The emperor has no clothes

In the eight months since Bill Weld departed on his excellent adventure, this dark-eyed son of a Hudson used car dealer has seen his poll numbers and campaign war chest grow just as robustly as the economy that has been his greatest political ally.

This weekend, Cellucci will travel to Worcester for the state Republican nominating convention, where he will be crowned his party's nominee for November's gubernatorial election. He will demolish his plucky opponent for the nomination, state treasurer Joe Malone, whose once-serious hopes for a convention upset have been ground to dust since Cellucci inherited the state's top job.

Cellucci will use the convention "to ratify his ascent to power," in the words of Democratic political consultant Dan Payne, and he will emerge from Worcester with more momentum, more money, and more support than any other candidate in the race. Indeed, as his four Democratic opponents squabble away in relative obscurity, Cellucci's bid to drop the "acting" prefix from his title of governor will seem even more unstoppable.

History shows that winning a GOP convention doesn't guarantee a victory in September's primary election, and Cellucci will still tangle with Malone for months to come. But as it stands, in the state's first election of the post-Bill Weld era -- in a millennial contest that will choose a leader to grapple with the aftershocks of welfare reform, to save the state's schools, to ensure that the precious fruits of our economic boom don't go to waste -- in this epochal contest, the winner as of now will be . . .

This guy?

This, as Mr. Spock would say, is highly illogical. For despite Cellucci's boasts that he spent six and a half years as Bill Weld's co-governor, he has spent the past eight months demonstrating that he is not ready for prime time.

What was the question?

When Bill Weld left Massachusetts, taking his cavalier humor and his genuine intellect with him, we knew that the switch to Paul Cellucci would be like replacing your favorite bubble gum with a stick of cardboard.

But at least we expected Cellucci to be comfortable and confident running the state. After all, Weld had described him as his "co-governor" in what was so often referred to as the "Welducci" administration. Weld once assured the Globe, "We don't take any step that we don't both agree on."

Yet even after eight months on the job, Cellucci -- who, given several days' notice, could not find 20 minutes to grant an interview to the Phoenix -- seems surprisingly unsure of himself. Although used cars are the family business, he somehow failed to learn the art of a good sales pitch -- even though he did take speech lessons a few year ago. When Paul Cellucci speaks, nobody listens. When he's under pressure, or forced to think on his feet, he fumbles and bungles. Even Republicans are wondering how he'll respond to the campaign maelstrom ahead of him.

Cellucci, for instance, managed to blow his State of the State address last January. In his first grand, statesmanlike appearance before the public since taking over from Weld, the acting governor had a chance to define himself with a compelling and watchable speech.

Instead he delivered a bland, pitifully cautious spiel whose personal coda played shamelessly to the voters ("My most important title -- my proudest title -- is Dad"), but which few people actually watched. Next to the forceful, substantive, rhetorically ambitious legislative address that House Speaker Thomas Finneran had delivered in the same State House chamber just a week earlier, Cellucci's address was embarrassing fluff.

Even more damning than this failure to deliver in a planned Big Moment, however, may be the countless examples of his inability to improvise in unscripted, politically pressurized situations. One of the more telling cases was Cellucci's response to the death-penalty vote last November.

Cellucci had made passing a death-penalty bill a very public mission after the gruesome murders of Reading nurse Elaine Donahue and 10-year-old little-leaguer Jeffrey Curley. An initial vote by the legislature led him to believe he'd won a huge, high-stakes victory after just three months as governor.

But on November 6, state representative John Slattery (D-Peabody) switched his vote and snatched away Cellucci's morbid triumph. And in the hallway outside his third-floor State House office, Cellucci blew his cool.

"Have you ever seen a phony vote like that?" he barked. "Have you ever seen a phony vote like that?"

And with the entire state, and people across the nation, watching Massachusetts debate the clearest life-and-death moral issue faced by government, Paul Cellucci hadn't comported himself with the decorum of a seasoned political veteran. Instead, he'd thrown a tantrum.

"Observers . . . thought the angry performance stopped well short of being gubernatorial," wrote the Globe's Scot Lehigh and Frank Phillips.

Since that fiasco, Cellucci has been far more cautious in public. But that hasn't made him seem much more gubernatorial.

