E-Mail This Article to a Friend Leftward ho? Forget the hype — the reconfigured Massachusetts House is hardly a progressive haven BY ADAM REILLY

This week’s Beacon Hill Hyperbole Award goes to Mike Festa, the Democratic state representative from Melrose, for his glowing assessment of House Speaker Sal DiMasi’s committee picks. DiMasi’s appointments constitute "a major shake-up," the ever-quotable Festa told the Boston Globe. "It is an absolute, whole new reconfiguration."

Whoa there, Mike! Yes, some House committee chairs changed hands Tuesday. And yes, some liberal legislators who were frozen out under Tom Finneran, DiMasi’s conservative predecessor, were brought back into the decision-making fold. (Festa was one beneficiary: the long-time Finneran critic was named vice-chair of the State Administration and Regulatory Oversight Committee.) But the House was not remade this week. Nor, despite the claims of several State House observers, did it get a significant push toward the left end of the political spectrum.

The truth is less exciting and much more complicated. Taken together, DiMasi’s committee picks suggest a deep ambivalence. They’re harbingers of progressivism and conservatism, meritocracy and cronyism, autonomy and control, stasis and change. Put differently, instead of presiding over a revolution, the new Speaker has embarked on a challenging balancing act. And over time, it may prove exceedingly difficult to sustain.

Cautionary exhibit A, for anyone eager to celebrate the House’s Great Leap Leftward, is the appointment of Bob DeLeo as Ways and Means chair. Since the announcement of DeLeo’s selection, the state representative from Winthrop has been described as a lunch-bucket Democrat who idolizes John F. Kennedy and aspires to help society’s most vulnerable members.

Sounds good. But as DeLeo takes over the House’s second-most-powerful job and begins guiding budget deliberations for the legislature’s lower chamber, certain aspects of his political identity should give liberals pause. For example, during the debate over gay marriage at last year’s constitutional convention, DeLeo backed a Finneran-authored amendment that would have defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman. He opposed funding the voter-approved Clean Elections Law. He’s been named one of the House’s 43 anti-abortion representatives by Democrats for Life of Massachusetts. He has backed a work requirement (a/k/a "workfare") for welfare mothers with kids between the ages of two and six. He supports the death penalty. And he has voted against raising the income tax to 5.95 percent to eliminate the state’s recurring budget gap, a step the Massachusetts Democratic Party platform advocates. Taken in isolation, none of these positions would peg DeLeo as a right-wing Democrat. Add them up, though, and he seems ideologically simpatico with John Rogers, the Norwood legislator who ran Ways and Means under Finneran.

It’s not just DeLeo. Thomas Petrolati of Ludlow — picked by DiMasi for the newly created position of Speaker pro tempore — also backs workfare and opposes gay marriage, abortion rights, and income-tax hikes. Ditto for new majority leader Rogers, who was a key player in the Finneran regime. Eugene O’Flaherty, the Chelsea legislator who kept his powerful post as chair of the House judiciary committee, is anti-gay-marriage, anti-tax-hike, and pro-workfare. And Angelo Scaccia of Readville and Marie Parente of Milford — who will remain as chair and vice-chair, respectively, of the House Rules Committee — are abortion opponents who stridently opposed gay marriage at last year’s constitutional convention. "You’re talking about a move from zero to maybe 30 percent," Pam Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts, says of progressive representation in House leadership. "Like many things, it wasn’t as good as some had hoped for or as bad as some had feared. It’s somewhere in the middle."

So why all the fuss? Chalk it up in large part to DiMasi’s knack for symbolism. Most notably, he picked as his second assistant majority leader Byron Rushing, a veteran legislator and progressive stalwart from the South End who once ran a quixotic campaign to unseat Finneran as Speaker. Selecting Rushing achieved two goals in one fell swoop: it elevated an African-American to a House leadership post for the first time, and it embodied DiMasi’s apparent willingness to involve Finneran-era dissenters in the legislative process. Naming Marie St. Fleur, Massachusetts’s first Haitian-American legislator, as vice-chair of Ways and Means helped drive home the first point. And bringing sundry other Finneran malcontents back from the political wilderness (e.g., Jay Kaufman as chair of public financing, Frank Smizik as chair of environment and natural resources, and Jim Marzilli as vice-chair of health-care financing) accentuated the second. "Byron was the most symbolically significant appointment [DiMasi] could have made," one legislator says. "He essentially took a guy who challenged Finneran and brought him on to the team. That should send a message that he’s going to be more inclusive, and that the old antagonisms don’t have to continue. And the fact that he brought in a handful of other liberals reinforces that."

What DiMasi didn’t do, however, was give any of these rehabilitated dissenters a key leadership post. "You have these diffuse placements of minorities and women," one liberal State House observer complains, "and most of them are in traditional social-service-type committee roles. They’re in positions that don’t have a huge impact. I guess when you’re coming from slightly to the right of Attila the Hun, which was where they were under Finneran, you’ll take crumbs."