Speechless

A rhetorical fixation reveals the trouble with Scott Harshbarger's candidacy

by Michael Crowley

Scott Harshbarger stands for "working families." We know this because Harshbarger, the state attorney general who became the Democratic nominee for governor last Tuesday, says so -- over and over and over. In fact, Harshbarger's fixation on working families has become the defining element of his campaign to unseat Republican acting governor Paul Cellucci.

With his starchy drawl and robotic gestures, Harshbarger inserts a working-families reference into nearly every one of his public declarations. Kicking off his campaign last April, he declared that "this race is about one thing: delivering the leadership that will move Massachusetts's working families forward." Harshbarger's economic plan is titled "Working Families First." One recent press release announced that "Harshbarger Stands Up for Working People." The following day, another release fine-tuned the point: "Working People, Families Stand Up for Harshbarger." On Tuesday morning, Harshbarger attended a "unity breakfast for working families." He even worked the phrase into an answer about the Lewinsky scandal, scolding the president but adding that Bill Clinton has been "moving working families forward."

In the annals of political bravery, a campaign built around the concept of working families -- that is, just about everybody -- will not be long remembered. After all, who could possibly be against such a thing? In truth, this mantra is a kind of code, a way for Harshbarger to compensate for his liberal-technocrat image by showing that he understands the basic needs of average people. More broadly, Harshbarger's reliance on this nebulous phrase is emblematic of the difficulty he faces in fleeing the unpopular legacy of Michael Dukakis, and in developing a viable Democratic identity in post-Bill Weld Massachusetts.

This is no way to win what will be an uphill election battle. The term working families is so vague that it ends up having no meaning -- and a campaign based on a meaningless slogan will itself have no meaning. The real question is what the new mantle-bearer for the Massachusetts Democratic Party really stands for. The attorney general himself seems unsure, and the state's political establishment is in disagreement. Harshbarger can't afford the confusion. Paul Cellucci is an incumbent sheltered by a strong economy. Unless Harshbarger offers a compelling case for change -- and "leadership for working families" isn't it -- Cellucci wins by default.

Certainly, Cellucci has real vulnerabilities. Harshbarger can portray him as a weak and expedient do-nothing incumbent. He'll paint Cellucci as the man who joined Bill Weld in slashing taxes for big business, but not for ordinary people, while the schools went to hell; as the acting governor who has fumbled one tough political decision after another, from gay rights to area codes to teacher testing.

But tearing down Cellucci won't be enough. Harshbarger must also sell himself. And he has yet to figure out how to do it.

No sooner had Harshbarger won his party's nomination than several leading Democrats -- many of whom see him as a priggish outsider and resent his prosecutions of popular party officials -- cast a pall over his moment of victory. Some, such as Boston mayor Tom Menino and House Speaker Tom Finneran (D-Mattapan), offered only lukewarm or conditional support for the nominee. Others actually attended a Democrats for Cellucci rally.

Still, the average voter won't care that a few Democratic hacks back Cellucci over Harshbarger. The bigger problem for the attorney general is that people still don't know quite what to make of him. Last week showed that to some Democrats, Harshbarger still isn't Democratic enough. But to others, he's too Democratic -- nothing short of a flaming liberal. Finneran says he's reluctant to back Harshbarger for fear that he'll veer to the "loony left." Last week Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi questioned such Harshbarger proclamations as "labor's agenda is my agenda."

Party dissident or liberal lapdog? Scott Harshbarger has an identity crisis. He is trying to appeal to too many constituencies without defining himself apart from them. He woos liberal Democrats with his record on the environment, civil rights, gambling, and tobacco. For the independents he offers a whopping $1.5 billion tax cut -- bigger even than Cellucci's proposal. And for urban and working-class Democrats, there is the empathetic talk of "working families." But in trying to be everywhere at once, Harshbarger risks winding up nowhere.

A good model for Harshbarger right now is the Bill Clinton of 1992. Like Clinton then, Harshbarger desperately wants to avoid the label of big-spending elitist liberal that can spell electoral disaster.

In fact, both campaigns share a similar point of reference: Michael Dukakis. When Dukakis's 1988 presidential candidacy collapsed under the weight of its perceived leftism, party moderates such as Clinton realized that future Democratic candidates had to peddle themselves as something explicitly different.

Likewise, Harshbarger needs to calm voter fears that he is the second coming of the governor whose fiscal liberalism is still widely blamed (fairly or not) for the economic misery of the late 1980s. Keenly aware of this, Paul Cellucci has already begun tarring Harshbarger as Dukakis's tax-and-spend heir. On Tuesday, for instance, Cellucci running mate Jane Swift insisted that "we will not stand here and allow [Harshbarger] to send Massachusetts back to the depths of chaos that resulted in the late 1980s."

Harshbarger has worked to fend off these attacks; his giant tax cut is an obvious case in point. But he must do more than argue that he's not Mike Dukakis -- or Paul Cellucci, for that matter. He must tell people who he is. While Bill Clinton, with his talk of "New Democrats" and a "New Covenant," was able to build a rationale around his political identity, Harshbarger seems merely to be pandering. Like Clinton, Harshbarger needs to make his candidacy into something greater, and more compelling, than the sum of its parts. Is he a maverick independent? A nonideological technocrat? Bill Weld with a soul? We don't know.

What's a 'working family'? Like Bill Clinton in 1992, Scott Harshbarger hopes to prove to voters that he's a new kind of Democrat. And as this definition of "working families" provided by Harshbarger's campaign shows, he's even borrowing Clinton's rhetoric to do it. Scott Harshbarger, 1998: You may not know who they are, but they do. They get up every day, go to work, pay taxes, play by the rules, and still find themselves working harder and longer trying to keep pace and make ends meet. . . . They worry about being able to put their kids through school, taking care of an elderly parent, and hopefully saving enough for their retirement. They worry about the quality of our schools, their children's safety, and losing their health care or, even worse, their job. . . . Bill Clinton, 1992: And so, in the name of all those who do the work, pay the taxes, raise the kids and play by the rules -- in the name of the hard-working Americans who make up our forgotten middle class, I proudly accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.

When Harshbarger actually defines the term working families, he hints at the most promising ideas of his campaign (see "What's a `Working Family'?", right). He means to address the struggle of all too many people -- those who aren't profiting from mutual-fund growth or capital-gains-tax cuts. There are, in fact, many thousands of families who stand to gain from the government expansion supported by Harshbarger in the areas of education, health care, and worker training. Pitched artfully, that message ought to have universal appeal: better schools, healthier people, and a highly skilled workforce will ultimately benefit everybody. It would also contrast with Cellucci's failure to articulate new directions for the state.

The ideas are there. It's the message that's missing. Rather than just chase one constituency after another, Harshbarger must acknowledge his free-agent centrism and sell it aggressively as such. Bill Clinton trafficked in slogans, too -- but he backed them up with personal passion and an intellectual framework. Perhaps to his credit, Harshbarger will never be the political salesman that Bill Clinton is. But there's no reason why he can't find a more creative package for his ideas than code words that don't really mean anything to anyone.

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley@phx.com.