E-Mail This Article to a Friend Unfriendly advice Mitt Romney lends the Democrats a hurting hand BY ADAM REILLY

WHEN TALK TURNS to Governor Mitt Romney’s political future — will he seek re-election next year? Is he running for president in 2008? — the governor and his spokespeople invariably offer the same response: Romney, we’re assured, is focused on doing his job.

Apparently, that job now includes providing up-to-the-minute color commentary on the developing race for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. When Deval Patrick, a former US assistant attorney general for civil rights and Coca-Cola executive, formally announced his candidacy in mid April, Romney gushed about his new opponent’s résumé. ("I don’t know Deval Patrick personally, but ... I think government needs more good people who have good private-sector experience to understand how jobs are won and lost," the governor said.) When Patrick hinted he’d be open to tax increases if elected, Romney, citing the voter-approved tax rollback of 2000, was quick to chide him. (Romney to the Boston Globe: "It doesn’t seem [Patrick] is challenging the citizens; it seems he is arguing with them.") And last week, after filing legislation to establish an allegedly foolproof death penalty in Massachusetts (see this week’s editorial), Romney found a way to praise Patrick’s death-penalty opposition. (Some people support the death penalty with proper safeguards, Romney told reporters, while others "simply oppose the death penalty on moral grounds, such as Deval Patrick, who’s announced his candidacy for governor. I respect both of those camps as being principled positions.") For good measure, Romney also took time to parse the motivations behind the odd position embraced by state attorney general Tom Reilly, who objected that Massachusetts lacks the resources to implement Romney’s death-penalty bill but said he would "probably" sign Romney’s legislation if elected. ("I’m afraid the real reason [Reilly] has backed away from his long-term support of the death penalty is that he is facing a more liberal opponent in the primary," the governor theorized.)

WHY, ALL OF a sudden, is Romney giving so much free publicity to the very Democrats who covet his job? One Republican insider who asked to remain anonymous insists it’s an unfair question. "I think most of the time, the governor’s actually been responding to comments made about him," this Republican argues. "Deval Patrick was criticizing Governor Romney for promoting a tax cut, and Tom Reilly came out criticizing the governor’s death-penalty bill. Romney hasn’t proactively gone out and sought to pick a fight. He’s simply defending himself."

There may be some truth to the notion that external events — i.e., Patrick’s formal announcement and the Democratic reaction to Romney’s death-penalty bill — are behind the governor’s sudden proclivity for playing political analyst. But this explanation doesn’t account for Romney’s crafty use of rhetoric. When Patrick declared his candidacy, for example, Romney could have simply have offered some boilerplate remarks about democracy thriving on competition; instead, he touted Patrick’s varied experience in much the same way that Patrick himself might. On taxes, Romney could have hammered the broader Democratic refusal to fully implement the state’s 2000 rollback, which passed as a ballot initiative by a margin of 56 to 38 percent and was supposed to cut the income-tax rate to five percent. (As the state’s fiscal crisis intensified in 2002, the Democrat-controlled state legislature froze the rate at 5.35 percent, where it still remains.) Instead, the governor turned the spotlight squarely on Patrick. Finally, Romney’s musing on legitimate anti-death-penalty arguments — with its clunky references to Patrick and his political ambitions — sounded like a badly written infomercial.

All of which gives credence to an explanation that, for obvious reasons, is popular in the Reilly camp: namely, that Romney is undercutting Reilly by bolstering Patrick’s stature and name recognition. "I think it’s obvious that Governor Romney is elevating Deval Patrick by constantly bringing up his name any time he has an issue with the attorney general," says a source close to Reilly. "When people read the paper or see the TV, they’re reminded of this other candidate." The obvious corollary is that Reilly — whom early polls show beating Romney in a hypothetical head-to-head match-up — is the Democrat Romney and the Republicans fear most. "I don’t see any other reason why the governor would play this blatantly political move," the Reilly source concludes.

Right now, Patrick’s two great liabilities are political inexperience and poor name recognition. He’s never held elected office, and in a recent Globe/University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll, 78 percent of respondents said they knew too little about Patrick to have an opinion of him. (The corresponding number for Reilly was 21 percent.) But as Patrick’s team itself realizes, the name-recognition gap might close if Romney keeps referencing Patrick in the coming months — and this, in turn, would free up Patrick’s team to cast their candidate as a political outsider rather than an electoral naif. "We don’t know why the governor wants to talk about Deval Patrick so much," says Kahlil Byrd, Patrick’s spokesperson. "But we’re not going to ask him to stop, because we think it highlights the different quality of leadership that Deval will offer Massachusetts."