O’BRIEN’S NOT there yet — and the vagaries of political campaigning may yet derail her — but her speech showed that she is on her way. She has yet to face the negative attacks that are sure to come from her primary opponents, and, with the exception of Saturday’s convention speech, her campaign has proceeded in a largely conservative fashion. O’Brien campaign manager Dwight Robson said the decision to target her speech to those outside the convention hall was made only after debate within the campaign, which considered questions such as whether an explicit play for independents would hurt her with undecided delegates. Even Grossman, a businessman who is further to the right on budgetary issues than O’Brien (he opposes even delaying the income-tax cut passed in 2000), eschewed discussion of fiscal management in favor of an unbridled attack on Romney — an understandable decision given that Grossman, who went into the convention fighting to win the requisite 15 percent of delegates to get his name on the primary ballot, needed more help there than the treasurer, whose 15 percent was assured.

"There was a sense that this could be a little bit controversial, a little bit more of an edge," says Robson, adding that he, along with others, had argued in favor of the speech. O’Brien’s address drew the praise of House Speaker Tom Finneran, whose appearance on the podium had been booed earlier in the day. In an interview, Finneran said he was unlikely to unleash his "loony left" rhetoric on the current crop of Democrats. "Shannon O’Brien seemed to give a speech that was much more appropriately focused toward the October-November considerations," he said. "I think it was a courageous political step."

But even with (or despite) Finneran’s support, O’Brien faces further obstacles. Several dark clouds, in fact, hung over her victory. The first and most significant was that she took the podium at 8:14 p.m., much too late to make the six o’clock news. While both dailies ran front-page pictures of her accepting the nomination, Democratic squabbling made it impossible for the party’s nominee to make her acceptance speech in a timely manner. Ideally, a party wants its candidate’s speech to precede the nightly news, or at least to coincide with it, so the stations can "go live" with a dramatic convention shot. Even worse, in a year when efficiency is an overriding issue, Republicans will be able to exploit the ugly and chaotic spectacle of the Democrats’ inability even to nominate their gubernatorial candidate in a smooth fashion. (To make matters worse, the nominations for treasurer came off in a chaotic mess that made a mockery of the party’s 15 percent rule. Exhausted delegates ended up putting all four candidates on the ballot by acclamation.) And, finally, both O’Brien’s Democratic foes and her Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, will charge that her nomination is the result of her being an insider with a female face — a charge that, while it has some validity, she should easily overcome.

In order to be the Democratic candidate who faces off against Romney, O’Brien must defeat four challengers, each of whom boasts niche appeal and can make the case that he represents the future of the state Democratic Party. Of these, Reich enjoys the most momentum. His aides believe that Reich’s now-guaranteed primary-ballot spot will help his fundraising numbers pick up even more. In May, for example, he raised $250,000 to O’Brien’s $351,000. (In what may be a sign of flagging momentum, Birmingham took in only $220,000.) Reich’s address to his yellow-clad supporters and reporters after the news that he had just made the 15 percent threshold was one of the dramatic highlights of the convention.

Three aspects of his campaign make the former labor secretary an increasingly interesting candidate. First, he is positioning himself as the ultimate state "outsider" who can fight corruption on Beacon Hill. Second, he is pitching himself to suburban voters, including independents, by stressing his experience at the Department of Labor (where he cut costs without cutting jobs) and his ability to "clean ... up Republican messes." Third, he is trying to cut into Birmingham’s organized-labor support by invoking his record at the US Department of Labor, where he fought sweatshops, tightened pension protections, and improved workforce-training programs — all accomplishments that he touted in his convention speech. His background as a labor intellectual allows Reich to aim at both the trade unions and the suburbs — unlike Birmingham. Senator Paul Wellstone, a former university professor, achieved a similar balance in his elections to the US Senate from Minnesota. (Like Reich, Wellstone is beloved among true-lefty Democrats, although he pulls some independents as well.)

Reich’s play for organized labor poses a direct threat to one of Birmingham’s key constituencies. Yet the Senate president’s campaign doesn’t seem to care. It made little effort to block Reich from getting on the ballot. The Birmingham campaign has largely relinquished the suburbs to the other candidates, and it believes Reich cannot harm its candidate with his core voters. At first blush, Birmingham’s fossilized message seems to be that of going down with the ship. "We, as Democrats, must not obscure the decision by offering [voters] a watered-down, kinder, gentler version of Mitt Romney, or by being all things to all people," he said in his convention speech, trumpeting his support for the labor movement, health-insurance benefits, and education. In light of well-known modern state voting patterns — and the fact that no Democrat has been elected governor of Massachusetts since 1986 — what can Birmingham’s campaign possibly be thinking?

