Winners and losers

Could Petruccelli's win bring Menino even more allies? Plus, ballot questions test progressives' pocketbooks; Democrats crack down on turncoats; and Gore wins a straw poll, but what does it all mean?

Political Notes by Ben Geman

It may be payback time in East Boston. After one of Eastie's biggest political brawls in years, Mayor Thomas Menino walked away with a victory on May 11 when his former aide Anthony Petruccelli won the Democratic primary vote to replace departed state representative Emanuel "Gus" Serra.

As the Democratic winner, Petruccelli is a lock in June's final election against Republican Thomas McCarthy, so the victory gives Menino a new buddy in the State House. But beyond that, it could have fallout in this year's city-council races.

Why? Because while Menino backed the victorious Petruccelli, Menino's biggest antagonist on the council -- at-large councilor Peggy Davis-Mullen -- backed Petruccelli's opponent, Richard Lynds.

Now, with Davis-Mullen up for re-election in the fall -- and hoping for the kind of strong turnout that might give her a base to run for mayor -- Petruccelli's rise gives the soon-to-be state rep and his mentor a chance to strike back.

They even have a perfect vehicle: Greg Timilty, who's running for one of the council's four at-large seats. Timilty, scion of a Boston political dynasty, has close ties to Menino and was a visible presence for Petruccelli at the polls last week. He and Petruccelli are buddies who played football together at BC High. With that friendship, it's not hard to imagine Petruccelli getting out the Eastie vote for Greg Timilty this fall.

John Nucci, a former city councilor who lives in East Boston, thinks the Eastie vote might even swing the election. "Timilty will enjoy huge support from the Petruccelli camp in East Boston," says Nucci. "He gets a whole bunch of votes as a result of this representative race. If an at-large candidate can hold his or her own across the city, maximize his or her base, and then steal a whole bunch of votes in East Boston, it could make the difference between winning and losing."

Petruccelli isn't so ready to admit he'll boost Timilty or seek vengeance against Davis-Mullen, but neither does he quite rule out blocking for his old football buddy. "I don't see myself in a position to help anyone in any races," he says, adding that "I'm in the business of making friends. I'm not out to make any enemies." However, he does admit he was "turned off" by the fact that two at-large councilors -- Davis-Mullen and Mickey Roache -- backed his opponent.

What's more, after enjoying the mayor's support in the fight against Lynds, it seems unlikely that Petruccelli would suddenly forget his friends.

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As the summer deadline for submitting questions for the 2000 ballot draws closer, a group of health-care advocates is preparing to wage an ambitious campaign to pass an initiative mandating universal health coverage in Massachusetts -- and likely also banning for-profit conversions of hospitals and HMOs.

Behind the proposal is the Ad-Hoc Committee to Defend Health Care, a group of doctors and activists pushing for universal coverage in Massachusetts, and liberal activists Jim Braude and John O'Connor, whose ubiquity around progressive causes can't be untethered from his political ambition (see "And in This Corner . . . ").

According to the committee, about 755,000 people are without health insurance in Massachusetts -- and HMOs are notoriously loath to provide costly treatments even for those with coverage, adds committee co-founder David Himmelstein. "The crisis of the uninsured continues," says Himmelstein, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. "If anything, it is growing. And even many with insurance find that their coverage is utterly inadequate. We are faced with the crisis of a system that's concerned more with money and business than with patients."

It's hard to fault the sentiment of the group, which also includes Dr. Bernard Lown of the Harvard School of Public Health, the founder of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. But bringing universal health care to the ballot box is almost certain to trigger a nasty fight, with a lot of cash flying around. The stakes are staggeringly high, and the insurance industry and the hospitals and the HMOs will go to the wall to fight anything they see as threatening -- just remember the all-out war against President Clinton's health-care proposal a few years back, which became a domestic waterloo for the president.

Meanwhile, another all-out fight is shaping up over another 2000 ballot question. The anti-tax crusaders at Citizens for Limited Taxation and Government are readying a drive to slice that ".95" off the state's 5.95 percent income tax, reducing it to a flat five percent. The plan, backed by Governor Cellucci, will face opposition from the Tax Equity Alliance for Massachusetts, Senate president Tom Birmingham and others who might disagree with the idea that saving one percent of income is worth cutting more than a billion dollars in state revenues. (Disclosure: I worked at TEAM in 1998.)

Now comes an interesting question: what happens at the polls when two big-ticket progressive battles are fought at the same time?

There are two ways of looking at this. One is that it creates synergy for progressives. After all, voters who support universal health care are unlikely to support the tax rollback, and two issues that progressives care about will attract more energy than one.

