Hidden treasure

Republican Bob Maginn could be a winning candidate for treasurer, if only he were willing to part with more of his money. Plus, the governor's race gets ugly.

by Michael Crowley

We've all had plenty of laughs over millionaire candidates who wasted way too much of their money for far too few votes; failed congressional candidate Chris Gabrieli ($4 million, 5700 votes) comes to mind here. But how often does a mogul go down to defeat because he won't spend freely enough?

That's the scenario Massachusetts Republicans are now contemplating. Their nominee for treasurer, Robert Maginn, looks bound to blow his crucial mission of holding on to one of the two statewide offices now in GOP hands.

Maginn, 41, a bookish management-consulting expert and long-time GOP donor, seemingly has everything you'd need to run for the job. He has a gilded résumé: Harvard MBA, Harvard master's degree in government, senior partner at Bain & Co. He has a path cleared for him: the office has been held successfully for eight years by the outgoing Republican incumbent, Joe Malone, who preaches the same kind of private-sector pragmatism that defines Maginn. And he has money: Maginn's adventures in the business world have left him with a bank account in the neighborhood of $5 million to $10 million dollars.

But with less than two weeks to go until Election Day, it is Maginn's opponent, former Democratic state senator Shannon O'Brien, who has the commanding lead. A Boston Herald/WCVB poll this week shows O'Brien blowing away Maginn by 48 percent to 17 percent. The Boston Globe also shows her far ahead, 44 percent to 29 percent.

There's still ample time for Maginn to make a comeback. Few voters are paying much attention to the race, and a lot of votes could be swayed through a television advertising battle over the next two weeks. But some Republicans are frustrated that such an apparently promising candidate has turned out to be such a dud. And their beef is, quite simply, that Bob Maginn has been a tightwad.

"Bob Maginn was the candidate who was supposed to spend whatever it took to keep this office in GOP hands where it belongs," says Republican political consultant Kevin Sowyrda. "And yet we're getting wiped out because Maginn throws coins around like they're manhole covers."

O'Brien, who has been doggedly building up her war chest since losing a 1994 challenge to Malone, has raised $1 million and just threw about $700,000 of it into TV ads that started airing this week. Maginn has raised about half that amount, including $350,000 of his own money. He promises to remain "competitive" with O'Brien and says he'll end up pulling about $500,000 from his wallet. But some Republicans wonder if it's not too little, too late.

"The only way we're gonna win is if he writes that check," says one GOP insider. "If he wants to get his message out, he's got to do it on TV." But this observer concedes that with Election Day so near, the power of Maginn's bank account has been neutralized. "This guy is immensely qualified, but he had to start his advertising a long time ago," Sowyrda adds. "What few ads they've come up with" -- run solely on New England Cable News until this week -- "are the most horrid, made-in-your-basement ads I've ever seen."

Losing the treasurer's office would be a bitter defeat for Republicans. It's a powerful job whose occupant manages the state's $20 billion in pension funds and its $3.2 billion lottery -- making the treasurer part superinvestor, part Lord of the Scratch Tickets. And for an outnumbered and struggling Massachusetts GOP, holding a key state office is crucial to party morale and image.

Maginn's woes are wonderful news for O'Brien, 39, the tenacious daughter of a prominent Democratic family (her father has been a member of the governor's council for 20 years) who served as a state rep and senator from Easthampton for six years before getting blown away by Malone in the 1994 treasurer's race. Now she's back with a more family-friendly message that mixes finance with talk of better schools and day care. That message may be bolstered by the fact that O'Brien is a woman, but that's not necessarily an advantage: Massachusetts has elected only one woman to statewide office, and of four Democratic women who sought state offices this year, O'Brien is the only one to survive the primaries.

Whereas most pols pretend to find other things to do between elections, O'Brien is quite explicit that she never stopped running. "I would have to be absolutely nuts to spend the last four years of my life working so hard to get elected if I didn't think this was important," she says.

With that sense of commitment, however, comes a less appealing sense of entitlement. "I don't think that he's earned the right to be the state treasurer," she says of Maginn. But if there is such a thing as a "right" to any state office, Maginn actually makes a decent case that it belongs to him. "I'm the de facto incumbent," he argues, calling himself the natural successor to Joe Malone.

