On the trail, Mihos exudes a joy no polls can dampen
DANVERS -- It wasn't a banner day for the Mihos-for-Governor campaign. With exactly two weeks left in the race, independent candidate Christy Mihos awoke one day last week to a poll that indicated his support was slipping. Once he had drawn 15 percent of potential voters polled; now, he was down to 9.
But as he shook hands at an expansive Greek cafe, the candidate looked positively gleeful. Cameras were following; elderly women were rushing up to hug him; Mihos, 57, kept repeating lines like "You're going to be my boss in January!"
His daughter, Ashley, 25, smiled from a few feet away. These days, she said, her family is tired. But her father is in bliss.
"He loves it," she said. "He loves politics, and this has been his dream, to run for governor. He's having a great time."
Say this about Christy Mihos: Retail treats him well. The convenience store magnate with the Brockton accent seems tireless shaking hands, outlining his platform points with grocery-business analogies ("Have you ever tried to sell anything to Wal-Mart?") and exchanging pleasantries with a restaurateur in Greek.
He's facile with a catchphrase; "sweet nothings" was the one he used in a debate to describe Democrat Deval L. Patrick's rhetoric. He has a knack for getting noticed, most famously with "Heads Up," his animated ad that imagines politicians and Big Dig engineers deceiving themselves in a manner that is unprintable in a family newspaper.
Yet the attention he's managed to generate, so far, hasn't translated to traction in the polls. Mihos has made himself a local celebrity, but he's sometimes criticized for a lack of big ideas. At forums, when he isn't hurling critical bons mots, he sometimes stands by in awkward silence.
When he's the only candidate in the room, though, Mihos has the air of someone living out a fantasy.
There's only one thing he doesn't love about running for office, he says: the pressure to wear makeup.
"I won't do it," Mihos said. ". . . You're going to get me, warts and all, and pockmarked and busted tooth and glasses. I am me. I mean, I don't want to be anyone else but me."
Holly Robichaud, a Republican political consultant, got a sense of that Mihos stubbornness fairly early in his campaign. Impressed by his outspokenness during his years on the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, she signed on in September of last year as a strategist. Five months later, she quit.
"I wanted to work for a serious campaign that really wanted to win," Robichaud said. "And after working with him for a couple of months, it was quite clear that he was not interested in running a real campaign."
She said she concluded that he would not do what it would take to win. Among their conflicts, she said, was her insistence that Mihos run as a Republican, and not an independent, in part to add rigor to his campaign. Others say that Mihos's strategy -- to appeal to unenrolled voters by positioning himself as the only true outsider in the campaign -- might have worked if Patrick had lost the Democratic primary to Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly.
Mihos says he has no regrets. He has decorated his campaign headquarters, several floors of office space a few steps from the State House, with the trappings of a man who doesn't care about political parties. There are pictures of Ronald Reagan and Robert F. Kennedy; an award Mihos received, during his Turnpike Authority days, from a group of Democratic town committees.
And from the street sometimes, there's a clear view of the candidate himself. Mihos's staff says he likes to perch in a chair beside the picture window, where he makes phone calls and waves to people walking by. He's been known to usher school groups inside for brief lessons in politics.
It's all in keeping with his outsider persona, said Bill Hillsman, the Minneapolis political consultant who produced Mihos's eye-catching ads. Hillsman has worked for a string of renegade candidates, from former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura to independent Kinky Friedman, the entertainer running this year for governor of Texas.
"A lot of professional politicians have been programmed to death, and they're basically robots at this point," Hillsman said.
Still, when Hillsman conceived of the "Heads Up" ad, which featured characters with their heads between their legs, Mihos and his staff balked. "We looked at it, and we just said, no, we're not doing this," Mihos said. "Then when Milena del Valle died [in the Interstate 90 connector tunnel collapse], I went, 'What was I thinking?' "
At first, Mihos said, he insisted that the ads air only between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. He changed his mind last month, he said, when an injury to his back and rotator cuff forced him to spend a few days off the campaign trail, watching daytime television at home.
"If this is what kids are watching coming home from school," he said he told himself, "put the darn ad up."
Now, he makes no apologies and hints at another cache of eyebrow-raising ads in the campaign's final days. "This business is so serious and so overwhelming at times," he said. "Sometimes you've just got to go at it from a less-than-dramatic point of view and get your point across."
Mihos has poured some of his own fortune into the race. By mid-October, he had given his campaign a little more than $3 million, according to the Office of Campaign and Political Finance. He has raised only $355,593 from others.
Some of his own relatives have donated to his opponents. Earlier this month, the Boston Herald reported that Mihos's brother, sister, and sister-in-law have contributed to Healey. Months earlier, those same relatives, plus Mihos's mother, gave to Reilly.
"It is what it is," Mihos said last week. "If I get the votes of everybody who has a sibling rivalry or some type of family squabble, I win going away."
Besides, his wife's side of the family is on board. In Danvers, his entourage consisted of his daughter, his father-in-law, and his brother-in-law, Arthur Argeros, who joined the campaign as treasurer after he was fired from an administrative job at the MBTA. (Argeros has filed a suit against the agency, contending that his firing was politically motivated. His bosses, at the time, said it was part of a management restructuring.)
Mihos's wife, Andrea, who once said she didn't want him to run for office, now happily pitches in. Before he leaves at 6 a.m. for a day of campaigning, she said, she walks with him on the beach outside their Cape Cod home. She fields questions from voters in the grocery store. When they're alone together, she's the driver.
His natural base of voters, Mihos insists, are frustrated working people, which is why he says he doesn't believe the polls.
"Do you know anyone that's been polled?" he asked his brother-in-law in Danvers. "Neither do I. The people that are going to be with me are out working every day. They're not home."
There is, his advisers say, a Christy Mihos victory scenario. It could happen, Hillsman says, if Patrick's commanding lead somehow slips. (If the Democrat is felled by an attack ad, Hillsman says, it won't have come from the Mihos camp.) It could happen if Election Day sees an unexpected turnout of grumpy independents.
In the meantime, Mihos casts himself as an alternative. In Danvers, he engaged Steve Lamson, 54, an assistant high school basketball coach, on the high costs of high school sports. Here, Mihos pitched his Proposition One, a bid to devote 40 percent of annual state tax revenues to local aid and slash all sport and activity fees from public schools.
Lamson said he was impressed, though "I don't think he's got much of a chance." There were more words of praise -- from a gray-haired woman who gave him a bear hug, a holistic nutritionist who said she liked his smile, a guy with "Chucky Sr." embroidered on his windbreaker sleeve, who said, "I'm going to push for you, buddy!"
At times, though, Mihos appears more novelty candidate than contender. Last week, before an appearance on the NECN show "Wired with Jim Braude," Mihos said he looked forward to sparring with the host: "That's debate prep for me. He just fires these things at you in rapid succession." But for the most part, Braude only wanted to talk about the Big Dig.
Mihos still managed to get in some memorable lines. When Braude asked what it would take to corral the Big Dig, Mihos answered with trademark terseness and a twinkle in his eye: "Courage. Guts. Stones."
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. 