In AG race, candidates stand apart -- far apart

For those who think too many political races are a choice between tweedledee and tweedledum, consider this year's contest for Massachusetts attorney general Exhibit A in the case against blow-dried uniformity.

The Democrat, Martha Coakley, is the fast-talking two-term district attorney of Middlesex County, who has prosecuted some of Massachusetts' most celebrated criminal cases. An admirer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, she keeps a small framed photograph of him in her campaign headquarters. She favors gay marriage and abortion rights, and opposes the death penalty. No Democrat challenged her in the primary.

The Republican, Larry Frisoli, is a Cambridge lawyer whose sole foray into politics was a term on the Cambridge City Council almost 30 years ago. A former Democrat who said he switched allegiance in the Reagan era, he opposes gay marriage and abortion rights, supports capital punishment in the most heinous murders, and is counting on votes from gun owners and soccer fans. (He is a hunter, and he heads the state Soccer Association.)

Frisoli entered the race only a few weeks before the state GOP convention in April, at the party's urging.

With a week until the election, Coakley and Frisoli do, however, have at least one thing in common: They have nothing good to say about each other.

Coakley said Frisoli is not a serious candidate. Indeed, she has refused to debate him because, she said, he falsely accused her of moving slowly to prosecute an alleged child abuser whose father belonged to a union that had donated to her campaign.

"Until he says something that's true or worth debating, I'm not going to waste my time," the 53-year-old career prosecutor said in a recent interview at her campaign headquarters in Charlestown.

Frisoli countered that Coakley talks tough but really isn't. He said her war chest -- Coakley has raised about $1.1 million, more than three times as much as he plans to spend -- shows she is a pawn of powerful interests. And the real reason she won't debate him, he said, is that she is scared.

"Am I so menacing?" Frisoli, 56, said in a law office decorated with soccer plaques and a mounted pheasant and a grouse that he shot. "She won't even be at a TV station the same time I'm there."

Few political analysts give Frisoli much of a chance. Coakley is district attorney of the state's most populous county.

She would be the third straight Middlesex district attorney to win an office that Democrats have had a lock on for almost 40 years. She would also be the first woman.

The North Adams native is considered one of her party's rising stars. She is nearly unflappable, as she has shown in cases ranging from the murder trial of British nanny Louise Woodward (which she tried as an assistant district attorney) to the pending trial of Neil Entwistle, who allegedly murdered his wife and infant daughter.

"She's proven herself politically skilled," said Maurice Cunningham, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, adding that Frisoli's is the "longest of longshot candidacies."

If elected, Coakley would run an office that defends the government in lawsuits and enforces consumer, healthcare, and environmental laws. Her biggest challenges might be what she does with the criminal investigation that Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly began of the Big Dig after Milena Del Valle's death in the Interstate 90 connector tunnel in July, as well as efforts to recoup money from contractors.

Coakley says she wants to be appointed a special prosecutor quickly in the Attorney General's Office if she wins on Nov. 7.

Frisoli says Coakley is ill-suited to oversee such litigation, because she has accepted thousands from lawyers who represent contractors and from unions. He would have no qualms, he said, about taking on such interests.

He vowed, for example, to introduce legislation requiring car insurers to set rates based solely on driving records.

The Cambridge native also wants to add convicted drug dealers to the state's sex-offender registry. Coakley skewered the idea as a "yellow pages" of drug dealers.

Frisoli is known for suing the North American Man/Boy Love Association on behalf of the family of Jeffrey Curley, the 10-year-old Cambridge boy who was raped and killed in 1997. The federal suit, which is pending, says the group incited the murder.

Frisoli has used another purported abuse case against Coakley. He says Coakley waited too long to indict a former Somerville police officer, Keith Winfield, allegedly for raping a girl, 2. Coakley says the charge she dragged her feet because of politics is "ludicrous."

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.