Debating games

Efforts to expand healthcare to the uninsured in Massachusetts are collapsing this week on Beacon Hill because of a lack of leadership and political will.

The state's child welfare agencies are in such disarray that one child was beaten nearly to death despite 17 prior reports of abuse and a baby was shaken to death by a woman whose day-care center had been cited repeatedly for violating safety standards.

The state's correctional system is so overburdened that a Superior Court judge felt compelled to exceed his legal authority and transfer county inmates to state prisons in order to relieve potentially dangerous overcrowding.

And Thomas F. Reilly thinks it is too early in the campaign season to engage in an issues debate with Deval Patrick, his opponent for the Democratic nomination for governor? What is he waiting for? Plague? Pestilence?

For weeks, Reilly and Patrick have followed one another on the same stages. Yesterday, they were in Danvers at a North Shore Chamber of Commerce event. Reilly, the state's attorney general, spoke at breakfast; Patrick, a former federal civil rights prosecutor, spoke at lunch. Today, they will smile politely at one another at a forum at the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council.

It is time they engaged each another directly on the contentious issues confronting Massachusetts. Only Reilly stands in the way. Patrick has accepted numerous invitations to debate from media outlets and public interest groups in the last several weeks, but Reilly has rebuffed them all, insisting it is too soon in the campaign.

That's an understandable strategic position for a better-known candidate reluctant to raise the profile of his opponent, but it is neither very civic-minded nor historically accurate.

It was not too early for debates four years ago. The first televised debate among the five candidates vying for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2002 was held on Jan. 30 at Boston's Channel 56. Senate President Thomas F. Birmingham, state Treasurer Shannon P. O'Brien, former US labor secretary Robert Reich, former Democratic National Committee chairman Stephen Grossman, and former state senator Warren Tolman spent an hour discussing the fiscal crisis gripping Massachusetts.

''Of course, it is not too early," Patrick said yesterday. ''One of the things I have learned running a grass-roots campaign is that people have a deep hunger for serious discourse about ideas, not just sound bites about our differences or our fund-raising, but a real conversation about where we are headed. Why would we wait to have that conversation?"

That sounds a lot like what Reilly was saying in 1998 when the Middlesex district attorney and candidate for attorney general challenged his primary opponent to six debates in every region of Massachusetts. Back then, Reilly denounced his competitor, state Senator Lois Pines, for what he called her pre-primary ''debate dodge."

In a letter to Pines that April, Reilly wrote: ''The attorney general is the most important job in the Commonwealth next to that of governor. The voters of our state deserve more than a single half-hour televised debate about our vision for the office." He wrote that he was ''committed to making sure more people feel engaged and participate in the process."

Patrick , a newcomer to electoral politics, earned the right to be taken seriously last month when he scored a decisive victory over Reilly in the party caucuses. It is time for both men to address a broader audience than those party insiders.

''I know you agree with me that too few people get an opportunity to see and hear the candidates beyond a 10-second sound bite or newspaper quote," Reilly wrote to Pines six years ago. ''Let's you and I set a new standard for openness and dialogue and involve this party in what promises to be the liveliest Democratic race in this campaign season."

Reilly was right then, and he is wrong now.

Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.