In from the cold

On Beacon Hill, political clout is proportional to the size of your office. And for the past six years, Ruth Balser has worked out of a cubicle.

But in April, the Newton Democrat moved into a corner office, with windows and leather seats. She has since hired three people and was appointed cochairwoman of one of 26 joint committees at the State House. She's become the go-to person for city and school officials who want quick answers about how state legislation will affect Newton.

''In Newton politics, she is very solidly left-wing," said Anne Larner, chairwoman of the School Committee. ''She is not a middle-of-the-roader. But she is so civil, people don't get [uptight] over things. While she speaks her mind with confidence, she's easy to talk to."

Balser, 56, was elected state representative in 1998, filling a seat held for 19 years by David B. Cohen before he became Newton's mayor. She emerged from a three-way Democratic primary, and her seat hasn't been contested since.

But during the past six years, her role was marginalized because on multiple occasions she publicly disagreed with the former speaker of the house, Thomas M. Finneran. The speaker, whose eight-year reign ended last fall, was indicted last week on charges that he had lied about his role in redrawing legislative boundaries. Balser was among those questioned by the FBI about Finneran.

Because of her discomfort with Finneran's politics, she developed a familiar role as an outsider, a leader of a small gang of dissidents. Now, she is grappling with how to handle a new label: leader.

''I think that some people were surprised when she became a member of leadership, because they saw her as someone who previously had a dissident role," said Representative Lida Harkins, a Needham Democrat who was part of the leadership under Finneran and the current house speaker, Boston Democrat Salvatore F. DiMasi. ''She expressed to me for a number of years that she wanted to be a fuller participant here."

Balser is a self-professed ''liberal Democrat" who strongly supports gay marriage, argued in favor of stem-cell research, and traveled to Florida to campaign for John Kerry. She has championed politically difficult causes such as increases in special education funding and more care for mental health patients -- issues Balser says are ''often neglected areas of public policy."

But to really get a handle on Balser's politics, you have to look at her approach to traffic -- and, in particular, stop signs.

''We used to jokingly refer to her as the Queen of the Four Way Stop Signs, because that's one of the things she was most concerned with in her district, Ward 8," said Alderman Verne Vance, who was the board's president when Balser joined in 1988. ''As a result of that, we put in a fair number of four-way stop signs over there."

When a vitriolic debate erupted over whether to make Hammond Street one-way to cope with increased traffic, Balser, who is trained in clinical psychology, came up with a solution: Put stop signs up where Hammond Street intersects with Suffolk Road.

That debate showed two things about Balser: first, her ability to sort through all sides of an issue and zero in on the core problem, which in this case involved slowing down traffic; and, second, her ability to persuade. She managed not just to win over the aldermen but also a traffic engineer.

In her retirement speech to the Board of Aldermen after she served four terms, Balser joked: ''In the 1960s, I held signs that said 'Stop the War.' Now, my signs just say 'Stop.' "

She still takes pride in her roadside achievements. ''There are, to this day, stop signs that I drive by and think of as mine," she said in a recent interview.

Balser has become known as a fierce, persistent debater, but she also has gained a reputation for being calm and compassionate, a listener.

Some of this, perhaps, comes from her professional background. She was the first psychologist elected to the Massachusetts Legislature. When the House was debating a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage last year, Balser quoted an American Psychological Association report to rebut arguments that same-sex marriage is bad for children.

''The whole profession is about respecting each individual's point of view, so my whole orientation has been that way," Balser said in an interview. ''That's actually the mission of psychology -- respect. It's my job to listen."

She recently worked with George Foord, a former co-vice president of the Newton Taxpayers Association, on a program that offers property tax discounts to seniors.

''In my opinion, she is probably one of the best and the most effective people in the Legislature. I really don't have enough good things to say about her," said Foord, who indicated that he leans Republican. ''This sounds weird for a politician, but she's really empathic. Our politics don't always work very well, but she's extremely honest, and she doesn't hold back."

It was not holding back that helped get her in trouble with Finneran.

''It wasn't so much that I, as an individual, had differences with the previous speaker," Balser said. ''It was that my constituency had differences with the speaker, and that was a problem."

Balser stood up to Finneran with her support for the Clean Elections Law. She was one of three Democrats to vote against the entire fiscal 2001 budget because it included a provision that lowered the standard of care for special education students.

Five days after Balser argued in favor of limiting Finneran's time as speaker, Finneran removed her from a prized seat on the Insurance Committee and placed her on an obscure panel on personnel and administration, which Balser once called a ''virtual noncommittee" since it rarely met.

Then, during the last House redistricting, in 2001, Balser was placed in a district with Representative Kay Khan, another Newton Democrat and Finneran opponent.

Finneran told Khan and Balser about the merger in a meeting on Oct. 17, 2001, one day before the map was publicly released. Federal investigators pointed to that meeting as part of their case against Finneran, who was indicted last week on perjury charges for testifying under oath that he had no prior knowledge of the redistricting maps.

Balser, who in the end retained her separate district, declined to talk about her role in the Finneran case, citing ongoing litigation.

Once Finneran stepped down, Balser threw her support behind DiMasi. When DiMasi shook up the leadership in February, merging several committees and laying out his new leadership team, Balser was named chairwoman of the new Joint Committee on Mental Health and Substance Abuse, a post that comes with a $7,500 stipend. Made up of six senators and 11 representatives, the committee already has 20 bills before it.

Balser is clearly excited about her new post, raising her eyebrows and scooting up in her chair as she talks about what she hopes to achieve. As with that traffic tangle in Newton years before, Balser wants to address the core issues of the problem -- in this case, the mental health system. When a mentally ill person is poor, it's not enough to provide housing, she said. When such a person commits a crime, prison isn't the whole solution. Such measures, she said, may quell the problem, but they don't solve it. Instead, she argues, treatment must accompany a housing voucher or a prison term.

Balser came by her sympathy for society's outcasts as a girl growing up in Queens, the daughter of two public school teachers. Her family was Jewish and had friends who were refugees from the Nazis who frequently talked about the Holocaust. In high school and college during the '60s, Balser was active in civil rights and antiwar demonstrations.

She receieved a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Rochester in 1969 and worked as a mental health worker at several area hospitals. In 1982, after getting her doctorate in clinical psychology, she opened a private practice in Newton, which she maintained until just before she ran for the Legislature.

Balser lives in a two-story Colonial near the Brookline border in Oak Hill. Divorced, she has two sons, both of whom are studying for doctorates, one in philosophy and the other in cognitive psychology.

She is passionate about hiking, and took up snowshoeing this winter. Another big part of her life is the Newton Centre Minyan, a highly participatory, egalitarian Jewish group in which all roles are open to both men and women. ''I wouldn't belong to anything," Balser said, ''if that wasn't the case."

Matt Viser can be reached at maviser@globe.com.