Healey's dire warnings -- and long odds

LOWELL

IF ONE HAD to reduce the Republican Party message here to a single sentence, it would be this: Disaster awaits if Massachusetts returns to one-party rule.

Kerry Healey summed that argument up in a neat piece of political jujitsu that tried to make a liability of the Democratic Party's strength.

''The Democrats hold four of the six constitutional offices in this state," she said in her speech to the Republican state convention. ''They've got 87 percent of seats in the Legislature. . . . To every voter who wants to keep two-party democracy alive in this state and hold your government accountable, I ask you to stand with us in this election."

Or, as Reed Hillman, her running mate, put it: ''Our next governor needs to be someone we can trust to keep an eye on the Beacon Hill crowd and hold them accountable when they are tempted to revert to their free-spending ways."

Dire are the consequences that will ensue if the Democrats claim the keys to the governor's office, the Republicans warned.

Special interests will dance. Taxes will soar. Spending will rocket. And, heaven forfend, children of illegal immigrants might attend the University of Massachusetts at in-state rates.

Conventions are all about laying down your themes and firing up your troops, and by those measures, Healey performed tolerably well. If a bit plodding, her speech still managed to be peppery at points.

And yet, watching the convention honor former US Senator Ed Brooke, an icon from an era when the state GOP was much more potent, one couldn't help but be struck by the slenderness of the thread by which the party's hopes hang.

Four years ago, Mitt Romney grabbed Kerry Healey from obscurity -- well, the chairmanship of the state Republican Party -- to serve as the corporeal equivalent of a can of Jim Rappaport repellent. Although painfully inexperienced, with Romney's help, Healey beat Rappaport in the primary to give the GOP an appealing ticket. And certainly there's a big difference between the relative neophyte she was then and the more confident candidate who took the stage yesterday.

Still, it will take a figure of formidable skill to continue the hold the GOP has kept on the corner office for the last 16 years by dint of luck, pluck, and bucks.

That four-victory streak has given the GOP a 10-8 edge in winning gubernatorial elections going back to 1950, and a 5-4 advantage from the 1970 contest forward.

Yet one has to peel the decades back to 1920s to find the last era when one party -- the Republicans -- won five elections in a row.

Some savvy Republican operatives are skeptical the GOP can do it again -- and these days, the top prize is about all the GOP has left.

Move beyond Healey and Hillman, and this year's Republican lineup is the weakest in modern memory. And at six senators and 20 representatives, the party's legislative ranks are at low ebb.

As for the theme of balancing Beacon Hill Democrats that Healey and Hillman struck -- and restruck -- yesterday, it certainly has worked well in the past.

Campaigning in 1990, Bill Weld portrayed then-Senate President William Bulger as a shadowy monarch sitting atop a patronage kingdom -- before becoming fast friends with him. And it proved a stunning success for Romney and Healey last time, when they campaigned against the ''Gang of Three": Democratic nominee Shannon O'Brien, House Speaker Thomas Finneran, and Robert Travaglini, then the incoming Senate president.

''I think we are going to be right back into that same argument that propelled Romney in the last 10 days [of that election]: Do you want to have total control by the Democrats?" says Senate Republican leader Brian Lees.

Yet this year that kind of construction relies strongly on straw men. None of the Democratic gubernatorial hopefuls can accurately be called a Beacon Hill insider.

As for the legislative leadership, though House Speaker Sal DiMasi remains an old-style pol, as Senate President Travaglini has proved himself not just a pragmatic moderate, but on occasion an accommodating Romney-Healey ally. As such, he's less likely to inspire the fear and loathing that a Bulger or a Finneran did.

Of course, in campaigns, perceptions are often more important than reality.

And that explains why what you saw in Lowell yesterday was a Republican Party more intent on explaining whom it stands against than what it stands for.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.