The good news for Birmingham is that his plan is not based on sheer madness. His campaign is convinced, and not entirely without reason, that its candidate’s path to victory lies in playing to his blue-collar, urban-ethnic base. Let O’Brien, Grossman, and Reich duke it out in the suburbs; in a five-person field, Birmingham can win the primary so long as he retains his base. There is nothing novel about this thinking. Much the same rationale helped propel both former Somerville mayor Mike Capuano and former South Boston state senator Stephen Lynch into Congress. State AFL-CIO president Robert Haynes says that if his union makes an endorsement, it will likely choose Birmingham. That means the Senate president will benefit from the union’s widespread and effective get-out-the-vote initiative, which gave gubernatorial candidate Scott Harshbarger a seven to nine percent boost in the 1998 general election. Of course, it’s been a long time since such a base strategy has worked in a statewide gubernatorial race. The last time the Democrats had this many candidates in a governor’s race was 1970; in addition to Donahue and White, that race also featured Frank Bellotti and Ken O’Donnell, an old Kennedy hand (later portrayed by Kevin Costner in Thirteen Days). Given the 30 years’ gap in everyone’s electoral experience, nobody knows for sure whether the Senate president’s plan can work now.

Birmingham’s primary strategy hinges on relatively low voter turnout. While O’Brien and others think independents will be important not just in the general election, but in the primary (Robson says they could account for as much as 40 percent of the turnout), the Birmingham camp thinks few true independents will enter the Democratic primary. "I would assume there’s [going to be a] very low independent turnout," says Birmingham strategist Michael Shea. "Anybody can pretend to be anything they want, there’s no one here who can’t be saddled with the name insider," he adds, noting that "there’s no John Silber in the race." (Former Boston University president Silber, a genuine outsider, won the Democratic Party nomination in 1990 with his at-times-inflammatory statements, dubbed "Silber shockers" by the press. He ultimately lost the general election to William Weld.) Shea further believes that those independents who naturally lean Democratic will rally behind Birmingham, while conservatives will vote in the contested primary for lieutenant governor. (It’s hard to see independents, however, turning out in large numbers to make sure Kerry Healey, Romney’s lieutenant-governor pick, beats Jim Rappaport.)

The chances of success for Grossman and Tolman, the two candidates lowest in the polls, hinge on things that haven’t happened yet. While much of the focus on Grossman pits him against Reich, the candidate he really needs to overtake is O’Brien. On the face of it, however, it’s hard to see how Grossman could pass O’Brien. His best hope is to keep striving to improve and remain in the game. If O’Brien falters or one of the other candidates, such as Birmingham or Reich, chips away at her appeal by questioning her stewardship of the Treasury or exploiting the degree of support she enjoys among Boston’s political insiders (i.e., Finneran), Grossman could pick up momentum. Again, nobody can anticipate the effect if Grossman decides to saturate the airwaves with television ads — something none of the candidates has yet done. New Hampshire Republican gubernatorial candidate Craig Benson went from 17 points behind front-runner Gordon Humphrey in February to 10 points ahead of him after two months of saturation television advertising. Maybe Grossman can do the same here.

No one can predict what will happen with Tolman either. If Finneran actually kills Clean Elections, as he is expected to do via House action within a few weeks, Tolman could find the burst of attention he’s been awaiting. He’s a likeable guy who seems able to generate excitement among supporters. As if to emphasize Tolman’s energy, Channel Five showed footage of the candidate hurdling a chainlink fence to greet voters in Dorchester on Sunday — in what is becoming a metaphor for his campaign (he also hurdled a Centrum turnstile on Friday in exchange for a delegate’s support). If he can somehow garner the more than $811,000 in public campaign funds he is owed, he may be able to climb in the polls.

IT’S TOO SOON to say who will win in September. O’Brien looks good, but a long summer lies ahead. We do know that four of the candidates are making a serious play for suburban-independent voters. Birmingham, the sole candidate not trying to win those voters, represents traditional progressive-urban politics. Only Reich appeals to the Chablis-and-brie Brattle Street set — although, if he receives a public-funding infusion, Tolman will use his populist cast to compete with Reich from the left as well.

The candidates’ focus on suburban independents means one thing: unless Reich or Tolman wins the primary, Democrats still need to worry about Green Party nominee Jill Stein siphoning away enough progressive votes to give victory to Romney — the Nader effect, if you will. The Reich camp contends that the former labor secretary is the only candidate who can do well in the suburbs and also address the Green challenge. They point to Reich’s strength in Northampton and other progressive enclaves in the western part of the state. But that raises another potential problem for Democrats if Reich wins in September: the more Green the Reich campaign goes, the more it risks alienating those all-important independent voters. To win both constituencies, the Democratic must strike a careful balance.

Congressman Barney Frank says any of the five Democratic candidates is superior to Romney. That’s a point he plans to make on the campaign trail, speaking to progressive voters in the summer and fall "about the unwisdom of wasting a vote for the Greens." He says a Green vote neglects how the legislature recently raised $1 billion in new revenues, which "averted some undeserved misery" and demonstrated the Democrats’ willingness to address Green concerns. Again, this will be a question for the fall.

As the Democrats move forward, voters are in a position to settle some unanswered questions about the state’s electorate. The primary will determine whether the average registered Democrat — the sort of voter who’d rather spend sunny June afternoons outside grilling than inside a sweaty convention hall duking it out for his or her candidate — is willing to do what the convention-goers did: nominate a candidate who can retain the progressive base as well as compete with Romney in the suburbs. If such a candidate wins the primary, then state politics will be changed, perhaps forever. That will be the real legacy of the 2002 governor’s race.

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