The $4 million man

He might be any other middle-aged businessman in a jacket, tie, and sensible glasses -- but for the fact that he is reciting a quirky little poem as he stands near an elevator in the nearly deserted FleetCenter: "An ant on the tablecloth/ Ran into a dormant moth/ Of many times his size/ He showed not the least surprise."

The poetry-spouting fellow is Alan D. Solomont. An hour earlier, Solomont had been part of a panel discussion of the upcoming Democratic National Convention. Having been involved in five presidential campaigns, including Senator John F. Kerry's current White House bid, he had plenty to say, most of it earnest. But now Solomont turns jaunty as he begins to talk about one of his favorite poets, Robert Frost.

He reaches the end of Frost's "Departmental," which describes how the ant kingdom's bureaucracy mobilizes to swiftly dispatch its own dead: "It couldn't be called ungentle/But how thoroughly departmental." The wit of that final rhyme makes Solomont smile. Then he frowns and admits there is one off-putting thing about the flinty, right-leaning bard of New Hampshire. "His politics were dreadful," Solomont contends.

If you're Alan Solomont, even poetry is political.

By his own admission, he is a partisan, dyed-in-the-wool, forged-in-the-'60s liberal Democrat who has long put his money -- and that of many, many others -- where his mouth is. Solomont estimates that he has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for the Democratic Party and assorted philanthropic causes. In April, in his capacity as Massachusetts finance chairman of the Kerry campaign, Solomont spearheaded a record-setting fund-raiser for Kerry in Boston that netted more than $4 million yet relied primarily on small donations.

"I wish he was a little less good at his job," Republican strategist Ron Kaufman says with a sigh. "I'm just glad he's in Massachusetts and not in some key battleground state."

Solomont is such an avid Democrat that last week -- before Kerry decided against a plan to delay accepting the nomination and keep raising private money in order to combat President Bush's fund-raising advantage -- he actually seemed energized rather than enervated by the prospect of having more work to do. To hear Solomont tell it, there are still hundreds of thousands of "grass-roots donors" eager to give to the Democratic nominee.

Spoken like a true believer. Yet for such a passionate partisan, Solomont seems to have made few political enemies. "He cares about his candidates and his party, and works hard at it, but he's a positive guy, versus being a negative guy," says Kaufman. "There's a way to play this business and a way not to play it. . . . Alan is the kind of guy who couldn't sell Chevys if he drove a Ford." Agrees Philip Johnston, chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party: "Unlike many people in politics, it isn't just about him. He really is driven by a sense of mission."

All that notwithstanding, Solomont says he was prepared to withdraw entirely from Democratic politics if he had succeeded two months ago in his unexpected bid to become president of the University of Massachusetts.

"It's the only thing for which I was willing to walk away from partisan politics," he says. When he emerged months ago as one of two finalists for the UMass post, his 18-year-old daughter Becca joked: "So you're applying to college too?"

'A local guy'
If it was surprising, perhaps it shouldn't have been. Solomont has cycled through numerous identities in his 55 years: student protester, community organizer, registered nurse, health-care magnate, and leader of Boston-area causes that range from the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston (where he is chairman of the board) to the Boston Medical Center (where he chairs the development committee).

"I'm a local guy," he says. "I've never thought of myself as a national figure."

Solomont, who was raised in Brookline and now lives in Weston, was born at Boston City Hospital, and his mother worked there as a nurse. Because Boston Medical Center is the product of a merger between BCH and the BU Medical Center, there is a personal dimension to the way Solomont has thrown himself into the center's $50 million capital campaign for a new cancer unit.

He has brought his political fund-raising style of one-on-one persuasion to the task: Solomont and hospital CEO Elaine Ullian have hosted individual lunches for 150 potential donors, followed by a tour of the hospital and meetings with staffers and patients. During those meetings, Ullian says, Solomont emphasizes the hospital's "good social values" in providing "equal access of health care for all people." At no point, she says, does he tell campaign war stories.

"He functions in many different worlds, but when he's in this building he only talks about Boston Medical Center," Ullian says. "Only. Exclusively." Of his work for the hospital, Solomont says simply: "Of all the things I do, it's probably the thing I'm proudest of."