Consider one episode from January, in a week when Cellucci was being bombarded by ethics charges from Malone. Cellucci's campaign manager, Rob Gray, swung back at the state treasurer, branding him "a phony" for alleged ethics lapses of his own.

When asked later if he agreed with the "phony" characterization, Cellucci retreated pathetically. "You can talk to Rob about that. . . . I didn't say that. Talk to Rob Gray about that. I did not say that."

Cellucci took this tactic to the next level last week, when he actually sought to distance himself from himself!

Stories widely believed to have come out of the Cellucci camp had appeared in the local press, detailing property taxes owed by a Malone family trust. At first, Cellucci blasted the treasurer. But the next day, when reporters tried to get Cellucci to follow up, he backed away. "I was just responding to questions that were put to me based on newspaper reports," he said -- without noting that those reports appeared to have been planted by his own campaign. Just as the going started to get rough, an aide abruptly ended the questioning with a shout of Thank you!

This exchange took place at the end of an elaborate press conference Cellucci had staged to unveil a new bill designed to put repeat sex offenders behind bars for life. It was a deftly orchestrated event. Cellucci was flanked by two sternly uniformed state troopers, no fewer than five district attorneys, and a leading advocate against domestic violence. A young woman bravely took the podium to recount her experience as a victim of rape, telling the assembled crowd how her assailant -- who turned out to have been a repeat offender -- "shattered" her nose with a knife and after a struggle fled with his pants at his ankles.

But although the get-tough bill purported to lock sex-offender scum away for good, it turned out it wasn't so simple -- something Cellucci himself seemed unaware of.

Is this life without parole we're talking about here? asked one reporter.

"I believe it is, yes," Cellucci replied uncertainly, at which a fresh-faced aide delicately stepped forward from the side of the room: "Uh, it's not, at the moment."

Details, details

That, Cellucci's partisans argue, is just what he is. Where Weld was disengaged, Cellucci was supposed to be a nuts-and-bolts guy who paid attention to the details. Where Weld felt he was above the mundane minutiae of state politics, Cellucci is a former state legislator who's still friendly with his old colleagues, knows how they think, and grasps the fine points of policy.

Back in his first term as lieutenant governor, Cellucci was described by then-state representative Bruce Tarr (now a Republican senator from Gloucester) in typical fashion: "Cellucci is probably not the grand philosopher that Bill Weld is," Tarr told the Globe, "but I think he has been the strongest link of the administration when it comes to the actual mechanics of the legislature and getting things done."

But so far, Cellucci has been ineffective in dealing with the legislature. He's won little support for his crown-jewel proposal, a $1.5 billion tax cut. His veto of a transfer tax for conservation efforts on Cape Cod was easily overridden, as was his veto of a tax hike to fund a new convention center in Boston. His support for a bill providing $52 million in state funds for a new football stadium in Foxboro has gotten that plan nowhere. Even the death penalty (fortunately) slipped through his hands.

Some early failures can be chalked up to the legislature's heavily Democratic makeup. But it's more than that. Cellucci just hasn't been as engaged in the tough legislative grunt work as he was expected to be. He has found himself overshadowed by House Speaker Tom Finneran and Senate president Tom Birmingham, who have usurped control of the state's political agenda since Weld's departure.

Asked about Cellucci's attention to detail, Birmingham answers cautiously: "I would say it's a tall order for anybody to be as disengaged as Weld." Pressed further, Birmingham offers only the faintest praise: "I don't have any frame of reference other than Weld, but I would say that he's more engaged than Weld. At our Monday meetings he generally produces longer lists of legislation than Weld did."

"I thought that Paul Cellucci would come in as the master of detail," says state representative Jim Marzilli (D-Arlington). "I expected him to be tinkering on every bill and having impact on everything. In retrospect, he has been just overwhelmed by Tom Finneran. He hasn't even been able to win the PR battle on major issues like tax cuts because he is too afraid of taking public criticism, unlike Finneran."

