Brock and roll

Meet John Brockelman, 29-year-old bomb-thrower for the state Republicans. If you're asking what state Republicans,you've got a sense of what he's up against.

Politics by Ben Geman

Another day, another bomb: John Brockelman is on the phone in the Milk Street office of the Massachusetts Republican Party, wrapping up a press release with the party's chairman, State Representative Brian Cresta.

" `They have fallen down on the job,' " he says, helping script Cresta's comments on the state's all-Democratic congressional delegation, " `and do not deserve a pay raise.' And then we'll just have the bullet points. Okay . . . all right . . . I'll talk to you."

Brockelman hangs up. "I think we are going to whack the Democrats for the pay raise they voted for themselves," he explains. The broadside is, if anything, mild stuff from Brockelman. Since Governor Paul Cellucci installed the 29-year-old operative as the party's executive director earlier this year, Brockelman and Cresta have been on the attack, cranking out press release after press release from party headquarters and establishing, for the first time in years, something resembling a pulse coming from the state GOP.

It's not easy being executive director of a party that is entirely shut out of the state's congressional delegation, has no power in the state legislature, and, aside from Cellucci and Lieutenant Governor Jane Swift, doesn't have a single statewide officeholder. Brockelman's job is essentially to be Cellucci's hatchet man, ever-ready to whack the state's Democratic congressional delegation and legislature.

To Brockelman, these attacks on state and federal Democratic officeholders are more than mere mudslinging. Instead, he calls them a piece of a larger strategy to turn the Republican Party into a player in Massachusetts.

To Democrats, it's a royal pain in the ass. "I don't know what he is other than a paid assassin for the party," says Congressman Joe Moakley of South Boston. Brockelman's broadsides, he says, "get beyond the pale of politics."

"This kid," fumed Moakley to Boston Globe political columnist Brian Mooney, "doesn't know his ass from third base."

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Brockelman has a ready response to that crack: "The [congressional] delegation is upset that they have to defend their record," he says. "No one has pointed out for some time now that they have not been delivering for Massachusetts."

And Brockelman -- "Brock" to colleagues -- can stake a claim to knowing his ass from third base, or at least first base, the position he played on his college baseball team at Colby College, in rural Maine. It was in college, he says, that he first caught the politics bug. At Colby he co-founded the Republican club and wrote a paper on the New Deal titled "No Deal," in which he argued that Franklin Roosevelt's massive social spending to rescue Americans from the Depression was a flop.

"We often had spirited conversations," recalls Colby government professor Anthony Corrado, who had Brockelman as a student several times. Corrado, a Democrat, was an adviser to Dukakis's disastrous 1988 presidential campaign. Brockelman never hesitated to bring that up. "He was a very strong Republican even then," says Corrado.

After Colby, Brockelman managed Republican Thomas Mann's campaign for the Massachusetts Senate. Mann lost, but Brockelman was noticed by party officials and landed a job with the Weld administration, serving as assistant communications manager for Charles Baker, then Weld's secretary of health and human services. "He was just an enthusiastic kid, tenacious, never stopped," recalls Joe Landolfi, Brockelman's boss at the time, who is now with the Cellucci administration.

Brockelman went on to be an advance man for Weld, research director for Weld's 1996 Senate campaign, and assistant chief-of-staff under Weld and Cellucci. Finally, last year, he became the deputy campaign manager of Cellucci's fight against Democratic nominee Scott Harshbarger.

Brockelman in person is more jocular than mean-spirited, but he is the sort of operative for whom campaigns don't end, even when there's no opponent anymore. Here's a sample of what he has to say about Congressman John Tierney: "He is kind of a mystery. He really has no record. He has not taken a leadership role." On Congressman Jim McGovern: "He was [Massachusetts's] point man in highway funding, and we end up with a 41 percent cut. He is certainly not getting the job done."

And on and on. Brockelman is rarely, as they say, "off message." "You see our latest convert on the clout argument?" he asks in the hallway at party headquarters, before an interview has even begun.

The "clout argument" is one of Brockelman's hobbyhorses, and it's gotten attention well beyond the offices of the state GOP. It's the idea that the state's one-party House and Senate delegation is powerless in a Republican-controlled Washington. His "latest convert" is Globe columnist David Nyhan, who just published a column on the disparity between what Massachusetts taxpayers send to Washington and what the state gets back in federal aid. Nyhan cited a study by the Beacon Hill think tank MassINC.

That argument, however, also isn't a bad illustration of the criticism that Moakley and others have hurled at the young operative -- namely, that he sacrifices accuracy for theater. Both the Nyhan column and the report by MassINC are a little more complicated than Brockelman makes them out to be. The MassINC study does say that the state gets less in federal money than it sends to Washington in tax dollars, but the think tank places a lot of the blame on a flawed system of federal anti-poverty appropriations. Nyhan also points to other factors, including a drift in the nation's political center of gravity toward Southern and Western states.

Brockelman's take on Jim McGovern, the Worcester representative whom he accuses of presiding over a 41 percent cut in state highway funding, is similarly open to charges of oversimplification. "He's comparing apples plus apricots to oranges," says McGovern spokesperson Michael Mershon. "What they are basically doing is using an artificially inflated number from 1991 [when Massachusetts received a major Big Dig appropriation] and comparing that to 1998 as an excuse to blast the delegation."

To Brockelman, though, it's all part of "party-building" -- which, in practice, often means trying to tear down the opposition while building yourself up. "If you are a potentially good candidate out there and you see stories that this [Democratic] guy's record is not all it's cracked up to be . . . then that helps drive candidate recruitment," he says.