The other perspective is more pessimistic, and perhaps a bit more realistic. You need to raise money to wage a campaign, especially with major industries lined up against you. And competition for progressive dollars could hinder one or both campaigns. Although Himmelstein says the health-care ballot drive will be a "grassroots" effort to harness public anger at the current system, the reality is that translating public anger into voter turnout takes PR, and probably lots of it. The cost of fighting the tax rollback could easily reach into the millions -- and that means approaching big-money liberals and other progressive sympathizers who may also be hit up by health-care advocates. "It's easy to imagine we will be going after some of the same people," says one insider.

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One of the few flickers of media interest during the state Democratic "issues convention" in Springfield last weekend came after the state party's presidential straw poll, in which party delegates were asked to choose between Al Gore and Bill Bradley in a hypothetical primary race.

So premature as to be almost meaningless, the poll nonetheless showed up in newspapers and TV reports both inside Massachusetts and out. New York Times New England bureau chief Carey Goldberg wrote about it, and even the Chicago Tribune picked up the story. According to the numbers, Gore clobbered Bradley, with 1130 delegate votes to Bradley's 385.

It's no surprise that Gore won -- he has far more firepower than Bradley, even if he's stumbled in recent weeks. The results, though, weren't nearly as interesting as the post-game analysis.

To one observer, the meaning of the results was manifest -- a net plus for Gore after several weeks of bad press. "It's a significant win," said Democratic consultant Mary Anne Marsh, who's unaffiliated in the race, as she left the civic center late Saturday afternoon. Marsh points out that delegates to the convention were selected before the straw poll was planned, so both campaigns "had to play the cards they were dealt." (In many straw polls and caucuses, candidates try to pack the house with their delegates.) And if a random selection of party delegates picks Gore that decisively, it's bad news for Bradley.

"If there's any question at all about Gore's strength at the grassroots level, they've been answered resoundingly," boasted one Gore backer on the Democratic national and state committees after the results were in.

Not so, say members of Bradley's Massachusetts team. Just before the convention, political consultant and new Bradley strategist Michael Goldman had tried to lower expectations by preposterously declaring that a five percent showing would satisfy the team. Compared to that, of course, a three-to-one drubbing looks good, especially in light of the Gore campaign's visibility at the convention.

Standing in the press room beneath the auditorium soon after the convention closed Saturday, Springfield state representative Paul Caron argued that the poll achieved at least one of its main goals. "I wanted to get some excitement into this, a lackluster, off-year convention," said Caron. "The way that presidential campaigns are run now, with the front-loaded primary schedule . . . this is a way to give delegates a voice in this process. If we wait for next March's primary we are an afterthought, inconsequential."

Then Caron, sporting one of the Bradley campaign's cute ANOTHER CELTIC FAN FOR BRADLEY buttons, explained that the results were only a "snapshot" and represented a solid showing for a candidate with a "ragtag" bunch of supporters who had begun organizing in Massachusetts only recently.

"This is the second day of spring training," said Goldman, who boasted that the poll was so unimportant he didn't even bother attending the convention. "We are playing the world champions and we are a new team in the league. Beating us three-to-one ain't so bad when we don't even have a pitching staff yet."

Regardless of whom the poll helped, it accomplished its mission. It moved the focus of the "issues convention" away from actual issues and toward presidential politics, where there's little room for that pesky policy stuff anyway.

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Put aside the buzz created by the straw poll, and the Springfield convention was more or less as advertised: an off-election-year snooze. That didn't prevent a bit of fun, though. For instance, delegates metaphorically gave the finger to former East Boston state representative Emanuel Serra, state senator James Jajuga (D-Methuen), and other Democrats who crossed the line and backed Governor Paul Cellucci in last year's campaign against Democratic nominee Scott Harshbarger.

On Saturday, convention delegates voted to amend the party's charter to bar Democratic candidates from getting any resources from the state party if they back non-Democrats in other races. ("What resources?" was one insider's reaction, but the party does help with phone banking, volunteers, and other get-out-the-vote efforts.) State party chair Joan Menard claims the crackdown was a long time coming; after all, Democrats have long backed Republicans for various offices. "People have been angry for years," she says. "They started to organize their thoughts into actions to say we don't want this to happen anymore."

Maybe, but no doubt it was last year's unexpectedly close governor's race that spurred party regulars to action. The amendment was, says South End Democratic activist Mark Merante, "a `screw you' to the Democrats for Cellucci."

Ben Geman can be reached at bgeman[a]phx.com.