Patrick rides the momentum and sticks to his playbook

As his campaign van sped along the rain-swept Massachusetts Turnpike, Deval L. Patrick was asked to name the most exciting thing that has happened on the campaign trail since the September primary.

Riffing on a paragraph of his stump speech, Patrick said he was amazed not just at the well-connected lawyers and business people who are lining up to help him, but at "the wait staff and the cleaning crew and the security guards, that they're excited too."

"That is energizing for me," he said.

So how about the second most exciting thing, something he has not already told thousands of people?

After a long pause, he returned to the stump speech, saying: "The most exciting thing is how it's not a campaign anymore. It's a movement."

The Democratic gubernatorial nominee is a curious blend of caution and confidence these days. Polls suggest he has vaulted far ahead of his Republican opponent, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey. He moves around the campaign trail like a rock star, regularly drawing crowds of 400 to 500 people, many of them carrying cameras or something for Patrick to sign.

But, 22 months after he first floated an improbable run for governor, Patrick is following the traditional playbook of a candidate with a comfortable lead a week before Election Day. His schedule is packed with rallies -- he calls them community meetings -- where he rarely fields an unfriendly question.

He has spurned Healey's repeated entreaties for a one-on-one debate, saying it is only fair to include the other candidates. When asked last weekend if he thought it appropriate that House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi got steep discounts on two used luxury cars through the help of a prominent lobbyist, Patrick would only say that he would hold himself above reproach if elected.

Confident in his rapport with reporters, he has not fenced himself off from the media and makes time for interviews throughout his day, but he rarely ventures off message.

When the odd mishap does occur on the trail, Patrick smoothly turns the situation to his advantage. On Saturday morning, he arrived at a union rally nearly a half-hour late because his drivers had accidentally drained the battery on his hybrid minivan while listening to a football game.

"There are so many ways in which this is a human campaign," he told the crowd. "Car trouble is just one of them."

And when the rain foiled his plan to go canvassing house to house in South Boston, an aide to state Senator Jack Hart invited neighbors to her home to meet Patrick. When Patrick arrived, the guests leaned awkwardly against the kitchen counters, listening politely to his introduction. Soon, laughter erupted as Patrick talked with a woman about how she had broken her foot Irish step-dancing. By the time he left, Patrick was calling the senator's mother Mama Hart.

Patrick says he worries about his supporters growing complacent and letting up on the grueling work of getting out the vote. He warns them that the political experts predicting his landslide victory are "the same wise guys and wise gals" who pooh-poohed his chances when he started his long-shot campaign.

Yet he exudes confidence, and so do his senior aides, who seem to be smiling everywhere they go.

Even as he warned his campaign field workers at a statewide meeting in Natick to ignore the polls last weekend, Patrick joked that he had been happy with his lead until the day before, when he had breakfast with New York's Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Eliot Spitzer, "who has a 50-point lead in the polls," he said, to laughter. "It made me mad."

Invoking Bill Clinton, who talked about transforming political discourse when he came to Boston to stump for him, Patrick went on to urge his supporters to consider how they will behave after the campaign is over.

"He talked about, as we are victorious and if we are victorious, it's important to be magnanimous," he said. "We can't just be about who we beat. We have to be about who we are and who we wish to be."

The same polls that put Patrick ahead also suggest he owes his lead partly to Healey's attack ads, which focused on Patrick's past legal advocacy for violent criminals. A Globe poll indicated that the ads hurt Healey far more than they stung Patrick.

In an act of political jujitsu, Patrick now seizes on those ads everywhere he goes, contrasting what he calls Healey's "negative and nasty" campaign with his "positive and hopeful" message.

At an event in Everett, he said he thought that Healey was "better than the campaign she is running" but that her "failure to set a tone in the campaign where there are limits and lines you don't cross indicates to me she doesn't understand a fundamental premise of leadership."

Patrick vowed that he would not break faith with his supporters by running negative ads, because the campaign "has got to reflect the best of who we all are and the best of what we all are, because that is where our hope and our promise lies."

Asked later if he considered himself lucky to be the political beneficiary of Healey's negative ads, Patrick lowered his voice in disgust.

"Just try to imagine," he said, "what it's like to be called everything but who and what you are and are trying to become -- as a man, forget about as a candidate."

Patrick, however, has not abstained from negative television ads himself. One of his commercials reminds voters that Healey once called aging homeowners overhoused and features an elderly woman despairing over high property taxes.

His defense: "I think that describing seniors who are trying to stay in their homes in the face of high property taxes as overhoused and showing no interest in addressing an extreme property tax burden, which is a direct result of their fiscal policies -- I think that is scary," he said. "I think that's what's mean."

Patrick said he believes his grass-roots network has helped protect him, because he has built relationships with thousands of voters who give him the benefit of the doubt amid attacks.

He says his success may also partly be a question of timing. Here and across the country, he said, voters are tired of scare tactics. And it happens "to coincide with my being in the race," he said, "and wanting to call out the politics of fear and offer a real antidote to that."

But he is not about to preempt the voters. On Saturday afternoon, he struggled to make his way through a school gymnasium in Everett where hundreds of well-wishers, braving torrential rain and a wicked wind, had gathered to hear him speak. Long after it was over, stragglers still pressed closer to shake his hand.

Steve Falvey guided his elderly father, a former city alderman, to Patrick's side for a picture.

"What do you think, Deval?" Falvey said, as Patrick's image wavered in the viewfinder of his camera. "Give me a prediction."

Patrick smiled. "I don't dare," he said.