Reilly's pit bull tactics

ATTORNEY GENERAL Tom Reilly did Chris Gabrieli and Deval Patrick an enormous favor in last night's debate. In a three-way race where just a drop of a few percentage points matter, he may have taken himself right out of the contest.

Stuck between the towering millionaire, Gabrieli, and the shorter, smoother millionaire with the grass roots, Patrick, Reilly blew a chance to play up his mere Watertown credentials. He instead took an opening question about taxes and tried to turn Gabrieli into Richard Nixon.

Reilly accused Gabrieli's campaign of leaking a report to the Globe that the Reilly campaign commissioned on the financials of Representative Marie St. Fleur. The Globe reported yesterday that two hours before Reilly announced St. Fleur as his running mate, he was given detailed information that St. Fleur had not paid student loans and the feds were after her for $12,000 in unpaid income taxes.

``The access to that report was limited, very limited," Reilly said to Gabrieli. ``The only person that had access to that report and a reason to give it to The Boston Globe was your campaign chair." Reilly said he was ``very disappointed" in Gabrieli.

There were three problems with this. One, the cheerful Gabrieli was utterly unflustered. Two, moderator and former New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen was uninterested, interrupting Reilly to move on to Patrick, who got to quip, ``Are we still on taxes?" Third, that it was shocking to see Reilly help everyone remember the dumbest moment of his race.

Back when the story broke, Reilly acted as if he had no clue to the details. Reilly even went to the extraordinary length of saying things that were clearly unreal. He said the episode proved that ``politics are not my strong suit." Huh? The attorney general claiming he does not know how to play politics?

This of course only served to remind everyone that Reilly, who has received significant money from Big Dig contractors, has no major convictions or penalties to show for a construction project that is already crumbling, with fatal results. He claimed to have saved $75 million for the taxpayers. But on a $15 billion project?

Reilly's pit bull tactics were turned briefly on Patrick, to just as little avail. He tried to bring up the mortgage loan scandal of Ameriquest, for which Patrick was once legal counsel . But Patrick, schooled in the Bill Clinton school of Teflon, had the final say, that if Reilly had such curiosity about the Big Dig, we would all be better off by now.

Reilly's self-immolation drained the debate of meaning. For all of the talk about tax cuts, newspaper reporting has already shown that we are talking minuscule amounts for individual households. Except for a brief moment where Patrick discussed merit pay for teachers, there was no serious discussion about perhaps the top social crisis facing the Commonwealth -- the preparedness of students in the state's K-12 public schools.

Reilly will undoubtedly physically stay in the race until it is over. But his only value at this point is whether he takes more votes from Patrick or Gabrieli. The man who had a chance to play the middle-class regular guy from the suburbs has now left the race to two millionaires. It will be quite entertaining to see which one of them, in the next week and a half, convinces Democratic voters who is the most regular guy with remarkable ideas.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.