign has turned into such a tax-cut auction -- Harshbarger, for instance, supports a whopping $1.5 billion cut -- that McGovern's plan now looks like the least of several evils.

McGovern herself, however, is more than a lesser evil. She isn't a perfect candidate, but she is a highly qualified, sensible, and electable one. One hopes she can sustain her momentum, for she promises to energize the Democratic campaign -- a campaign that risks going by default to the well-financed Harshbarger. A spirited debate is exactly what Massachusetts Democrats need in 1998, and it would be a shame -- for both McGovern and for the party -- if she never gets the chance she deserves.

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