EILEEN MCNAMARA
Reilly's dirty work
It is hard to say which is more absurd : Tom Reilly trying to paint someone else as a corporate toady or Tom Reilly trying to sell himself as a hapless political naïf.
Hapless he is, but a month before the Democratic primary -- with a new 7NEWS/Suffolk University poll indicating that the attorney general is trailing his two rivals -- Reilly is playing a tried-and-true game of dirty politics.
As my colleague Joan Vennochi revealed in a column earlier this month, the Reilly campaign has been working hand in glove with a one-man crusade to tag Deval Patrick with the corporate sins of
(The effort to paint Patrick, former civil rights chief in the Clinton administration, as a corporate union buster has been so successful that Local 615 of the Service Employees International Union yesterday endorsed Patrick for his demonstrated ``commitment to fairness and justice for all workers.")
That Reilly says he didn't know what Guarino and other top advisers were up to is hardly reassuring. This is the same candidate who says he did not know about the tax troubles that forced state Representative Marie St. Fleur out of the race for lieutenant governor 24 hours after he invited the Dorchester lawmaker to be his running mate.
When he is not admitting to being out of the loop of his own campaign, Reilly is dissembling about what he did know and what he did. Did he intervene with a district attorney on behalf of a friend and campaign contributor whose two teenage daughters were killed in an apparently alcohol-fueled car crash? He concedes he made a call, but says he was not trying to squelch an investigation. Did he righteously refuse to sign off on a settlement agreement with the main contractor on the problem-plagued Big Dig project? He says he did, but US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan insists that Reilly was actually the one pushing the deal.
Negative campaign tactics are nothing new for the state's chief law enforcement officer. Patrick is getting the Lois Pines treatment. Eight years ago, Reilly, then the Middlesex district attorney, squeaked out a win for attorney general against Pines, a former state senator and regional administrator of the Federal Trade Commission. It was not pretty. When she flew past him in early fund-raising, collecting $1 million to his $400,000, his surrogates complained that Pines's fund-raising techniques were too ``aggressive" and even ``threatening."
And who was this diminutive Democrat from Newton allegedly menacing? Men like Jack Connors, the millionaire advertising executive widely known around town as a shrinking violet. Isn't Connors, a local corporate titan, just the kind of fellow disdained in Reilly's suddenly populist worldview?
Reilly might not be rich, but it is Reilly, not Patrick or Chris Gabrieli, who is corporate Boston's favorite Democrat. They have been with him from the start, his humble rental apartment in Watertown notwithstanding. Back when Pines was being so inappropriately ``aggressive," a group of business executives invited some peers to meet their pal Reilly at the Downtown Club in the Financial District.
``We are concerned that this all-important office will be in hands that will make it more bureaucratic and more regulatory with detrimental implications for the state's business climate," read the letter of invitation that was signed by, among others, Tom May of
With those friends and that history, Reilly might want to reconsider his misguided efforts to portray Patrick as a tool of the corporate elite. This is Massachusetts; voters have long memories.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
