A campaign commercial in the making

FADE IN: Colonial-era music. Fife and drum corps, dressed in tricorn hats and breeches, marches in to Faneuil Hall.

PAN PAST: pipers and drummers to Governor Mitt Romney, who is marching behind them, smiling and waving.

CUT TO: Romney, at wooden desk on Faneuil Hall stage, signing bill into law. Politicians (including Senator Edward M. Kennedy ) surrounding him erupt in applause. The packed hall cheers. Romney smiles.

For a governor with presidential ambitions, yesterday's signing ceremony for the new healthcare bill was a campaign commercial waiting to be cut. As he ascended a lofty platform to a podium, Romney gazed out at the spectacle with almost incredulous delight.

''This is a politician's dream, you've got to admit that," he chuckled.

That was not lost on the mostly Democratic politicians who gathered to watch the governor sign the landmark legislation that he is likely to talk about endlessly if he runs for president.

House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi joked about the sky-high platform, which made Romney seem to the audience below like a spire in a suit, as tall as the flag poles behind him.

''Everybody's been talking about you reaching higher places," DiMasi cracked. ''I didn't know it was going to happen today."

Senate President Robert E. Travaglini joined in, too.

''It's clear to me that a campaign is taking off and flying high," he said. ''And there's a reason for that: The bill that's here in front of us this morning."

Since the bill emerged from conference committee earlier this month, the national news media have cast Romney as the genius governor who fixed the nation's most intractable problem. Newsweek's Jonathan Alter wrote that Romney was once considered a second-tier Republican presidential primary candidate. ''No more," he gushed.

Some of the Democratic lawmakers at yesterday's event were happy to adjust the spotlight in their direction. Representative Peter J. Koutoujian, a Waltham Democrat who chairs the Joint Committee on Public Health, praised Romney for making healthcare reform a priority, but said the bill was ''unequivocally a creation of the Legislature."

Underlying tensions abounded in the historic hall. Democrats were smarting at Romney's decision to raise objections to the bill at the last minute, in a Wall Street Journal column Tuesday, and then veto portions of the bill yesterday.

But the governor seemed happy to bask in the appearance of bi-partisanship and in the presence of the best-known liberal in the country, US Senator Edward M. Kennedy. He defeated Romney in the 1994 US Senate race.

Romney joked that the last time he and Kennedy were on the Fanueil Hall stage it was during a debate for that race. ''This to me feels a bit like the Titanic returning to visit the iceberg," Romney said.

In the highly scripted event, the governor's aides left few details unproduced.

Outside Faneuil Hall, arriving guests might have thought they were entering a rock concert. Television news satellite trucks turned Samuel Adams Plaza into a cobblestone parking lot. Out back, steel barricades extended halfway to Quincy Market, preventing any uninvited riffraff from wandering in without a ticket.

Inside, the stage was adorned with twin banners that announced, in Revolutionary War-era font, ''Making History in Healthcare." Aides to the governor busily passed out campaign-style buttons and programs, printed on stiff marbled paper, with the same logo.

Eric Fehrnstrom, the governor's press secretary, shrugged off a reporter's suggestion that the production could be a stage set meant to launch a presidential race.

''It's not unusual for us to take a bill signing outside the State House," he insisted.

But even Romney later said, with a laugh, that he thought the pomp and circumstance was ''over the top" and ''a bit much."

Brother Jack Rathschmidt, a Capuchin friar from Jamaica Plain and a member of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, said that a few adjustments would have made a difference.

''Visually, had we designed this," he said, looking up at the elaborately decorated stage after its politicians had gone, ''there would have been poor people up there. There would have been people of color up there."

That, he said, would have shown people who the bill was really about.

Scott Helman of the Globe staff contributed to this report.