E-Mail This Article to a Friend POLITICAL SISYPHUS How the Bagel Man keeps the faith BY ADAM REILLY

He will not win. I know it, the voters filing into the Oak Square YMCA know it, and the candidate himself — Dan Kontoff, better known as the Bagel Man — knows it, too. But Kontoff is staying resolute in the face of certain defeat, carefully taping his purple-and-white campaign signs to the lamp posts on Washington Street.

Kontoff’s garb does not help his cause. In his Velcro-strapped sneakers, dangling dress shirt, beaded Cuban-flag necklace, and police hat plastered with buttons (BUSH/ORWELL 2004; IT’S A PLANET, NOT AN EMPIRE), the fortysomething Kontoff looks like a countercultural Rumpelstiltskin, not a serious Green-Rainbow candidate for the Massachusetts House. (Along with Democrat Mike Moran and independent Thomas O’Brien, Kontoff, a former bagel vendor who works at Brookline’s B&D Deli, is vying for the 18th Suffolk seat formerly held by Brian Golden.)

As Kontoff sees it, though, his clothes aren’t the problem — it’s what people like me make of them. "If I wore a suit coat and tie," Kontoff says in his herky-jerky cadence, "people might, believe it or not, vote for me more than if I don’t.... To me, it’s not what a person’s dressed like. It’s who they are underneath all that. But people don’t vote that way." (Apparently, Kontoff encounters a similar dynamic when he hitchhikes around the country, and finds it equally frustrating. "Look at most mass murders!" he protests. "They were not Charles Manson. Charles Manson’s a rarity. Most of them were clean-cut. They’re your next-door neighbor.")

Fair enough. But if Kontoff wants his ideas to get a fair hearing, why not accept the rules of the game and dress like a typical politician? The candidate is not wholly unsympathetic to the idea. "I won’t put on a coat, and I won’t put on a tie, but I do wear a nice dress shirt," he points out. "And a lot of times I do button it down, these days. And I keep my hat off, a lot of times, when I’m at the debates."

Kontoff’s challenge isn’t just aesthetic. Most state-rep candidates build support by emphasizing local issues that affect their constituents — e.g., in the case of the 18th Suffolk, institutional expansion by Harvard, Boston College, and Boston University. But Kontoff, like many Greens, gravitates to bigger systemic problems. To wit: "There are some good Democrats, but they’re the minority. Most of them are about the money, about the Man on top. Green-Rainbow is not about that. Green-Rainbow is about minority rights, human rights, social justice. It’s anti-war; it’s about real things. It’s not about greed."

Kontoff hasn’t won an election with this message, but he seems to be making progress. In Boston’s 1999 preliminary election, running for an at-large city-council seat, he finished ninth in a field of 10, with one percent of the vote. In 2003, running only against District Nine councilor Jerry McDermott, Kontoff’s vote total was a more respectable 21 percent. (This year — running, he says, at the behest of some Green-Rainbow activists whose names he’s since forgotten — Kontoff garnered less than two percent of the vote.)

And now, whither the Bagel Man? Might a third city-council run be in the offing? On Tuesday afternoon, with the polls still open for several hours, Kontoff declines to answer. "We’ll see what happens," he says, smiling for the first time. "I cannot say. Today is Election Day."