E-Mail This Article to a Friend Race consciousness (continued)

• Gay marriage will be a subtext, not a focus. If there is one race in which the gay-marriage debate could be expected to play a central role, it’s the Brown-McQuilken contest. McQuilken — whose political mentor, Jacques, is an out lesbian — supports full civil marriage for gay couples. Brown doesn’t. He voted against the moderate compromise amendment put forward by Senator Brian Lees and Senate president Robert Travaglini, while supporting two more restrictive amendments banning gay marriage at last month’s ConCon. He also once described Jacques’s partner’s pregnancy as "just not normal."

During the campaign, though, neither candidate has seemed inclined to make gay marriage a focal point. Brown’s Web site references issues like reducing class sizes, providing drugs for seniors, and English-immersion education (he supports it). McQuilken’s addresses topics like attracting emerging technologies, funding full-day kindergarten statewide, and improving identity-theft laws. Neither makes any mention of gay marriage, civil unions, or any kind of constitutional amendment on the issue.

Why not? "The media is already covering it pretty extensively — it’s almost overkill," Brown says. "Out here where I live, people are more concerned now about their schools, their overrides, how they’re going to pave their roads and bridges — you know, the everyday things that matter." McQuilken’s explanation, while emphasizing his and Brown’s differences on gay marriage, is similar. "There are gay families throughout this district who are raising a child, and I will never support a measure that would hurt those children or those families," McQuilken says. "But the vast majority of voters in this district don’t consider this the top issue for them because it doesn’t affect their lives, and those families are worried about issues that do affect them — education, job creation, health care, and public safety."

For both McQuilken and Brown, however, strategy may be as big a consideration as constituent attentiveness. "My guess is that McQuilken believes he can win it without that issue, and [Brown] is afraid he’ll lose it because of that issue," says Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman. "People know where McQuilken is, so he doesn’t have to drive it home, necessarily, to the people who are opposed to it. And [Brown] says, ‘Gee, why let people have a reason not to vote for me?’" It’s a safe bet, too, that officials from the state Democratic and Republican Parties and high-ranking pols on each side — including Romney and Travaglini — are urging their respective candidates to broach the issue with great delicacy, if at all.

Just because the candidates aren’t emphasizing it, though, doesn’t mean gay marriage isn’t playing a significant role in their race. Because the election’s outcome could affect the legislative approach to the issue this year and next, activists from both sides are actively involving themselves during the run-up to the special election. For example, the fundraiser Steve Grossman attended earlier this week — a South End brunch where requested donations ran from $100 to $500 — was publicized explicitly through the prism of the gay-marriage debate, with potential attendees urged via e-mail to "Protect Our Marriage Rights — Elect Angus McQuilken on March 2!" According to Tom Gerace, who hosted the brunch, over $27,000 was raised at the event. And next week, the Coalition for Marriage, an anti-gay-marriage group, plans to pepper churches and other locations around the district with fliers contrasting McQuilken’s and Brown’s positions on the subject.

There probably will be some races in which the candidates themselves make gay marriage a central issue. For example, two openly gay Democrats from Provincetown have already announced plans to challenge State Representative Shirley Gomes, a South Harwich Republican who voted for two amendments restricting civil-marriage rights while rejecting the Lees-Travaglini compromise. If the ConCon fails to yield an amendment, moreover, Democratic incumbents who opposed submitting the issue to the electorate will almost certainly be taken to task by their Republican opponents. After all, a recent Boston Globe poll indicated that 53 percent of Massachusetts residents oppose legalizing gay marriage, with only 35 percent in favor. But while gay-marriage advocates and opponents will probably work to shape the outcomes of these races, the candidates’ own rhetoric on the topic is likely to be understated — and, as in the McQuilken-Brown contest, it probably won’t be framed as the central issue.

• Old Glory will be a campaign prop. The Romney administration’s affinity for mixing politics with patriotism is well-known. Remember when the governor advocated naming the reconstructed stretch of I-93 that cuts underneath downtown Boston the Liberty Tunnel instead of the Tip O’Neill Tunnel? Romney spokesperson Shawn Feddeman suggested that legislators who opposed the governor’s plan were somehow dissing the men and women serving in Iraq. In this year’s legislative campaigns, Romney and the state Republican Party probably won’t want to risk alienating coveted independent voters by overtly impugning the patriotism of Democratic incumbents. Instead, they’ll take a more subtle approach and swaddle Republican candidates in as many all-American trappings as they can muster. When Romney stumped with Brown in North Attleborough last week, the strains of John Philip Sousa’s "Washington Post March" served as auditory bookends for the two men’s speeches, and the signs held by Brown’s supporters — which touted his PROVEN LEADERSHIP — featured a nifty little eagle in the upper-right corner. On Brown’s Web site, meanwhile, the imagery is even more explicit. At the top of the home page, a virtual American flag flutters against a brilliant blue sky. Scroll down and you see Romney and Brown standing side by side as another American flag sprouts from Romney’s head. (In case anyone missed the point, Brown is also wearing an American-flag tie.) The big question, of course, is how the Democrats will respond. Do they cede the faux-patriotic ground to Romney and his troops, or do they get in on the act? McQuilken, whose campaign materials are flag-free and dominated by green and yellow rather than red, white, and blue, has apparently opted for the former approach. It’ll be interesting to see how many Democratic incumbents exercise similar self-restraint.

• Mud will be slung. On Monday, Brown’s campaign team sent out a press release demanding that McQuilken weigh in on Romney’s proposal to merge the Turnpike Authority with the Highway Department. Fair enough — after all, it’s shaping up to be the big legislative battle of 2004. But Brown didn’t stop there, choosing instead to go for the jugular. "Every time the voters read about a teacher, firefighter or police officer getting laid off, they should know that the blame lies squarely with anti-reformers like Angus McQuilken," Brown said in the release. One day earlier, another Brown press release accused the McQuilken campaign of stealing pro-Brown yard signs. Last week, meanwhile, a Massachusetts Democratic Committee press release targeted Brown’s favorable ratings with the Gun Owners’ Action League and National Rifle Association, charging that Brown is situated on the "extreme fringe" when it comes to gun-control issues. And on the night of the February 3 primary, according to the MetroWest Daily News, McQuilken labeled Brown "one of the least-accomplished members of the House of Representatives" and asserted that his opponent "has yet to have his first good idea." As evidence, McQuilken cited — and dismissed — a pending Brown bill that would prohibit publicly funded sex-change operations for state-prison inmates. All of which suggests that Democratic and Republican candidates alike will be perfectly willing to go negative as this year’s campaigns unfold.

ACCORDING TO Massachusetts Republican Party executive director Dominic Ianno, the Republicans already have 88 House candidates and 22 Senate candidates committed to running this fall. (These include 23 and six incumbents, respectively.) During the previous three election cycles, the average Republican total was 76 candidates. So from the standpoint of candidate recruitment, 2004 is already a very good year for the Republicans — and anyone toying with a GOP run still has another month to file.

This wealth of candidates will be meaningless, however, if it nonetheless produces a paucity of election victories. Will Romney’s personal investment yield results? Or will the governor find the Democrats’ Beacon Hill dominance insurmountable? Next week’s election won’t necessarily answer that question. But the way the Brown-McQuilken campaign has played out so far does suggest some of the strategies the state’s Republican leaders — and their Democratic counterparts — plan to use. If nothing else, we’re in for the most lively legislative election cycle we’ve seen in years.

Adam Reilly can be reached at areilly[a]phx.com