TOLMAN WAS born the seventh of eight children to working-class parents in Watertown, where he still resides. His Web site (www.tolman2002.com) trumpets his credentials as an earnest striver: "In every class from sixth grade ... through Watertown High School, college and law school, he was elected president of the student government." Tolman worked his way through high school and Amherst College with a panoply of jobs — caddy, Boston Globe carrier, telephone-switchboard operator, cafeteria scrub. The six-foot-four Tolman played tackle for the Watertown Raiders and became the first Watertown graduate to attend Amherst in a quarter-century. He used his position as a leader in student government to help avert what he calls "a racial showdown" after a student allocations committee refused to fund minority student groups adequately. Tolman convinced the dean of students and opposing factions to negotiate the problem at hastily arranged meetings. "I think you can have an impact at every stage," he says, brushing off the suggestion that student government was the preserve of nerds and Bill Clinton wanna-bes. "I felt leadership was important. Sometimes I thought it was a pain in the neck because I was involved with sports and always working."

Leadership was so important to Tolman that he ran for public office while still attending Boston College Law School in 1986. While most of his classmates were either scrambling to line up work or basking in the final year of school before beginning legal drudgery, Tolman was knocking on doors in Watertown and Brighton as a Democratic candidate for the state senate. Incumbent state senator George Bachrach had thrown his hat in the ring for the Eighth Congressional District, so Tolman gave it a shot. He was defeated by the up-and-coming state representative Michael Barrett.

Soon afterward, though, Tolman saw his willingness to take political risks rewarded. And maybe this is where he learned that taking such risks — of which his Clean Elections run for governor is just the latest example — is a good thing. In 1990, the year of great anti-incumbent sentiment during which House Democrats were unpopular for voting to raise the state income-tax rate from five to 5.75 percent, Tolman ran again for office, this time for the House. With a few years as a litigator at Burns & Levenson under his belt, Tolman challenged Watertown’s incumbent representative, John Bartley. "I didn’t think he was doing his job and I thought I could do a better one," he recalls. The themes for this run? "Interestingly, it was about campaign-finance reform and changing the way business was done on Beacon Hill," Tolman says. He won. After two terms in the House, he ran again for the Senate. That time he succeeded.

From the get-go, Tolman fought against the prevailing winds in the Senate, which in 1994 blew north from Southie in the form of Senate president William Bulger. Tolman supported a progressive faction of some six other senators under the aegis of Senator William Keating of Sharon. The insurgents hoped to unseat Bulger the way an earlier generation of representatives under George Keverian had wrested control of the House from Speaker Tom McGee. The insurgency failed and Tolman began his career as a political enemy of the most powerful pol on Beacon Hill.

In some ways, perhaps, this may have made it easier for Tolman to pursue a reformist agenda. With no opportunity to compromise, he was never tempted to do so. Tolman went about building his legislative career around several clear-cut reformist issues — campaign finance, the environment, tobacco. In the House, Tolman authored the Act for Accountable Politics, which increased disclosure information about money and donations. In the Senate, he sponsored the Tobacco Disclosure Law, which required tobacco companies to list all the ingredients in cigarettes. He also sponsored the Clean Rivers Law, which, among other things, created a 200-foot development-free zone around the state’s rivers and streams.

Tolman rejects the notion that he is a Johnny-One-Note — reform, reform, reform, which is dominating his current campaign in the guise of campaign-finance reform, campaign-finance reform, campaign-finance reform. Instead, he argues that if campaign-finance reform were enacted, a lot more could change than just the way politicians get elected.

Tolman points to three issues that could be more constructively addressed if the influence of big-money donors decreased: energy deregulation, Big Dig cost overruns, and prescription-drug benefits. Of the 1998 energy-deregulation law, Tolman contends that lobbyists were able to dominate the discussion and pass provisions to the measure that cost the state far more than the $10 million the Clean Elections Law would cost this year. (The state has already set aside $20 million for the Clean Elections account since 1998.) Regarding the Big Dig, Tolman argues that if the contractors and transportation companies did not hold financial sway over the governor and top legislative leaders, the state would have had a better chance of keeping costs down. As for the high cost of prescription drugs, Tolman maintains that only political pressure from donor-lobbyists like Robert Crane Jr. (who gave $5590 to legislators between 1997 and 2000), Mass Pharm PAC, and others, keeps Massachusetts from joining Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine in a drug-buying compact that lowers prices.

