Can Joe Malone win?
In mid-April, anyone but the state treasurer's diehard loyalists would have answered that question with a snort of amusement. Surveys of likely Republican primary voters showed him getting creamed nearly 3-to-1 by Acting Governor Paul Cellucci. Party leaders were urging Malone to drop his challenge. Their urgings were punctuated at the party convention in Worcester, where a crushing majority of the delegates endorsed Cellucci. It seemed clear that Malone would be looking for work before the year was out.
That, as they say, was then. Now, less than three weeks out, this race has turned into a dogfight.
Cellucci's political momentum is gone. It began leaking soon after the convention, when polls showed him edging Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, the leading Democratic candidate, with only 40 percent support. By early August Harshbarger was edging him. If Cellucci's stock is falling among voters overall, it is probably falling among Republicans.
It is easy to forget that Cellucci has never run for statewide office in his own right. Unlike Malone, who won commanding victories in 1990 and 1994, and William Weld, who stormed to reelection with the widest margin of any Massachusetts governor in a century, Cellucci's status is unearned. When Weld quit, Cellucci inherited his constitutional powers and Corner Office keys. But Weld's popularity was never part of the package.
Cellucci's promotion to acting governor gave him a year's headstart on his long-anticipated contest with Malone, a natural-born campaigner. Yet instead of using those 12 months to earn the trust and affection of his own party's rank-and-file, he immediately went to work ingratiating himself with Democrats.
The new governor showed up at a Teamsters picket line to endorse the union's strike against UPS. He showed up at a Democratic gathering in Lowell to endorse Hillary Clinton's $21 billion day-care scheme. Yet he didn't show up when The Boston Globe invited him to a forum for Republican candidates. For a while he even balked at promising to show up for the traditional Republican Unity Breakfast on the day after the primary.
Like Elliot Richardson in 1984, Cellucci is running as a don't-hold-my-party-against-me Republican. When Paul Tsongas retired from the Senate, Richardson — the former US secretary of everything, the hero of the Saturday Night Massacre — was the choice of the Republican establishment to run for the open seat. Early polls and conventional wisdom had him soundly defeating the more conservative Ray Shamie, who had been in the race even before Tsongas's announcement. Foolishly, Richardson believed the hype. Presuming that he had the primary locked up, he campaigned openly for Democratic votes. GOP voters didn't appreciate being taken for granted. Shamie won in a 25-point landslide.
The contrast between Cellucci and Malone is not as stark as Richardson-Shamie. Malone is not nearly as conservative as Shamie, and Cellucci is no Richardsonian liberal. Moreover, while the candidates in 1984 were campaigning for an open seat, the fight this time is between an incumbent and a challenger. Massachusetts voters are loath to turn out incumbents; Massachusetts Republicans, who have so few incumbents to begin with, especially so.
But as in 1984, one candidate is going out of his way to make ideology the issue while the other stresses electability. Cellucci says, in effect: I'm the better candidate. Malone says: I'm the better Republican.
The Cellucci camp is betting that what Republican voters want most is to hang on to the governor's office. Their strategy has been to attack Malone as a spoiler, a hopeless candidate whose selfishness is jeopardizing his party's chances in November. Stick with Cellucci, the acting governor's ads imply, or big-spending Dukakoids will once again be running the show.
That's a good pitch, especially to casual voters whose Republicanism turns on party loyalty, not philosophy. But it works only if Cellucci radiates strength. When polls showed him ahead of every other candidate, the electability argument was hard to rebut. When they show him losing traction and slipping behind Democrats, it becomes hard to sustain.
The lesson Malone learned in 1984 — he ran Shamie's campaign — is that Republicans thrive when they sharply distinguish themselves from Democrats and fight hard over principles. For 7½ years, the Weld-Cellucci record has been one of muting ideological differences, cutting deals with Democrats, refusing to draw lines in the sand. The result is that big-spending Dukakoids are already running the show — and that Republicans, despite holding the governor's office, are all but irrelevant in crafting state policy.
Malone calls himself "the conservative for governor"; his ads say of Cellucci, "He really is a liberal." Even in Massachusetts, GOP voters prefer their candidates conservative — and Malone embraces the label. But his strategy is less about labels than about meaning. I'm a Republican who stands for something, he is telling primary voters. Don't base your vote on a sterile calculus of winnability, base it on your gut beliefs — on the reason you're a Republican in the first place.
In the long run, Malone is right: Great parties are built on philosophy, not pragmatism. But elections are waged in the short run. Malone has three weeks left to set GOP hearts aflame. Let's see if he can make them ignite.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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