Consider one example: Shortly after taking office last year, Cellucci declared a bill to ban assault weapons one of his top priorities. The bill has passed the Senate, but it's been mired in the House for months -- and its supporters say Cellucci has done little to apply what could be crucial pressure on Finneran, whose personal opposition has been the only obstacle to the bill's passage in the House. "He comes to the press conferences," says one leading backer of the ban, "but he hasn't really done a lot to support it."

And if Cellucci has such a strong grasp of the nuts and bolts of state government, how did he make such a public relations disaster out of one of the most publicized issues of the year -- telephone area codes?

In August the legislature approved the creation of two badly needed new area codes, but a few favor-currying legislators carved out an exemption to keep their own districts in 617.

State regulators warned that those exemptions would touch off "area code chaos." But Cellucci, wary of angering the exempted towns, put politics before good public policy and indicated he'd sign the bill -- even painting himself as something of a helpless observer. "We live in a democracy, and the legislature has the right to change things around," he said.

But a week later, after details of the bill's flaws emerged -- the special exceptions would have caused the 617 area to run out of phone numbers by May 1998, for instance -- Cellucci reversed himself and said he would veto it. After this clumsy seesaw, Cellucci was lampooned for days on TV and in the newspapers.

An embarrassed Cellucci took it out on the legislature for sending him such a lemon of a bill and chastised the Department of Public Utilities for not raising objections earlier. Never mind that Cellucci, the supposed master of state-government minutiae, hadn't paid attention to the details until it was too late.

And when it's convenient, Cellucci claims no such mastery at all. For instance, he failed to submit his budget by the third Wednesday in January as state law requires. His excuse for the tardiness? The law gives an extension if a governor is in his first year. In other words, Cellucci was arguing that his six years as "co-governor" simply didn't count. Which clears that up.

The Legend of Sleepy & Hollow

Perhaps Weld was referring to his in-flight cocktail, because that's certainly not the evaluation Cellucci's getting here on terra firma, either from his Democratic rivals or from some increasingly nervous Republicans.

However, just as George Bush lay back and tanned himself in the political sunshine of his Gulf War victory, Cellucci has let the economy do all the work for him. Not only has he failed to win any real victories in the legislature, but he's offered virtually no innovative or ambitious proposals. Instead, putting quantity ahead of quality, Cellucci throws out fistfuls of thin policy confetti.

And this is a moment that cries out for a real agenda. A booming economy has left Massachusetts flush with hundreds of millions of dollars in extra revenue. But despite the good times, serious deficiencies persist throughout the state. Some 750,000 people still lack health care -- including perhaps 500,000 full-time workers. The state's education system is in dire straits, and hundreds of school buildings desperately need repairs. Major employers almost unanimously report that they are having trouble finding workers with necessary skills. Even a smaller-government Republican must concede that these problems are serious and that the status quo isn't adequate to deal with them.

Cellucci's answer has been to propose an endless list of small, media-friendly initiatives. He has offered incremental new crackdowns on deadbeat dads. He has daringly come out against child porn on the Internet. He calls for "character education" in the classrooms. And in perhaps his most ridiculous act to date, he outlawed the formation of political action committees by prison inmates -- a threat to the Commonwealth if ever there was one -- prompting state prison guards to carry out quasi-fascist searches of jail cells for political literature.

In some cases, to be fair, Cellucci's family-oriented policies have been sincere and effective -- his years of work fighting domestic violence may be the highlight of his political career. But of late, they have been little more than the photo op of the day.

This brand of prophylactic politics prompted even the Boston Globe -- whose generally gentle coverage has played no small role in Cellucci's extended political honeymoon -- to weigh in with a story noting Cellucci's "almost exclusive emphasis on such noncontroversial and politically safe initiatives," many of which were ideas co-opted from the legislature or resurrected from years past. "Politics by props" is how GOP consultant-analyst Kevin Sowyrda (who is neutral in the governor's race) puts it.

At times, Cellucci resembles the worst of Bill Clinton -- he of the school uniforms, the V-chip, and umpteen dinky, symbolic tax credits -- writ small; but Clinton, crucially, also talks about the big stuff, like Social Security and race relations.

That Cellucci traffics in mere props is bad enough. It's even worse when the props then melt away. For a characteristic moment of cotton-candy leadership, think back to Cellucci's vaunted State of the State address.

