Unfounded mandate

Paul Cellucci says he's on a mission -- but to do what? Plus, the Harshbarger autopsy continues, and a sinister GOP operative hits the skids.

by Michael Crowley

If you can believe it, Paul Cellucci is claiming a mandate. The no-longer-acting governor is arguing that his margin of victory on Election Day, remarkable mainly for its embarrassing slimness, is in fact a special declaration of faith in his abilities by the people of Massachusetts.

"I got a bigger percentage win than Bill Weld and I got in 1990," Cellucci said to the Boston Globe of his 51 percent to 47 percent victory -- a difference of 64,000 votes. "We had a mandate then and I believe I have a mandate now."

With this heady sense of mission, Cellucci couldn't wait to start talking about his agenda. Last week he laid out early priorities for his first full term, promising to recruit better teachers, lower taxes, bring back the death penalty, and win public funding for a new Patriots football stadium. Now he's talking grandly about the "new energy" and "new ideas" that will be drummed up by a vaunted "transition team."

But let's play find-the-mandate for a minute. Cellucci campaigned on a pledge not to raise taxes, but he didn't often mention the specifics of his proposal to cut the income-tax rate from 5.95 percent to 5 percent -- a plan that couldn't win enough signatures when anti-tax activists tried to make it a ballot question earlier this year. He did growl about the death penalty a few times, but no one seriously believes that's what people were voting for; exit polls showed that only 5 percent of voters identified "crime and drugs" as the issue that mattered most to them. And if the subject of the Patriots was raised at all in the campaign, it was only in the form of some clichéd touchdown-pass metaphor. This is hardly an agenda the people are clamoring for.

Cellucci is more in tune with the electorate when he talks about education, which routinely registers in polls as a top public priority. Even here, however, Cellucci's early signals bear faint resemblance to his campaign platform. As a candidate, Cellucci made competency testing for teachers a central element of his platform, even running ads accusing Harshbarger of opposing teacher testing (the campaign's most flagrant act of dishonesty).

Cellucci repeatedly hammered at teacher incompetence to establish his tough-on-education credentials. Yet in an interview with the Globe last week, Cellucci was just a sweet and misunderstood teddy bear. "I think I got a bad rap as a teacher-basher," he said. "I never bashed a teacher. I think teaching is the most important job in our society." Now Cellucci is shifting his focus from tough testing standards to recruiting and training talented new teachers.

In fact, there's no reason why Cellucci and other leaders shouldn't have condemned the horrifying 59 percent failure rate of teachers who took the state's first competency tests last spring. But the sudden shift in Cellucci's tone drew chuckles on Beacon Hill. "Paul Cellucci's reelection campaign began Wednesday morning," says one Democratic aide. Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) president Stephen Gorrie also expressed some wonderment at the peace offering. "We here at the MTA and our members had felt all along that he deserved the moniker of bashing," Gorrie says. "I would be very surprised if a vast majority of our members did not agree that it was deserved."

On other educational issues, Cellucci's credibility is similarly shaky. He has often talked of hiring new teachers to help reduce class sizes. But shrinking classes will require expensive school construction and repairs. How will Cellucci reconcile this with his insistence on "fiscal discipline"? And even these plans amount to little more than tinkering around the edges of the state's massive 1993 education-reform law.

The more serious problem is that Cellucci doesn't really have any ideas. So now he is assembling a "transition team" that will gather experts to brainstorm up a fuller agenda. The team will soon be stocked with private-sector appointees, forming four working groups that will draw up policy prescriptions on the economy, education, health care, and quality of life; results are expected by Christmas. If they turn out to be more than a PR stunt, these groups could provide the basis for a serious and useful Cellucci agenda, as opposed to the piecemeal and politically expedient proposals he offers now. But it is a curious approach: first the mandate, then the ideas. Couldn't he have ginned up an agenda before Election Day?

Senate president Tom Birmingham chuckles at the notion of a mandate. "On its face it's a preposterous claim," he says. "What would he call a squeaker?" Birmingham makes it clear that he and House Speaker Tom Finneran aren't about to roll over for the new Cellucci regime, and that is the most relevant fact about today's Beacon Hill dynamic. Neither Finneran nor Birmingham has expressed much enthusiasm for any of Cellucci's big-ticket priorities besides education. Both are skeptical of an income-tax cut -- although Birmingham says he might be open to increasing personal exemptions instead of cutting rates. Finneran is adamantly opposed to public stadium funding and the death penalty.

Despite continued grumbling about his conservatism, Finneran's famously tight control of the House appears to be as strong as ever. One House member describes a challenge to Finneran's Speakership as "inconceivable." In all likelihood, Finneran will continue to be the dominant force in the State House, outdoing Cellucci by virtue of his legislative clout and his greater skill at making his case to the media. (We'll get a clearer sense of Finneran's priorities when he makes his annual session-opening address to the legislature in January.)

