The man at the helm in delegate dispute

James Roosevelt Jr. has been called unflappable and perfect for the job of helping decide the Democratic delegate dispute. (File/The Boston Globe)

James Roosevelt Jr. is not your run-of-the-mill party apparatchik as he sits at the center of the storm gathering over the Democratic Party's snarky dispute about seating convention delegations from the scofflaw states of Florida and Michigan.

Longtime cochairman of the national party's rules and bylaws committee, the Cambridge resident is well suited by temperament and background to the task of adjudicating the dust-up when the first challenges come before his committee next month, colleagues say.

"Any kind of attribute that you think would be appropriate for someone in that job, he has it," said Don Fowler of South Carolina, who, upon being named chairman of the national party in 1995, promoted Roosevelt to succeed him as cochairman of the rules committee.

Fowler said Roosevelt and Alexis Herman, the rules committee's cochairwoman, are both very capable, but he called the standoff over whether to seat Florida and Michigan "a monumental problem that almost seems insoluble."

Roosevelt, Fowler said, "is going to have to be Jesus and Moses all at the same time, and maybe Solomon, too."

Two Massachusetts Democrats on opposite sides of this race are pleased that Roosevelt may play such a key role.

"He's perfect for it," said Philip W. Johnston, former chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, where Roosevelt for 30 years has volunteered as general counsel and convention parliamentarian. "I have observed him in innumerable tough situations where he was being pressured by people from different sides, and he always maintained his cool and gave a fair assessment of the situation. . . . His word will be trusted by all sides."

"Jim is unflappable, endlessly fair, and he gives no indication whatsoever of any favoritism when he's listening to different points of view," said Steve Grossman, who followed a stint as state party chairman by serving as national chairman of the party. In that role, Grossman reappointed Roosevelt to a four-year term cochairing the rules and bylaws committee. "His judgment, in my experience, has been impeccable."

In the epic struggle for the Democratic presidential nomination, Johnston backs Barack Obama; Grossman supports Hillary Clinton.

Roosevelt, a superdelegate to the nominating convention in late August, has maintained a strict policy of neutrality until all the convention issues are resolved. If the rules and bylaws committee doesn't settle matters, the dispute will fall to the convention credentials committee. Roosevelt will also be cochairman on that panel when it is constituted in late June.

Roosevelt's love of politics and the Democratic Party is a product of his upbringing and illustrious lineage: He is one of 24 surviving grandchildren of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His late father and namesake was a force in California politics and was elected to six terms in Congress from a seat in the Los Angeles area.

"When my dad was elected to Congress, he started sending me the Congressional Record every day, and I actually read it, starting in about the fourth grade," Roosevelt said in an interview.

Now 62, Roosevelt never met his renowned grandfather, who died about a year and a half before he was born. But he has vivid recollections of Eleanor Roosevelt, his famous grandmother. They visited several times a year. "She was, in a way that usually doesn't come across about her, warm and grandmotherly to me as a kid," he said. And, from the time he was learning to read, he read her newspaper column every day, seven days a week, for many years.

Pictures of his grandparents adorn the walls of his Watertown office at Tufts Health Plan, where he has been CEO since 2005, taking over when the insurer, hemorrhaging subscribers, was in deep trouble.

Healthcare is another great passion of Roosevelt's, who, as a lawyer in private practice in Boston, specialized in the field and was general counsel at the Tufts plan before becoming chief executive. Since then the insurer has reversed course, and last year had the largest growth rate of any family health plan in the nation.

Except for one failed run for public office - finishing behind Joseph P. Kennedy II and two others in a crowded 1986 Democratic race to succeed House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr. in Congress - Roosevelt's political activism has been defined mostly by his party service. After campaigning for Bill Clinton in 1992, he joined the Clinton administration as an associate commissioner of the Social Security Administration, the cornerstone of FDR's presidency.

In March 2005, when President George W. Bush proposed partial privatization of Social Security, Roosevelt gave the Democratic response in a nationally broadcast radio address.

"I've always had a day job that went to my profession as a lawyer and my commitment to public policy in healthcare, but some people say, 'How do you do what you do at the party and still do a demanding day job?' " Roosevelt said. "My typical answer is, 'Some people play golf, I do politics.' "

As a teenager, he started on a much different career path. After graduating from a high school run by Christian Brothers in Pasadena, he joined the De La Salle order's novitiate at a monastery in the Napa Valley. But Roosevelt decided against becoming a Christian brother, and enrolled at Harvard, where he met his future wife, Ann, then a student at Radcliffe. He then went on to Harvard Law School and a 3 1/2-year stint in the Navy, where he served in the Judge Advocate General's Corps.

In 1968, he married Ann, who is now an environmental activist, and settled in Cambridge. They have three daughters in their 20s.

Usually, Roosevelt's committee chairmanship requires only a couple of hours of his time per week. With the issue of Florida and Michigan percolating, however, the unpaid position has taken up additional time, at least "a couple of hours a day" and lately even more, he said.

Earlier this month, he and Ann made their annual vacation pilgrimage with friends to Fort Myers, Fla., for beach time and to take in three Red Sox spring training games. But there was no break in the gyrations of the state legislatures, party officials, and the presidential campaigns wrangling over whether and how to conduct do-overs of the early primaries that the Democratic National Committee had nullified.

"I was on the phone every day about this," Roosevelt said. "But not during the games."

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