TUESDAY, April 9, 2002 — It’s still Weld vs. Dukakis. To hear many Republican operatives tell it, the central political question for the 2002 governor’s race is whether Massachusetts voters will follow the tax-cutting tradition of Governor William Weld or the tax-and-spend tradition of Governor Michael Dukakis. Only a candidate with the requisite display of fiscal responsibility — à la Weld — can capture the votes of the 51 percent of state voters who are independents, they argue.

This analysis overlooks a very important political strand in Massachusetts. Call it the Third Way — sorry, Clintonites. The Third Way in Massachusetts politics was best exemplified by Paul Tsongas, a state politician who helped bring fiscal discipline to national Democrats. Tsongas died in January 1997 at the age of 55. By that time he had been a congressman, a senator, and a presidential candidate and had personally worked to revitalize the downtown of his birthplace, Lowell. It’s interesting to note that none of the gubernatorial nominees offered up by the Democrats since Dukakis left has fallen into Tsongas’s mold, and, accordingly, none has been able to wrest the governor’s office away from the GOP.

Tsongas’s legacy was inescapable this weekend at the Republican Convention in Lowell. Before going to cover Mitt Romney’s pre-convention bash, I had my dinner a few blocks down Market Street at the Athenian Corner, where Tsongas used to dine on traditional lamb dishes. It’s an old dining spot amongst a sea of numerous new restaurants, bistros, and cafés downtown. All are part of the rebirth of Lowell, in which he played such a vital part.

Tsongas’s economic philosophy was two-fold. First, in the belief that government should spend only what it has, he staunchly opposed deficit spending. This formed the centerpiece of his 1992 presidential campaign. But, just as important, Tsongas also believed that government and the private sector could work together in public-private partnerships to foster economic development — the kind of thinking that led to improvement in Lowell.

This philosophy, I believe, would have led Tsongas to oppose the Weld–Paul Cellucci–Jane Swift income-tax-cutting initiative in 2000. It follows that he would probably have favored delaying the tax cut’s implementation in the face of the current budget shortfall.

More important, if he were part of the political discussion today, Tsongas would have long been struggling to devise economic development schemes to help get the state out of its funk. Two Democratic candidates — former Democratic National Committee chair Steve Grossman and former secretary of labor Robert Reich — have both delivered major economic addresses. Tsongas’s legacy could be seen in both — although Grossman pays more direct homage to the former senator.

Like Tsongas, Reich focuses on economic growth, but he sees government as playing a more direct role in it. His theory is that more government regulation will lead to more and better jobs. "Bring in global capital by becoming so productive that even though wages are relatively high, benefits are decent, and health and safety and environmental requirements are strong. Capital will be eager to come because workers are able to produce more and better products," Reich said in his March 28 speech. He favors more spending on "education, health care, transportation, and the environment" as "complements to private investments." Perhaps to rebut those who try to paint him as a tax-and-spend type, Reich decried how little the trio of Republican governors accomplished when times were good in the Commonwealth. "Our state government squandered the booming 1990s," he said. "A leadership that relied so heavily on tax cuts in a time of surplus ... failed us economically and socially."

The former labor secretary called for special "Opportunity Loans" that encourage young people to enter the fields of teaching and public service, increased spending at community colleges, and buying pharmaceutical drugs in bulk. It’s easy to see state voters looking at the 12 years of Republican leadership and agreeing with Reich.

For his part, Grossman offered up a detail-specific speech with lots of Tsongas-type programs that don’t entail the grand costs of some of Reich’s "investments." Grossman proposed creating certificate or associate’s programs in biotechnology at community colleges, a "21st-century Teachers Corps" to recruit 10,000 new teachers in the coming years, and a Skills-Building Tax Credit for companies that help improve their employees’ educations. He vowed to become the "Chief Economic Development Officer" if elected governor. Finally, he quoted Tsongas by name, saying, "In the words of Paul Tsongas, ‘You can’t spend wealth you never create.’"

To my untrained economic eye, both Reich and Grossman raised an interesting array of proposals, with Reich favoring more direct government spending and Grossman articulating slightly more specifics. Grossman, in the margins, cut closer to Tsongas’s message of fiscal discipline — but Reich made his a play for it in his own way as well.

There is, however, a larger point to this Grossman-Reich parsing. The Democratic candidate who can beat Mitt Romney is the one who best captures Tsongas’s legacy and can articulate it in a way that reaches the majority of unenrolled voters in the state. That could ultimately be Treasurer Shannon O’Brien — who frequently makes reference to her programs that educate women about investing — or one of the other candidates, such as Senate president Tom Birmingham or former Watertown state senator Warren Tolman. Mitt Romney’s stance as a "fiscal conservative and a social moderate" may not be enough if the Democrats can retake the fiscally moderate, socially liberal, government-friendly ideological space that Tsongas left vacant.