"The current system of campaign financing is corrupt and we’re paying for it whether we have public financing or not," Tolman says. "We’re paying a lot more under the current system than we ever would under Clean Elections."

TOLMAN MAY be convinced that the campaign system needs to change, but is he the one to do it? Propelling him into the governor’s campaign this year is, in part, the sense that he has already paid his dues. Tolman served as the Democratic Party’s candidate for lieutenant governor in 1998. With his running mate Scott Harshbarger now ensconced in Washington as president of Common Cause, Tolman can make a claim to run for the top office in his own right. He raises the example of former governor Michael Dukakis, who ran for lieutenant governor and lost in 1970 before going on to win in 1974. "He was a state rep," notes Tolman. "He ran for lieutenant governor. He lost. He came back four years later and ran for governor and won. He was a reformer. I think I’m a reformer."

The memory of the 1998 campaign, however, does not exactly stir the hearts of Democrats desperate to retake the corner office this time around. First, there is the story of Tolman’s march to the nomination that year. Tolman came out of the state convention with the support of 83 percent of the delegates. But Somerville mayor Dorothy Kelly Gay, who was then a governor’s councilor — surely the most obscure elected post in state government — entered the race, and not only exceeded expectations by capturing 46 percent of the vote, but nearly defeated Tolman.

Political observers were astonished by her performance and unimpressed with his. Although Tolman had raised far more money than she, he waited until the very end of the primary campaign to run ads against Kelly Gay, who attacked him, ironically enough, for being in bed with big-money donors. (At the time of this writing, Kelly Gay was traveling in Ireland and unavailable for comment.) Today, Tolman points out that he never took money from political-action committees or lobbyists in that campaign. George Pillsbury, director of the Massachusetts Money and Politics Project, adds that Tolman is an "outspoken leader in changing the system," who is all the more laudable for doing so while pursuing political office. Even so, Tolman spent roughly $300,000 on television ads, which put him over the top.

Events in the general election simply reinforced Tolman’s conviction that sometimes it’s better to take risks and work from outside the system than from within it. Take his relationship with running mate Harshbarger, at that time the state attorney general. As the state’s highest law-enforcement official, Harshbarger came into the gubernatorial race with something of an adversarial relationship with the Democratic leadership — a tension made worse by ideological differences between himself and the more conservative Speaker, Tom Finneran. Early on in the campaign, Finneran warned the state that Harshbarger represented a return to the "loony left." At the same time, Cellucci himself cautioned that Democrats could not be trusted with the state’s finances — a notion that seemed to accord with Finneran’s statement. Harshbarger’s response? He dispatched his minions to bring the Speaker into the fold — an act that Tolman now calls a mistake.

The experience taught Tolman that when running statewide, the support of the Democratic establishment can be overstated and might even hinder such a campaign. "[Harshbarger] should have told Tom Finneran, ‘I’m going to reform the system. I’m not going to be part of the old-boy network,’ " says Tolman. "At some point, people know who you are and know what they want to do and they’ll be supportive and if they’re not, you’ve got to cut your losses."

Harshbarger agrees with Tolman’s interpretation of the 1998 campaign. "I think you learn from a campaign like that, that the best thing to do is to do it the way you feel and do the right thing," says Harshbarger. "Incumbents are all concerned about their own incumbency and tend to protect their own interests. I think he thinks he’s doing the right thing. It is always risky in politics to do the right thing and to try to be a public leader."

That spirit seems to underlie Tolman’s insurgent gubernatorial effort. "I’m going to win the primary without them and I’m going to win the general election without them, because I’m not of that culture," Tolman says.

Well, Tolman may be stretching things a bit to say he’s not of the Beacon Hill "culture." After all, he spent eight years up there. But he did so as a member of "outsider" factions, which lends a degree of credence to his claim. The real test of whether someone is an insider, however, is the price he or she pays as a candidate. Tolman has already paid the price. It’s up to the SJC to say whether he’ll reap his reward.

Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell[a]phx.com