Permission isn't needed
ANEEDHAM -- This is how politics in Massachusetts is supposed to work, with people choosing, not politicians anointing.
Orderly deliberations at Democratic caucuses across the state yesterday underscored the ineptitude Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly displayed by trying to usurp voters' right to decide for themselves the best candidate for lieutenant governor.
The grandiose notion of gubernatorial candidates selecting their running mates was a publicity grab when Bill Weld, the ultimate political stuntman, began the trend in 1990. That Democrats were so quick to adopt a bad Republican idea says something about the timorous state of the party. Democrats don't have the discipline to pull it off. There were already four Democrats running for lieutenant governor before Reilly's rash invitation to Representative Marie St. Fleur.
The 24-hour candidacy that imploded after the exposure of St. Fleur's pattern of tax delinquencies ought to establish once and for all that politics is not the prom. You don't need a date to run for public office.
Talk at the Pollard Middle School caucus site was more about the dust-up in the race for lieutenant governor than the gubernatorial nomination fight between Reilly and Deval L. Patrick, the chief of the US Justice Department's civil rights division under President Clinton.
''I guess the idea is that you get a big bang from the announcement but, as we just saw, sometimes the explosion can go off in your face," said Rick Mann of Needham. Mann, whose father was a longtime mayor of Newton, said rank-and-file Democrats are not middlemen to be cut out of the electoral process on a candidate's whim. ''We have a process for a reason, not a coronation."
Deb Goldberg did not ask anyone's permission to run when she began to lay the groundwork for her campaign for lieutenant governor more than a year ago. The former chairwoman of the Board of Selectmen in Brookline, Goldberg waded into the caucus here, the first of half a dozen she planned to attend, greeting old friends and marshaling support.
To earn a place on the September primary ballot, Goldberg will need to win the votes of 15 percent of the delegates to the party's convention in Worcester next June. She is competing for those votes with the other Democratic candidates for lieutenant governor: Timothy Murray of Worcester, the city's mayor; Andrea Silbert of Harwich, owner of a nonprofit group that promotes entrepreneurship among women, and Sam Kelley of Cohasset, a psychiatrist.
Goldberg thought she already had St. Fleur's support. St. Fleur was one of half a dozen elected officials who hosted a fund-raiser for Goldberg's nascent campaign last June.
The fifth generation of her family to live in Massachusetts -- her family founded the Stop & Shop supermarket chain -- Goldberg has known St. Fleur, a Haitian immigrant, for years. They have worked together on inner-city job development projects sponsored by Jewish Vocational Services and campaigned together for former Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, Goldberg on the Jewish desk and St. Fleur on the Haitian desk. Their 13-year-old daughters are classmates and close friends at Brimmer and May, a private school in Chestnut Hill.
St. Fleur left a voice mail on Goldberg's cellphone last Monday night to let her know they were about to become political competitors. ''Needless to say this has been a very difficult week," Goldberg said. ''I feel like I just lived through an episode of West Wing."
Whatever personal fallout she feels from the chaos in the Reilly campaign, it was not evident as she introduced herself to delegates in the crowded school corridors and talked about the burden state budget cuts have inflicted on cities and downs. ''One thing I learned early on is stick to your plan, no matter what is going on around you. That's what I am doing," she said. ''There will be plenty of time later for Marie and I to talk."
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.
