There is a difference

They may seem like dull and duller, but Paul Cellucci and Scott Harshbarger have a lot less in common than it appears

by Michael Crowley

For such a white-bread pair of politicians, Paul Cellucci and Scott Harshbarger have conducted a startlingly grotesque campaign for Massachusetts governor. In Paul Cellucci, the Republican acting governor, we have a monotonal bully who would still be a State House backbencher were it not for the cult of Bill Weld. In Harshbarger, the Democratic attorney general, we have a robotic lawyer who, one senses, could sit through a movie like Airplane! and not get any of the jokes.

The level of debate in this campaign was embodied by Monday night's third and final candidates' debate, a caustic and nonsensical shouting match that culminated with the acting governor pointing at Harshbarger and employing that well-worn line from A Few Good Men: "You can't handle the truth!"

A painful moment, but hardly the campaign's worst. This is, after all, the contest that has seen Harshbarger supporters dressed up as racing jockeys to suggest that compulsive gambling explains Cellucci's $700,000 in personal debt. That has included a Cellucci aide's declaration that Harshbarger is "a complete sleazebag." That has even featured a Cellucci advertisement linking Harshbarger to witches -- witches! -- and implying he might throw the Easter Bunny in jail.

Making it even harder to vote for either of these guys is the apparent similarity of their platforms. Both men have proposed a major tax cut. Both support roughly similar increases in the state budget. Both call education their top priority; they even want to hire exactly the same number of teachers (4000). Both are pro-choice, and both would raise the minimum wage.

So what's the difference?

It is that, at their philosophical cores, Paul Cellucci and Scott Harshbarger fundamentally disagree over the role of government. Harshbarger is driven by the liberal Democratic ideal of a vibrant, activist state. Paul Cellucci embodies the conservative movement's suspicion of anything more than the bare necessities of governing. Neither man is extreme in his views, but both hold them firmly. Harshbarger wants government to lead; Cellucci wants it to get out of the way. "In short," says the liberal activist Jim Braude, "this election is about the importance of government."

Which of these visions prevails will have important consequences for the state over the next four years. Massachusetts enjoys low unemployment and surplus tax revenues, but it has become clear that the economy can do only so much on its own. The gap between rich and poor continues to grow. The number of people without health insurance is rising and may be as high as 750,000. The state's public school system is in a state of physical and intellectual disrepair. A shocking one-fifth of Massachusetts adults are functionally illiterate. People forced off the dole by welfare reform are struggling to find decent jobs.

In basic terms, Paul Cellucci believes that maintaining a pro-business, anti-government approach is the best way to address these problems. Scott Harshbarger believes that where the private sector has failed, government must step in. That's the real difference, and it's one that will affect the course of the state long after the shouting and the attack ads have ceased.

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The 1990 election of Bill Weld and Paul Cellucci represented the beginning of a new era in Massachusetts politics. Theirs was a regime of deep budget cuts, big tax breaks for businesses, and a stern overhaul of the state's welfare system. When Weld jetted off to Washington in July of 1997 for an ill-fated duel with Jesse Helms over his nomination as US ambassador to Mexico, Cellucci -- whose political career had been withering in Weld's shadow -- suddenly inherited the legacy of a man who had attracted the attention of the entire country.

As his first year as acting governor made clear, Paul Cellucci is Weld Lite. His libertarianism is less pronounced than Weld's, his faith in free markets and supply-side economics less explicit. But Cellucci's status-quo message demonstrates that he shares Weld's opinion that government works best when it gets out of the private sector's way. Since succeeding Weld, Cellucci has unveiled no major new initiatives, preferring to celebrate good economic news and tirelessly promise further tax cuts.

Where Cellucci has made his name on a philosophy of scaling back government, Scott Harshbarger has made a career of harnessing its potential. A Harvard Law School graduate who was Middlesex district attorney from 1978 to 1990 and has been attorney general since 1990, he has always taken an activist approach toward governing, pushing his office's reach in nontraditional directions. He is a religious man driven by a sense of injustice, who sees government as a tool for helping and protecting people.

Though they sound alike when calling each other names in campaign debates, Scott Harshbarger and Paul Cellucci are two very different men, with different value systems and different attitudes toward the role of the governor as public leader. Just as he views the very mission of government with suspicion, Cellucci has shown little interest in articulating social values from the State House. Harshbarger, by contrast, would bring a moral authority to the governor's office that hasn't been seen since the days of Michael Dukakis. It is the difference between a governor who sees himself as little more than a cost-controlling bean counter and one who sees himself as a voice of public conscience.