Cellucci limited his speech to just two issues: education and taxes. On the first, his bid idea was a plan to hire 4000 new teachers. If this nice, round number sounds more like a scripted sound bite than the result of serious deliberation, that's because it almost certainly is. It turns out that Virginia governor James Gilmore had proposed exactly the same idea in his 1997 campaign. And, lo and behold, Cellucci and Gilmore share the same political consultant: GOP media whiz Stuart Stevens.

"The least he could have done was say 3500, or 4500," notes Democratic consultant Michael Goldman. "At least fake it!"

But fake it he couldn't. When Cellucci released his budget at the end of the month, he didn't even provide enough money to hire the teachers.

One thing you can say for the 4000-teachers proposal -- it's not as silly as the "character education" idea. What exactly Cellucci means here is still unclear, but the concept manages to sound both sinister and absurd. It would also seem to clash with the basic tenets of his philosophy of smaller, less intrusive government. Has he now decided -- to borrow the language of the right -- that a bunch of state bureaucrats know better than working families how to shape their kids' characters?

Rising from the banal clutter of all this shallow gimmickry is Cellucci's one truly ambitious proposal: a plan to cut taxes by $1.5 billion per year.

Let's lay aside ideological objections -- say, to the way the cut would drastically favor the state's richest citizens -- and judge Cellucci here on his own terms. For years, he has ridiculed the fiscal recklessness of the Dukakis administration. Now, even most conservative economists say the state can't risk his massive, unconditional cuts while struggling to fund education reform, pay off huge capital debts, and complete the Big Dig.

Meanwhile, Cellucci refuses even to take a position on a new proposal to raise the state minimum wage, and has no serious ideas for reforming campaign finance. And, as Malone points out, though he's spent the past seven years in an administration that's railed against big government, he hasn't even delivered a plan to downsize his administration.

Some political insiders suggest that Cellucci is suffering from the failings of what is repeatedly characterized as a "B-team" staff -- a mix of young aides and consultant/advisers who are more interested in their lobbying fees than in state policy. Weld, they say, was smart enough to take care of himself. But Cellucci needs more help.

Indeed, complacent as he seems to be, Cellucci could be one stock-market dive away from losing the only clear rationale for his candidacy -- a good economy. And some Democrats argue that it won't require an economic downturn to unsettle the voters: they anticipate dismal results from standardized exams that Massachusetts students will take for the first time next month, creating a sense of crisis around public education -- and, perhaps, outrage at the Weld-Cellucci administration.

"It's Paul Cellucci's election to lose," says Sowyrda, the GOP consultant. "But I think to prove to people that he's more than just an inheritor of the crown, he needs to produce initiatives that have only his fingerprints on them." The advice: define yourself before others do it for you. "We still haven't seen Paul Cellucci after a million dollars in ads are run against him," Sowyrda says.

Deep doo-doo?

One theme Malone has already cultivated, effectively if hubristically, is a parallel between himself and Ronald Reagan. The idea is that Malone is the courageous, principled, and ideologically pure leader. (This assault from the right will keep Malone alive and kicking in the primary. But should he somehow upset Cellucci, his ardent conservatism will haunt him in the general election.)

Far clearer than any parallel between Malone and the Gipper, though, is one between Paul Cellucci and Reagan's successor. Cellucci used to be one of George Bush's most enthusiastic political allies in Massachusetts, giving early support to Bush's 1980 presidential campaign and organizing the state for his 1988 effort.

Like Bush, Cellucci is a passionless, uninspiring creature of the System. And one suspects that, also like Bush, Cellucci sees the job of executive as more of a crowning career move than an irresistible mission -- more a trophy than a generalship in the war of political ideas.

Cellucci's fate, like Bush's, may yet turn unexpectedly. If the economy bottoms out, or if voters panic in the wake of those standardized tests, Cellucci will have a thin record and little vision to fall back on. Fond memories of Bill Weld will not earn him four more years in the corner office.

Shortly after he succeeded Weld last July, Cellucci acknowledged to the New York Times that he was, in effect, auditioning for the job of governor. "If I do a good job, it will give me the credibility to be a competitive candidate next year," he said.

Don't call us, Paul -- we'll call you.

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.