Malone took office in 1990, bringing an ethic of private-sector efficiency to an office that had become the patronage-larded fiefdom of eternal incumbent Robert Crane -- a living symbol of the worst excesses of the Democratic State House establishment. Malone has been widely praised for trimming payrolls and budgets and for overseeing strong pension-fund growth. O'Brien, Maginn warns, would be a return to the bad old days. "If she gets into office, we're back to when Crane was the treasurer," says Maginn campaign manager Anne Bresnahan. Maginn says O'Brien is already promising jobs to her State House cronies, and -- perhaps placing a light finger on the gender button -- he calls her "naive" about financial matters. At a nasty Boston Herald debate on Tuesday, Maginn told O'Brien: "The fact of the matter is, you're not qualified to do the job."

O'Brien strikes back in kind. She describes Maginn as a secretive tycoon who won't disclose his clients or his tax returns; a profit-crazed baron who would recklessly risk the state's pension funds; a candidate running on "a rich man's whim." Her campaign manager, Michael Travaglini, derisively cracks that "no one pays attention to this guy." And where Maginn holds O'Brien's State House experience against her, she turns the argument around, saying that he'd be clueless and ineffective on Beacon Hill. "This guy has been insulting the legislature," O'Brien says. "He's not going to be working with them. I'm the only candidate who really has the ability to do it." Indeed, central to her platform is a pledge to work with the legislature to keep a check on the state's considerable debts.

Get past the wisecracks and personal butt-kicks, however, and Maginn and O'Brien don't differ all that much on how the treasurer's office should be run. Keenly aware of poll data, both candidates have strained to link the office to education, and they have offered competing plans to expand the treasury's "U Plan" tuition savings accounts. (Maginn's even proposed a scratch ticket whose grand prize would be a free college education.) Neither candidate envisions serious changes at the state lottery: Maginn wants to print odds of winning on scratch tickets, and O'Brien wants to boost revenues with a larger advertising budget.

Most significant, perhaps, are the candidates' investment philosophies. O'Brien warns that Maginn's private-sector strategies would threaten the state's pension funds, which lost more than $2 billion in this summer's stock-market turmoil, and that she'd invest more conservatively. Maginn charges that O'Brien knows nothing about investing.

These dry platforms aren't likely to grab the voters, so the race will probably come down to identity. As a veteran Democrat with name recognition, O'Brien figures to win by default. But if there's still time for Maginn to get across the message that this important money-managing job demands a business-savvy Republican, he might have a shot.

Asked about complaints that he's been too frugal, Maginn offers no apologies. "One of the things [O'Brien] tried to do right from the very beginning was to characterize me as a checkbook candidate," he says. "I said from the outset, I am not going to try to buy the election."

Is Bob Maginn being noble or just a tightwad? We'll probably never find out. But if he winds up losing badly because voters never got to know him, this may be that rare occasion when a candidate's restraint turns out to be unwise.

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What a lovely little governor's race we've got here in Massachusetts.

A spokesman for Acting Governor Paul Cellucci calls Attorney General Scott Harshbarger a "complete sleazebag." The Boston Herald reports that the state's witches are flooding Cellucci headquarters with angry phone calls. Harshbarger, once a paragon of positive campaigning, uses lame one-liners and the Twilight Zone theme to ridicule Cellucci's massive personal debt.

A race that once revolved around taxes, health care, and education has now devolved into little more than political pornography. But although the civics professors might not like it, the new tawdriness of the governor's race is good news for Scott Harshbarger. As a well-known incumbent, Paul Cellucci would have been the winner in a dull, low-profile race. Excitement and controversy are inherently good things for Scott Harshbarger's underdog challenge -- as evidenced by a Wednesday Herald/WCVB poll showing the race had closed to a statistical dead heat.

So are dumb Cellucci moves, like his campaign ad mocking Harshbarger for defending a group of Salem witches who were being harassed by religious zealots in 1992. During his first year in office, Cellucci must have held dozens of press conferences promoting his work protecting women from domestic violence. But apparently it's a different story when the women have spooky beliefs -- even if, like Wicca, those beliefs are protected under the law. Massachusetts Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance chairman Sean Cahill says that Cellucci's mockery of witches and of Harshbarger's ban on Christmas decorations in public areas of the attorney general's office displays a prejudicial (and potentially illegal) "Christianism." "This is the governor," Cahill says of the man who once enjoyed so gleaming a reputation for tolerance. "He's acting like a schoolyard bully."

Harshbarger, meanwhile, hasn't exactly exalted himself with jokes about Cellucci's $700,000 in personal debt, or with a Rod Serling-inspired ad campaign that cheekily refers to the state's debt ("the Paul Cellucci debt tax"). He'd do better to explain more forthrightly why Cellucci's debt matters. Still, the more one watches Cellucci's hostile and disingenuous responses to the debt question, the more evident it is that the Cellucci campaign's smugly dismissive attitude toward Scott Harshbarger is giving way to real alarm.

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