Underdog Ross adds atypical voice

BROCKTON -- It was the ultimate softball question, the sort that your average politician -- especially your average candidate for governor of Massachusetts -- would have knocked out of the park without even thinking about it.

But Grace Ross thought about it. When a student at Massasoit Community College raised his hand and asked: "Do you like the Red Sox?" Ross considered the question as carefully as she had pondered other queries about healthcare and affordable housing. "I'm actually not much of a baseball fan or a football fan," she finally replied. "I like the Revolution. I'm a soccer fan."

It was enough to make a political consultant weep. What kind of candidate gives the back of her hand to the beloved Sox and the powerhouse Patriots while pledging allegiance to the most obscure sports franchise in town? Where are the votes in that? But in its directness, its embrace of the underdog rather than the winners, and its utter disregard of politics, the answer fit the profile forged by this most atypical of gubernatorial candidates.

The likelihood is somewhere between minuscule and nonexistent that Ross will take the oath of office in January. Few expect her to break into double digits in the Nov. 7 election. Yet to some students on the Massasoit campus, where many come from working-class backgrounds, Ross, 45, is the lone voice in a field of millionaires who speaks directly to, and for them.

"She's more like the average person," said Jamie Lee Porter, 19. "She took time out of her busy schedule to come talk to us regular Joes."

Stefanie Harris, 21, praised Ross's outspokenness and that she's "out there" on the issues. "Whatever she has on her mind, she says it," said Harris. "She's more on my level. She's not a millionaire. She associates better with average people."

During Ross's visit to Massasoit, a custodian, a campus security officer, and a cafeteria worker sought her out to tell her they were thinking of voting for her.

Some, though, were underwhelmed by the Green-Rainbow Party candidate. Rita Teixeira, 23, who had expressed enthusiasm for Ross before her speech, said afterward that she had not spent enough time talking about education. Other signs of cold political reality were not hard to find. Dubiously eyeing the throng waiting for Ross in a student center lounge, one student commented to another, "I'll probably vote for Healey or something." Replied the other, as they walked away, "Or Deval."

Ross got a generally enthusiastic reception from more than 100 students and campus employees in Brockton on Tuesday. But six hours later, only nine people showed up to hear her speak at a gathering of environmentalists at Quincy Market.

The audience was larger for the Wednesday night television debate on Channel 4. As with previous debates, Ross was a voluble and unavoidable force -- heartening to those who see her as a tribune for the disenfranchised, maddening to others who yearn for a face-off between the major -party candidates. (When the hopefuls were asked about their charitable contributions, Ross said only that when she has come into possession of money in the past she has given it away, but did not say how much. The answer might have surprised viewers: In the mid-1990s, when her parents died and left her an inheritance, Ross gave $433,000 to a variety of healthcare and antipoverty organizations, she told the Globe last night).

Nor does she put special emphasis in her campaign on the fact that she is openly gay. "Everybody knows it. It's on my website," she said. "I'm completely out. I'm just not acting like it's something that needs fanfare."

In large settings or small, Ross's speaking style demands that her audience pay close attention, because she thinks and talks fast. Public-policy proposals burst out of her in sometimes eye-glazing detail; there are times when she brings to mind the old line about Hubert Humphrey having more solutions than there were problems. Transitions can be abrupt.

"How many of you folks have heard of Zip cars?" she will suddenly ask before launching into a discussion of public transportation, or "How many folks have heard of cluster zoning?"

But she displays a fundamental respect for the intelligence of voters. She opened her talk at Massasoit by asking those in attendance to shout out their top priorities. The answers came fast and furious: "Education!" "Gay marriage!" "Taxes!" "War on drugs!" "Poor people!" "Healthcare!" Ross smiled and went on to talk about most of those issues, but when someone asked her a question she didn't feel equipped to answer, she said so.

It's rare, though, when she doesn't have an answer, and some voters find her persuasive. At the Quincy Market gathering, Boston Green Drinks, a monthly meeting of environmentalists, Cindy Liebman , 28, listened intently as Ross discoursed on ways to combat sprawl, revive downtowns, and adopt clean energy options.

"Well, I feel better about the world now," Liebman exclaimed at the end of the talk.

Likewise impressed were Jerrad Pierce , 28, and Andrea Atkinson, 26. Both indicated before the meeting that they were leaning toward Democratic nominee Deval L. Patrick, partly because they oppose Republican nominee Kerry Healey. But after listening to Ross, both said voting for Ross is a possibility. "She made me think, whereas before I was 'No way,' " said Atkinson.

To say that Ross is the only non millionaire in the gubernatorial field is to radically understate the matter. Because of funding cuts, she made less than $10,000 at her last job, as director of the nonprofit organization Sisters Together Ending Poverty. She has averaged between $20,000 and $30,000 a year during her 20 years as a community organizer, she said.

After living for many years in Somerville, she moved to Worcester a year ago because, she says, rents had gotten too high. She estimates that her total campaign expenditures by Election Day will amount to "tens of thousands" of dollars (most of it raised from small donations, though Ross recently contributed $6,000. ) That is a sum that any of her three rivals could burn through in a single media buy. She ranks in the low single digits in the polls.

But she has been campaigning long enough to have developed a knack for sound bites and snappy comebacks. To those who say she is for "soaking the rich," she retorts: "The rest of us have been getting soaked for a long time." On the need to focus on helping small businesses rather than trying to attract large corporations to the state: "Money that's spent locally, economists tell us, kicks around seven times. If you spend it at Wal-Mart, it's gone."

She often uses the word "we." She seems intent on persuading voters to see her fight -- whether it is for an increase in the minimum wage or a fairer tax policy -- as their fight. At Quincy Market, she told the assembled activists that the more votes she gets, the stronger the message in favor of such issues as universal healthcare.

"That's not my power," she says. "That's your power. Whatever number of votes I get, use that." At Massasoit, she boiled it down to words that could fit on a bumper sticker but that seemed heartfelt: "My life has been about us."

That life began 45 years ago in New York City, where Grace Ross was born to Hugh Ross, a choral conductor, and Ruth Ross, a visual artist. Ross attended the Dalton School, a prep school in Manhattan, where she excelled. "It's probably why I do relatively well in debates, because I was always in classes with boys," Ross said.

She went to Harvard, majoring in psychology, but was not active in campus politics apart from a few antiapartheid rallies. For one thing, she was busy working: as a waitress, a hotel maid, and doing clerical work in the Harvard billing office.

But her concern for social and economic justice was never far from the surface, and she began to focus on the relationship of communities to the broader society as she obtained a master's degree from the Harvard School of Education. In the mid-1980s, she joined the unsuccessful push to make Cambridge a "nuclear-free zone." She realized then, she said, that the best way to combat big-money campaigns was to listen and talk to people. She has worked as a community organizer ever since.

Listening and talking to people has been her campaign tactic, and that, she said, is what she will continue to do after Election Day. However unorthodox a candidate she may be, she sounds as if she has been bitten by the campaign bug. In fact, she doesn't rule out running for governor again.

"All my adult life, I've been hearing that people are apathetic," Ross said in an interview. "It's not true. Boy, do people care. It's amazing."

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.