Yet it is as a political fund-raiser that he causes the most visible ripples. He boasts a wide network of donors, and he is a reliable donor himself, adding to his credibility, Johnston says, when it comes to asking others for money. Any national Democratic officeholder who comes to Boston -- be it Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, or House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi -- is virtually certain to ask Solomont to hold a fund-raiser, and Solomont is virtually certain to oblige. Local and state candidates also regularly seek his aid -- as did, of course, Kerry.

Cameron F. Kerry, John Kerry's brother and confidant, says the Kerry campaign is counting on Solomont's savvy as "somebody who's operated at the national level in Democratic party politics before." Under Solomont, Cameron Kerry says, the Massachusetts finance operation has raised more money for the Kerry campaign "than maybe any other part of the country, including New York."

Says Cameron Kerry: "Alan has organized it, he's kept a lot of people on target and motivated, and he's been generous with the credit -- in a game in which you get a lot of people with their elbows out trying to get credit."

Activist and insider
Solomont simultaneously shrugs off and revels in his image as an ace fund-raiser. "I'm not good-looking or smart enough to do much else, but I certainly know how to raise money," he says. "It isn't all that hard; it isn't rocket science. It comes down to a passion for what you're doing." His demeanor veers from jokey to party-line earnestness, as when he says of the countless hours he devotes to a task few would relish: "People often ask me: 'What do you get out of this?' I say: 'I get a better America.' "

National Republicans may wince at the thought that if the UMass board had said yes to Solomont's candidacy, he and his fund-raising prowess would have been removed from the equation of this hard-fought presidential campaign. When it was initially suggested he should be a candidate to succeed William M. Bulger as president of UMass, Solomont's reply was succinct: "You're crazy." But then, he says, "It started to get under my skin a little bit." He began to envision ways he could knit together the university's stakeholders: the business community, the "thought leaders," the alumni, the Legislature.

But though he had been vice chairman of the UMass board in the early 1990s and was one of two finalists for the UMass presidency, Solomont was passed over in favor of Jack Wilson, who impressed trustees during a stint as interim president. Solomont's partisan affiliations may have worked against him. In addition, although Solomont enjoys a solid business reputation, some speculated that after dealing with the controversy over William Bulger's brother, fugitive mobster James "Whitey" Bulger, the UMass board of trustees was leery of Solomont because of legal problems in which his brothers were embroiled. One brother, Jay Solomont, was in an Israeli prison on a charge of misappropriation of funds (a source close to the family says Jay was recently paroled); another, David Solomont, was accused of embezzling $1 million from a start-up firm (the case was recently dismissed after a settlement was reached).

Still, Alan Solomont's candidacy to head the five-campus, 60,000-student state university system underscored what a multifarious force he has become. After selling his elder-care company in 1996 for a reported $100 million, he has been free to do whatever he's wanted -- and what he has wanted has been to range across the realms of higher education, health care, presidential politics, and philanthropy. "I used to be a business guy who worked on politics and nonprofits on the side," he says. "When I sold my business, I decided I would spend my time in the political and nonprofit area, and do some business on the side."

In that goal, he is part of a formidable team that includes his wife, Susan Lewis Solomont, who chairs the board of the New England Aquarium and advises businesses on "strategic philanthropy" as a senior adviser at the Philanthropic Initiative.

"The word 'fund-raiser, fund-raiser, fund-raiser' keeps repeating," remarks Steve Grossman, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a longtime friend of the Solomonts. "But what I think people don't understand as well about Alan and Susan is that they have a great strategic sense, so they can synthesize and bring multiple skills to the table."

If Alan Solomont seems equal parts activist and insider, it may be a combination prefigured in part by his experience at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. He was then a Tufts student majoring in political science who had landed work as a page on the convention floor.

Somewhat guiltily, Solomont describes standing next to then-House Speaker John W. McCormack, "while in the back of the room, my peers were getting their heads beaten in." Solomont had that scene in mind the first time he met Bill Clinton. He told Clinton: "You represent, for me, a second chance for our generation to lead this country." It was a line Clinton repeated back to him after he was elected president.

