Candidates provide a lively show
Anybody who believed the Democratic gubernatorial race lacked feeling was in for a surprise last night. The candidates smirked, pointed, scowled, sweated, and guffawed their way through a grisly hourlong debate, leaving the viewer feeling as if he had overdone it at an all-you-can-eat emotional buffet.
There were attacks and counterattacks, mainly served up by Thomas F. Reilly (Reilly to Christopher F. Gabrieli: ``You don't even have a healthcare plan!"). There were angry interruptions and petulant remonstrations (Deval L. Patrick to Gabrieli: ``We're asking you to think more broadly.")
There were jokes that had the whole room roaring with laughter (Gabrieli, explaining that he had invested $8 million in personal funds in his campaign: ``My wife's here, she just heard that statistic . . . Sorry.").
At several points, the candidates lectured one another, speaking over one another for so long that it was impossible to hear what was said. After a prolonged back-and-forth over whether Gabrieli's stem cell research plan would shut out public universities, the moderator, former governor Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, grinned tightly. ``Let's change the subject," she said.
The debate illustrated the state of the race less than two weeks before the vote. Polls have suggested that the race is nearly tied, and all three men grabbed every bit of air time they could to get their message across. The result was a debate that had the candidates trying to sound reasonable, but also aggressive, moderate but idealistic, innovative but experienced. It looked exhausting.
Reilly set the tone. The debate wasn't two minutes old when he turned and lit into Gabrieli, accusing his campaign chairman of dime-dropping a damaging story to the Globe. The visual effect of the frowning 5- foot-9-inch Reilly turning on the 6- foot-4-inch, goofily grinning Gabrieli presented a somewhat incongruous picture .
``Chris, I have to tell you, I'm very disappointed in you," Reilly said.
When it was Patrick's turn, he tried to make light of the situation: ``Are we still on taxes?"
The forum last night was a far cry from the candidates' first live televised debate in May, an issue-laden C-SPAN style meeting where it was nearly impossible to detect differences among them.
Almost every time Reilly opened his mouth, he was on the offensive, his eyes narrowed, the corners of his lips drawn down tight. Reilly made sure Patrick got his share, too. He brought up a tax lien of Patrick's and resurrected the subject of Patrick's service on the board of the parent company of Ameriquest, a mortgage company accused of predatory lending.
Patrick hit back, accusing Reilly of lax oversight of the Big Dig. He suggested Reilly was not the enemy of big business he claimed to be. ``You ought to be proud of it, too," Patrick said.
Gabrieli piped up, earnestly, to laughter: ``I got some more ideas on how to grow the economy."
Patrick seemed to struggle at times to find the right tone, as he inserted bits of his stump speech, which in its natural setting is a high-minded appeal for better government and civic participation. Stuffed into sound bites between barbs, the oratory sometimes seemed misplaced.
Gabrieli was at his strongest in the first half of the debate, deflecting pointed questions with humorous asides and meeting Reilly's attacks with an I'll-take-thehigh-road response. Gabrieli noted he was the party's nominee for lieutenant governor in 2002 -- ``I think my character's pretty clear," he said -- and then asked Reilly why he didn't use his time to talk about policy matters. ``That's the future of our state, not personal attacks," Gabrieli said.
But in the second half, the bickering drew Gabrieli in. He found himself sucked into a mosh pit of rhetoric about stem cell research and public universities that was almost unintelligible.
This time it was Reilly who cracked up the room.
``It can't all be about Harvard, OK?" Reilly said. 