At a recent meeting at the party headquarters, Brockelman sits down with party political director Alicia Davis and field coordinator Natalie Wong-Brink to plan "issue hits" on incumbent Democrats and discuss ways of improving ties between Milk Street and potential candidates. "Split up a round of phone calls to the Senate captains and say, `You gave us Bill Smith as a potential candidate, but we have also identified this Republican school-committee member as a potential candidate. What's their background?" he instructs.

It's hard not to notice that Brockelman is doing most of the talking. Often, he finishes his colleagues' sentences with his desired conclusions. "We used to kid him about not being the best listener in the world," recalls Landolfi. "He is always one step ahead. He needs to work on his backswing a little, and he needs to work on his listening a little."

Some of that can probably be chalked up to youth, though. Brockelman, Davis, and Wong-Brink all seem to be at least a couple of decades younger than the people enshrined on their office walls; Brian Cresta, the 30-year-old party chairman, is practically an old man here. Peer around the corner into any of the offices at GOP headquarters and a twentysomething head pops up.

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But even this young, aggressive team might not be able to breathe life into the Massachusetts Republican Party anytime soon. Republicans actually lost a legislative seat this year in special elections to fill vacated offices. The GOP now holds just 34 of 200 seats in the state legislature. (By contrast, in 1991, after Weld's first election, there were 54 Republicans in the legislature.)

Yet the party has succeeded in some other respects. At a time when Cellucci is all but shut out of debates on Beacon Hill, for example, the Brockelman-fueled stream of press releases has done a lot to keep the GOP on the media's radar screen.

"He gets covered and has increased the visibility of the party," says one progressive activist. "When you are a Republican, you don't have the ground troops. You have to have an air war. He is dropping bombs left and right, and that gives his boss some political cover."

Not everyone gives Brockelman credit for the state GOP's higher profile. If you ask Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman, it's the kindness of the press that gets the Republicans covered at all. "The media has decided, and I don't know why, to perpetuate the myth that the Republicans are the loyal opposition, when really the loyal opposition is whichever part of the Democratic Party is opposing the agenda of the other," he says. "They are the third party in a two-party state."

It also must be said that Brockelman's carpet-bombing has had some success because the Democrats haven't done much to defend themselves, let alone to exploit Cellucci's obvious weaknesses. The state Democratic Party hasn't even had an executive director since the departure of Gus Bickford earlier this year. And there's certainly no attack dog, which means that Republican attacks -- or blunders -- go unanswered. Earlier this month, for example, Cellucci made jaws drop by picking former Massport head Stephen Tocco as chairman of the state board of higher education. Not only is Tocco a lobbyist, but he has no educational background at all. The reaction from the Democrats was several days of silence, followed, finally, by a release from state Democratic Party chair Joan Menard.

For now, the Democrats are letting Brockelman fight his air war. A plan to hire Goldman through the state party as a formal mouthpiece for the Massachusetts Democrats in Congress was shot down largely by Congressman Barney Frank, who says the move would have been unnecessary. "There are a lot of things the state committee should do," said Frank. "Voter registration, party building. We are big people. We can take care of ourselves."

But even Moakley, who calls Brockelman unimportant, acknowledges that the mud is sticking more than he'd like. "I don't think [the Republicans] will get a seat in Congress no matter what," he says. "But I don't like the idea that paid minions go unanswered after making scurrilous and ridiculous charges."

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Brockelman's doing his Scott Harshbarger impression, and it's near perfect. At roughly 6'2", he's far larger than last year's Democratic nominee for governor, but he manages to contract physically as he draws his elbows close to his body and swings his hand up and down. "Paul Cellucci vee-toed funding for children," he says in his Harshbarger voice. "He vee-toed funding for day-care centers. He vee-toed funding for job training."

Even rusty, the imitation is convincing -- it's often said that Brockelman did a terrific job prepping both Weld and Cellucci for debates, standing in for Harshbarger, former state treasurer Joe Malone (Cellucci's primary opponent), and US Senator John Kerry (whom Weld challenged unsuccessfully in 1996).

He's also good at turning phrases -- Brockelman's assaults on Democrats may be scurrilous, and they may or may not be effective, but there's no doubt they're kinda fun. At Milk Street, it sometimes seems that the kids have been turned loose, with the fax machine standing in for the frat-house keg. A prime piece of evidence is Brockelman's response to the recent public-TV scandal, when WGBH and other stations were found to have shared donor lists with the Democrats. He cooked up a press release suggesting new PBS shows: Marty Meehan would co-host a cooking show called Term-Limit Waffles, and Barney the Dinosaur would become "Barney Frank the Dinosaur." It was funny and, like much of Brockelman's material, one-sided -- not long after the story broke, it emerged that public TV stations elsewhere had been swapping donor lists with Republicans.

What's less clear, though, is how much of an ideological ax he actually has to grind. Raised in a Republican household in Holden, Massachusetts, Brockelman will allow -- when pressed -- that he's pro-choice and for the death penalty. And, of course, he's no fan of taxes -- in fact, Cellucci's push to pass a ballot question lowering the state's income tax by nearly a full point will be coordinated in part by the state GOP.

But he's reluctant to delve more deeply into his own ideology, at least when talking to reporters. "My job here at the party is not to produce a certain ideological tint either way," he insists. "We have had such a small party that our job is to bring as many people together as possible. There is no interest in infighting amongst ourselves."

Indeed, he's unapologetic about divorcing the strategy of politics from the larger point of politics. "I am not on a visionary crusade," he says. "I am a political operative."

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