Finneran is no enemy of Cellucci. Indeed, many Democrats would argue that the Speaker has more in common with the governor than with most members of his own party. But Finneran also cherishes his power. And he's never needed a mandate to wield it.

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The corpse of the Harshbarger campaign has already been sliced open and thoroughly examined a few times over, but there remain a few organs to be scooped out and scrutinized.

The first autopsies have left political insiders divided over whom to blame for Harshbarger's defeat. Some fault Harshbarger's handlers and staff for general lack of vision and ineptitude. Others conclude that Harshbarger is a man far better equipped to hold office than to run for it. And to some, of course, casting blame is unfair: unseating an incumbent in good economic times, they feel, is simply a Herculean task.

One point that's been lost in the post-election shuffle is the failure of Harshbarger's campaign to work with the Democratic state committee, which runs a well-honed and essential voter-turnout machine. Several Democratic insiders have suggested that the Harshbarger campaign's failure to exploit the state committee's phone-bank and voter-identification operations could have cost him crucial votes. One campaign source singled out Harshbarger field director Kim Gilman, the campaign's liaison to the state committee, as having alienated state party officials. Gilman, this source says, "was not very smooth, and did not cover up her disdain for them and her allegiance to Scott."

The real cause of death is probably a combination of factors. Yet it's hard not to think that Harshbarger's fundamental inarticulateness may have been an insurmountable handicap. Even when he had good points to make, his harried staccato delivery often rendered them unintelligible. Sadly, but also tellingly, Harshbarger's concession speech last Tuesday night was probably his most articulate moment of the entire campaign.

It's been said that Scott Harshbarger ran his gubernatorial campaign much the way Michael Dukakis ran his 1988 presidential campaign. Both men set out hoping (naively, in retrospect) to keep things positive, and then failed to strike back effectively against unfair charges from the other side. National Democrats learned their lesson and responded in 1992 with Bill Clinton, whose campaign machine was a case study in ruthless efficiency. The infamous Stephanopoulos-Carville "war room" was a direct reaction to Dukakis's passivity.

Likewise, Massachusetts Democrats would do well to learn from the failures of the Harshbarger campaign. In all likelihood, the 2002 governor's race will involve a similar scenario: a Democratic middleweight trying to knock off a Republican incumbent. Expect that Democrat to hit hard and often from the beginning of the campaign.

Democratic consultant Mary Anne Marsh -- who sums up Harshbarger's loss by saying he was short on "money, message, and machinery" -- argues that the key for Democrats is to quickly recruit their bestcandidate and avoid some of the messy intraparty divisions that dragged Harshbarger down. Like others, Marsh sees the popular US Representative Marty Meehan (D-Lowell) as a prime candidate.

But as Democrats search for a savior, they might reflect on their statewide strategy. The party's last two gubernatorial candidates have run toward the center -- Scott Harshbarger, with his big tax cut and avoidance of liberal rhetoric, and 1994 nominee Mark Roosevelt, with his pro-death-penalty stance and calls for strict welfare reform. Neither campaign generated much enthusiasm, possibly because activist Democrats are left uninspired by a moderate and independents have little reason to vote out an incumbent if his challenger looks like his clone.

Tepid Democratic centrism might be tolerable if it kept the party in power. But it's been 12 years since Democrats controlled the governor's office. Even as both national parties rush to the center, perhaps it's time for Massachusetts Democrats to revisit the spirit -- if not all the old policies -- of the crusading left.

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Not only were the 1998 elections dismal for the national Republican Party -- Godspeed, citizen Gingrich! -- but they were a big blow for nefarious GOP operative and Massachusetts resident Arthur Finkelstein.

Democrats once quivered at the mention of Finkelstein, whose brutal campaign tactics and signature strategy of branding opponents as "liberal" were once considered key elements in the rise and survival of such conservative titans as North Carolina senator Jesse Helms and New York senator Alfonse D'Amato.

But Finkelstein's slash-and-burn approach seems to have lost its potency. Two of his biggest Senate clients -- D'Amato and North Carolina senator Lauch Faircloth -- were knocked off last week, continuing a miserable record that dates back to 1996, when five of Finkelstein's six Senate candidates were defeated. And in Massachusetts this fall, Finkelstein's "he's-a-liberal" attacks got state treasurer Joe Malone nowhere in his primary challenge against Paul Cellucci. (Finkelstein's professional downfall comes on the heels of personal controversy: he was outed in '96 by Boston magazine, which pointed out the irony of a gay man's helping to elect some of the most anti-gay members of Congress.)

Michael Goldman, a local Democratic consultant who is an ideological world apart from Finkelstein, cautions against kicking a man while he's down. "Consultants get too much credit and too much blame," says Goldman, no stranger to the ups and downs of the business. "Sometimes you're selling a product that people just don't want to buy that season."

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