Raising controversy
In the Newton office of Solomont Bailis Ventures, where Solomont scouts for promising new health-care firms, the walls are crowded with photographs that suggest the breadth of his contacts and his interests. There are photos of him with Bill Clinton and with Hillary Rodham Clinton, with former vice president Al Gore, and former US Representative Joseph Kennedy. But there are also photos of him with Ringo Starr and Emmylou Harris and Shimon Peres.

A copy of Douglas Brinkley's new biography of John Kerry sits on Solomont's desk. Solomont was among the Kerry supporters who journeyed to Iowa before the pivotal caucuses, at a time when, he says, "everyone had given up the campaign for dead. But John Kerry turned that thing around." There is a photograph of Susan Bailis, his business partner for 16 years, who died in 2000 of breast cancer.

Solomont worked on both of Clinton's presidential campaigns and was selected by Clinton in 1997 to dig the Democratic Party out of debt as national finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He remembers the Clinton years fondly, though they were not without controversy for him.

A 1997 article in Time magazine raised questions over whether Solomont had exploited his fund-raising clout to lobby then-Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala over changes in nursing home regulations. Solomont says he sought only to have HHS be more "sensitive" to nursing-home owners' concerns about a "punitive" regulatory environment, adding: "Anybody who knows Donna Shalala knows how ridiculous the allegation was, that she would bend" regulations for political reasons.

Later that year, a Republican-controlled Senate committee subpoenaed Solomont and three other Massachusetts businessmen, requiring them to provide documents in response to the committee's inquiry on whether they had obtained improper access to the Clinton administration by contributing to the Democratic Party in the 1996 election.

Solomont contends the subpoena was part of "a vindictive attack" by congressional Republicans against people associated with the Clinton White House, and notes that after he was forced to spend "a small fortune" on lawyers, he was not even deposed by the committee.

Of his influence with Democratic officeholders, Solomont maintains: "Yes, they do take my calls, they listen to me -- not because I'm holding a check but because I believe in what they're doing."

Hands-on involvement
The role of major player on friendly terms with the political establishment is a role Solomont might not have envisioned back in the late 1960s, when he joined other Tufts University students in occupying the president's office to protest a lack of minority workers in a dorm renovation project.

Now, in a collision between his past self and his present self, Solomont is a Tufts trustee who played a leading role in launching the University College of Citizenship and Public Service, a civic initiative program at Tufts. Rob Hollister, the program's dean, recalls Solomont, at one meeting, displaying an old newspaper photo of himself during his student-protest days. It was Solomont, Hollister says, who suggested adding the word citizenship to the program's title.

Nor, when he was fired in the early 1970s from a job at a nursing home due to union organizing, could Solomont have envisioned that he would one day own several nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. His stint as a community organizer in Lowell awakened a desire for more hands-on involvement in people's lives, so he got a nursing degree in 1977 at the University of Lowell (now UMass-Lowell). It was not the usual path for the holder of a bachelor's degree in political science from Tufts.

As it happened, Solomont did not work as a nurse after graduation; instead, he helped his father manage a couple of family-owned nursing homes. But the political fires were still burning. "All of a sudden, I'm a business guy," he recalls. "But I realized I could play a role in politics if I was willing to be a fund-raiser."

He started small, hosting a $50-a-head event for a state Senate candidate in a tavern, but by 1982 Solomont had graduated to a role in Michael Dukakis's gubernatorial campaign. Throughout the 1980s, he worked closely with the Dukakis administration on issues of long-term care for the elderly. When Dukakis won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, Solomont moved his fund-raising skills to a national stage, developing a network he tapped for Clinton in 1992 and 1996, for Gore in 2000, and now for Kerry.

For someone who prizes the "mission" of an institution, being denied the UMass job was a blow that still hurts. "UMass was unique," he says. Solomont doesn't rule out the pursuit of another top university job, saying that "higher education is an exciting place to be." But at the moment, he points out, "I have another presidential campaign to fall back on. . . . And this is the most important race of our generation."

It couldn't be called undramatic/ But how thoroughly Democratic.

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.