That Cellucci is so skeptical of government is ironic in itself. He is, after all, a career politician -- a former Hudson town selectman and long-time state legislator before he became lieutenant governor. Yet despite his years of experience in government, Cellucci has been plainly ineffective in the governor's office. Prior to this campaign he was a virtual nonentity on Beacon Hill, overshadowed by Senate president Tom Birmingham and, especially, by the iron-willed House Speaker Tom Finneran, who came to be known as "the real acting governor."

Cellucci has been so ineffective in part because he's had so little to offer. His skimpy policy agenda consists almost solely of a call for a $1.2 billion-per-year income-tax cut and 4000 new schoolteachers. Even when the legislature took up such seemingly popular issues as the effort to rein in health maintenance organizations, Cellucci sat invisibly on the sidelines. He seemed tentative, flat-footed, uncomfortable. Perhaps this paralysis reflected something of an existential crisis for the acting governor. Here was a man who had spent seven years with Bill Weld preaching an anti-government gospel, and now he was the face of government itself. Cellucci didn't seem to know how to respond.

Meanwhile, as Weld and Cellucci pushed the Massachusetts political debate to the right, Scott Harshbarger steadfastly followed a liberal course. As attorney general, he has been a crusader, using his office as a vehicle for major battles against Big Tobacco, assault weapons, and corporate polluters. He placed a special priority on his civil-rights division, making it one of the nation's best. Harshbarger also displayed the righteousness he acquired as a Pennsylvania preacher's son, fighting against legalized gambling and adamantly opposing the death penalty.

That righteous streak has made Harshbarger fervent enemies. Paul Cellucci has been endorsed by dozens of state Democrats who despise Harshbarger's aggressive and highly public investigations of popular party figures -- inquiries that didn't always produce indictments but often left reputations ruined.

Yet the squeaky-clean crusader in Harshbarger sets him clearly apart from Cellucci, who understands the machinery of state government but has shown little sensitivity for the ethical and moral imperatives of public office. Although no one accuses Cellucci of being corrupt, he has promoted or tolerated many of the worst business-as-usual practices of Beacon Hill. Some of his closest advisers are highly paid lobbyists who represent business interests before the legislature. Under Bill Weld, Cellucci was well known for overseeing the administration's patronage machine, doling out hundreds of government jobs to friends and allies; some of the Democratic endorsements he's received appear linked to those favors. And Cellucci has completely ignored strong and growing evidence that his insurance commissioner, Linda Ruthardt, has improperly favored industry interests. It is difficult to imagine such practices under a moralist like Harshbarger. Voters will also have to judge whether to accept Cellucci's patently misleading explanation of how he accumulated $700,000 in personal debt.

Cellucci's tin ear for the moral dimensions of office was betrayed by his reprehensible campaign ad mocking Harshbarger's "priorities." Cellucci's ad ridiculed Harshbarger for banning Christmas decorations in public areas of the attorney general's office, and for defending the witches of Salem from harassment. It was a clever piece of work, complete with a criminal lineup showing a chalk-faced witch, a Santa Claus, and a man in a pink Easter Bunny suit who cowers from Harshbarger's nefarious reach.

Clever, but callous. The intent was to portray Harshbarger as a liberal extremist, but the effect was to reveal that Cellucci doesn't take seriously the duty of public officials to respect diversity and fight discrimination. How, for instance, does he think someone with the right "priorities" should have responded to reports that Wiccans, who observe a religion recognized by state and federal law, were being stalked by a group of religious fundamentalists?

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Of course, a governor does far more than set a tone for the public. He sets a concrete policy agenda for the state. And though Scott Harshbarger and Paul Cellucci may share the same yes-or-no positions on such litmus-test issues as abortion and the minimum wage, their contrasting philosophies translate into plainly different approaches to governing.

Cellucci insists that, given the strength of the economy, there's no reason for the state to change its course. But after eight years, the hands-off Weld-Cellucci approach is starting to show its limits. Even a sizzling economy hasn't significantly boosted wages or kept the number of people without health insurance from rising. Cellucci's answer to most of these problems is to stay the course and rely on the elixir of a good economy. Harshbarger argues that a period of calm and prosperity is a time for the state to act. "This is a very special moment of opportunity," Harshbarger said in a recent interview. "We have a $1 billion surplus as a way to articulate our values." This, though he too often fails to say so, is the real rationale for Harshbarger's candidacy -- not Paul Cellucci's personal debts.

Cellucci and Harshbarger agree on education as a top priority. Indeed, public schools appear to be the one area where Cellucci, a backer of a multibillion-dollar 1993 state education-reform law, tolerates massive state spending. But what sets Harshbarger apart is his emphasis on adult education and worker training, which serves as a cornerstone of his platform.

