Show me the money

A millionaire mogul tries his hand at political hardball

Talking Politics by Michael Crowley

Of the dozen or so probable contenders for the prized congressional seat of retiring US representative Joe Kennedy (D-Brighton), he is perhaps the unlikeliest. He has never run for political office. His name recognition stands at 1 percent. He is such an unknown that he recently suffered the indignity of being suspected as a fraudulent "straw candidate" -- a stooge pushed into the race by one candidate to draw votes from another.

"A straw [candidate] false alarm went off in the Eighth Congressional District race," reported Boston Herald columnist Wayne Woodlief last week. "Michael Goldman, Marjorie Clapprood's consultant, said: 'We started getting phone calls from Michael Capuano's campaign that somebody was doing a poll for some obscure Italian, Gabadino, or Gabadelli or something like that. And they were accusing Marjorie of putting in a straw against Mike.' "

That was no straw -- it was Chris Gabrieli, a venture capitalist and Democratic activist from Beacon Hill. And as Woodlief himself noted, Gabrieli's presence in the race is both legitimate and significant. With a personal fortune of several million dollars, he can buy instant name recognition. He's had a hand in a number of heavyweight political and policy operations. And -- noteworthy in a district that is home to 72,225 Italian-Americans (well over 10 percent of the district's total population) -- his name ends with a vowel.

But though Gabrieli's name routinely pops up on lists of contenders in the Eighth Congressional District -- which encompasses most of Boston and nearby towns such as Somerville, Cambridge, Watertown, and Chelsea -- even many of Boston's hardest-core political insiders know little or nothing about this 38-year-old resident of Beacon Hill's tony Louisburg Square. So, even as another little-known candidate (former US ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith) backed away from the race this week, the Phoenix checked in with Gabrieli to see, as they say, if this guy is for real.

He is.

"I have filed with the [Federal Election Commission] and I'm certainly doing everything I can to be able to pull off this race," says Gabrieli from his temporary campaign headquarters in Kendall Square. He's not kidding, either: Gabrieli has snatched up some of the best campaign operatives in town, including veteran Democratic pollster Tubby Harrison, who takes the public's temperature for Boston mayor Tom Menino, and the political advertising powerhouse of Squier Knapp Ochs Communications, which created most of the advertising for the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign. Last week, he also submitted 6500 signatures to the state, more than tripling the number needed to make the September Democratic primary ballot. Look for a public campaign kickoff in the next couple of weeks.

Relaxed and jocular in a brief interview, Gabrieli showed off a polished résumé that deliberately establishes his credentials as a Clinton-style "New Democrat": a moderate on issues such as taxes, welfare, and crime who presumably rejects knee-jerk fealty to party constituencies such as unions, he stands apart from an ideologically homogenous field of traditional working-class liberals more inclined to play pork-barrel politics and cater to labor. That lineup includes former Boston mayor Ray Flynn, former state representatives Clapprood and Susan Tracy, Somerville mayor Capuano, and former state senator George Bachrach.

A Buffalo native and Harvard grad who moved to Boston in 1990, Gabrieli cut short a stint at Columbia Medical School to found a health-care software company, which he sold for a bundle a few years ago. Since 1986 he's been a partner at Wellesley-based Bessemer Venture Partners, where he earned millions helping others start high-tech and biotech firms. (In the boardroom that's called making a killing -- but in Gabrieli's shrewd candidatespeak, it's "helping build companies and create jobs.")

Gabrieli waded into politics in the early 1990s. In his one tour of campaign duty to date, he was a fundraiser and occasional adviser to Mark Roosevelt in his failed 1994 gubernatorial bid. More revealing is Gabrieli's involvement in several moderate political and policy outfits. He is a former board member of the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist "New Democrat" organization once chaired by Bill Clinton, and was chairman of the New Democrat Network, which raises money for party moderates around the country -- an experience that helped Gabrieli get to know Democratic congressional leaders in Washington.

Gabrieli is also on the board of a Boston-based national group, the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, that boasts egghead luminaries like competition guru Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School and Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, whose research on how to bring work and wealth back to blighted urban centers is a guiding principle for organization. Apparently conscious of his identity as an elite business mogul, Gabrieli says: "As someone who's been involved in building jobs and wealth not in the inner city, that's something that's very interesting to me."

Perhaps most significant, since the fall of 1996 Gabrieli has served as chairman of the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth -- better known as MassINC -- a proudly wonky nonpartisan think tank that has produced some excellent policy analysis and publishes the quarterly journal CommonWealth. (Gabrieli, forced by his candidacy to resign from MassINC, has been replaced as chairman by former Weld cabinet member Gloria Larson.)

Gabrieli was primarily a sugar daddy for MassINC, helping to keep the nonprofit group afloat with big money. But he did have a real role in the chin-stroking department, says MassINC executive director Tripp Jones, a friend of Gabrieli's dating back to the Roosevelt campaign.

"He has without question played a very, very important role, not just as a financial supporter but also in the substance of what we're doing," Jones says. "What really fires him up is the work that's done around the table to hammer out the substance."

Indeed, while most of the other candidates in this race will flog bread-and-butter issues and pledge to work the system to get the Eighth District's fair share from Washington, Gabrieli apparently intends to pursue a more sophisticated candidacy of Big Ideas. He says his campaign will be guided by three core MassINC issues: safe neighborhoods, economic growth, and "lifelong learning" through adult education and worker training.

"I think the thing that personally connects all the things I've done is that I do believe in the power of innovative ideas to change things," he says. "I've seen that in the private sector . . . and in the political sphere. Powerful new ideas, like some things in particular that Clinton and Gore have done, can go a long way."

This is a point echoed by Jones. "He'll add a lot to the caliber of the debate," he says.

Gabrieli has a well-honed shtick for an electoral novice. But can innovative, smart-guy politics really fly with the Eighth District's core of blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth voters? Critics will say he's just another rich dilettante who bought his way into the inner circles of politics, usually serving as a money man first and a thinker second -- and that he now wants to buy himself a congressional seat. (He'll likely share that criticism, perhaps to diluting effect, with the wealthy Cambridge environmentalist and businessman John O'Connor). And surely his opponents will find black marks on his past business record. As one close Democratic observer of this race puts it: "I have yet to meet a businessman who somewhere along the way didn't screw working people."

What's more, can a political neophyte survive a free-for-all with 10 rivals -- including the iconic Flynn, the manic Clapprood, and the tenacious Capuano -- who hold advanced degrees in Boston-area political hardball? Gabrieli barely showed up in a Sunday Boston Globe/WBZ TV poll of the Eighth District field, and though he can use his own money to buy endless hours of radio and TV advertising, he has no practice on the stump and no natural political base.

Or does he? In a town with a rich history of ethnic politics, most political analysts assume that an Italian last name is worth a few percentage points on Election Day -- hence the suspected attempt to split Capuano's base. And in an 11-candidate race that could conceivably be won with just 20 percent of the vote, even a few points count for a lot. How ironic that would be: a flashy, high-minded Beacon Hill millionaire carried to victory by that oldest of voting rationales -- pure ethnicity.

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