Even as the economy booms, both employers and labor leaders agree that the state's work force isn't keeping up with the global economy. "While many of our citizens -- particularly those with college educations and high-tech skills -- are prospering," warned a 1997 report by the respected nonpartisan think tank MassINC, "the economy's demand for skilled workers is leaving behind hundreds of thousands of less-educated workers who are falling out of the broad middle class." The MassINC report showed that basic literacy and specialized job training can increase workers' wages by thousands of dollars, and concluded: "We can improve our state's competitive position more quickly -- and its distribution of income -- by combining education reform with a major adult-education initiative." Cellucci has vetoed funding for such programs. For Harshbarger, his worker-training plan -- a modest $25 million increase in spending for adult-education programs and new training partnerships between businesses and community colleges -- represents the ideal of activist government that is not Big Government.

The dilemma of how to help the 13 percent of Massachusetts citizens who lack health insurance is especially revealing of the candidates' philosophical differences. Although Cellucci brags about a state program that has covered more than 150,000 people, he actually opposed the cigarette-tax hike that pays for it. Continuing to put his anti-tax vow ahead of new health care funding, Cellucci prefers to encourage private businesses to cover their employees.

Harshbarger, by contrast, thinks cigarette taxes should pay for public health insurance. Here, the attorney general does back a sizable new government program. He would directly extend state coverage to another 200,000 people, relying largely on money from an anticipated national tobacco settlement. Health care specialists widely agree that Cellucci's plan wouldn't go nearly as far.

Even when smart, activist government hardly requires any spending at all, the candidates disagree. Take the state's 1995 welfare-reform law, one of the signature achievements of the Weld-Cellucci administration. Although the state welfare rolls have shrunk since the law took effect, there's scant evidence that former recipients, most of them with little education, are finding decent jobs that will help them escape poverty. As the first mothers who still haven't found work begin to lose benefits this December, the problem will only grow more urgent.

Common sense, and the experience of other states, suggests that throwing uneducated people into the work force condemns them to dead-end minimum-wage jobs. Studies have shown that training and education lead to higher wages, but the state won't let welfare recipients count those programs toward their new 20-hour-per-week work requirement. When several of Cellucci's economic advisers recommended that the policy be changed, he vowed to fire them. Harshbarger supports the exemptions.

Cellucci portrays these modest proposals as evidence that Harshbarger would return the state to the "bad old days" of the late 1980s -- or, as Harshbarger puts it in his strange syntax: "Invest -- he's making that a code word for `Aha! Spending!' "

But Harshbarger isn't talking about massive spending increases so much as using government creatively and carefully -- investing a small amount of money to improve the state's work force; thinking about the long-term prospects for welfare recipients; taxing tobacco to pay for health care. (If anything, fiscal conservatives should be skeptical not of Harshbarger's modest spending proposals but of his insistence, along with Cellucci, on cutting the state income tax to 5 percent.)

Besides, it's folly to suggest that this legislature would spend the state into oblivion under any governor. Last time anyone checked, the powerful House Speaker Tom Finneran -- a strict fiscal watchdog who recently warned Harshbarger not to veer off to the "loony left" -- didn't look ready to sign off on any spending sprees. "Scott is a responsible and effective leader, and he understands the unavoidable limitations that come with state budgets," Finneran says. A compliment, to be sure, but one seemingly laced with warning as well.

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Sadly, many of these important differences between the candidates will likely be lost on those thousands of voters who have followed the campaign distantly through TV ads and impressionistic headlines. To them, the election may come down to Cellucci's personal debt, or Harshbarger's annoying tendency to interrupt during debates. Certainly, few people will be casting votes for anyone they see as a heroic figure.

How did it come to this? There was a time when the governor's race promised to be a compelling drama. Remember that two years ago, Joe Kennedy looked like our next governor, and that Bill Weld was flirting with the idea of a third term, if only to "kick Joe K's ass." Even Republican state treasurer Joe Malone, who mounted a failed primary challenge to Cellucci, would have been a more dynamic and charismatic candidate than either Cellucci or Harshbarger.

But the charisma deficit in this race doesn't make the results matter any less. At a time when both Congress and states around the country are struggling over what to do with record budget surpluses, Massachusetts can set an example. The state's actions could signal a national return to progressive values now that the Republican revolution has lost its potency. More important, Massachusetts has a chance to confront neglected social and economic needs. That opportunity should not be wasted.

The state's voters, subjected to a trashy and shallow campaign, may ultimately have little sense that this election means anything. But Tuesday's choice will have a profound influence on the direction of state government and the tone of our political debate. If we begin to restore some faith in our government, perhaps we'll even be treated to a more edifying campaign the next time around.

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