Attorney-General Tom Reilly, a Democratic candiate for Governor of Massachusetts, throws the first stone with a negative ad that chides his opponents, Deval Patrick and Chris Gabrieli, for not disclosing their tax returns.
In this bluest of blue states, this is a strange turn of events. Given that Kerry Healey, currently Mitt Romney's lieutenant governor, is seen as the weakest Republican candidate since Jane Swift, this election is seen as the putative Democratic nominee's to lose, whoever that turns out to be after the Sept. 19 primary. Perhaps Healey's weakness is the reason that there was no "gentlemen's agreement" to not go negative before the primary.
More on the flipside...
Democrats
Tom Reilly
"What are they hiding?" is the tag-line of the ad, and it plays to Reilly's blue collar affectation. He and his family have rented, rented! their modest home in the formerly working-class suburb of Watertown for thirty years, though they own a summer residence in the town of Chatham, on Cape Cod.
Reilly, like most attorneys-general (Eliot Sptizer comes to mind), shows up often on the local news, announcing a high-profile indictment or conviction, the AG equivalent of a NASCAR race winner taking a victory lap and carving donuts on the infield grass. Thus, he's probably got the best name-recognition of all of the Democratic Party candidates.
After the recent Big Dig tunnel ceiling failure, he took second seat to outgoing Governor Mitt Romney. While Romney showed off his much-vaunted crisis management style, Reilly announced the possibility of criminal indictments against managers and contractors associated with the Big Dig project. Both Romney and Reilly were seen by local pundits as grandstanding in the aftermath of a tragedy that left a Jamaica Plain woman dead and her husband injured.
Deval Patrick
Patrick, who headed the Department of Justice civil rights unit under President Clinton (after serving as an attorney for the NAACP), led the race after a state Democratic convention where he gave an impassioned and masterful speech. But in the following months, the race has tightened up; it is now effectively a three-way tie within the margin of error.
Where Reilly is seen as your neighbor drinking beer while he grills a plate of burgers and bratwurst, Patrick has a corporate aura. Since leaving the DoJ, he's sat on the boards of Coca-Cola and Ameriquest, where he made an honest effort to bring reforms to each company (in the case of Ameriquest, predatory lending practices were at issue; Ameriquest settled with 49 states for $325 million during his tenure).
Patrick's story is one of rags-to-riches: he grew up in a family on welfare, earned a scholarship to tony Milton Academy, went to Harvard and Harvard Law and, upon graduation, served with the Legal Aid Bureau, defending poor families.
Recently, Deval Patrick has undergone media scrutiny surrounding the McMansion he's constructing in Western Massachusetts (34 rooms, IIRC), and the amount of debt he's taken on to build it ($9M, again, IIRC). We Mass. voters consider personal fiscal responsibility a sign of prudent public fiscal responsibility, for better or worse.
[Full disclosure: Patrick is the candidate I intend to vote for, so if you think this is biased towards him, you can blow me.]
Chris Gabrieli
Gabrieli, a businessman currently heading an equity fund, never held elective office (like Patrick), though he did run for Lieutenant Governor in 2002. A fiscal moderate (favors tax cuts) and social liberal (pro-choice, anti-death penalty), he'd been the dark horse, launching his own race for governor after turning down Reilly's request that he run with him as Lieutenant Governor (Gov. and Lt. Gov are seperate elections in Mass., so it's possible to have a Dem. Gov. and a GOP Lt. Gov.).
Though he headed Boston Mayor Tom Menino's Task Force on After-School Time, unlike Reilly and Patrick, he's been exclusively private sector, working for software and venture capital firms.
His ad buys have been mostly warm and fuzzy, featuring his wife and children.
The Others
Kerry Healey
Currently Lieutenant Governor under Mitt Romney, Healey doesn't really poll positively these days, getting no more than 30-35% against whoever wins the Democratic primary. Her association with Romney doesn't help, seeing as how he's distancing himself from liberal Massachusetts in order to launch a presidential run. The Reilly, Patrick, and Gabrieli campaigns smell the blood in the water: they never refer to Healey by name unless Mitt's is attached. It's always the "Romney-Healey" adminsitration that cut your kid's sports/arts/after-school/lunch/healthcare program, never just Healey.
Healey was recently profiled by the Boston Globe for her "cookout initiative", attending backyard barbecues this summer in order to get a word-of-mouth thing going and to take the temperature of the electorate, a pretty shrewd retail politics tactic. But the conventional wisdom is that she's just another wealthy Republican, albeit in a Talbots pants suit instead of Savile Row pinstripes.
Her campaign is tainted by a whiff of impropriety, thanks to her husband using a state tax break in order to locate his public relations firm in a ritzy North Shore suburb. While not exactly illegal, it was seen by many pundits as "gaming the game".
Christy Mihos
Running as an independant, this convenience store tycoon (Christy's Markets, once a chain of 144 stores, though 132 were sold to 7-11) and member of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority Board (and ousted by then Governor Jane Swift, though he successfully sued to get his seat back) was offered a guarantee of 15% of the votes at the state Republican convention (enough to get him on the ballot). He declined, and decided to run as an independant.
If that paragraph had a lot of parentheses in it, it's because Mihos, when all is said and done come November, will be a parenthesis in this election. He can only siphon votes from Healey (hence her convention offer).
Grace Ross
Yes, even the Greens have a candidate running, and she wears colorful clothes (she's running as a "Green-Rainbow" candidate). The over-under on Ms. Ross has been between .02% and .05%.
A Note on Massachusetts state politcs
We've elected moderate (Weld, Celucci) or pseudo-moderate (Romney) Republican governors since 1990. But the real power lies in the 60%+ Democratically held State House, where state senators and representatives have held a majority or super-majority for decades.
[Another full disclosure: the one and only time I voted for any Republican was in 1990, when Bill Weld ran against John "One-Armed Bandit" Silber, the bizarre crypto-fascist president and later chancellor of Boston University, who torpedoed his own campaign with the line "When you're ripe, it's time to go..." in reference to euthanasia of the elderly during an interview on local TV).]
[And, yes: I took a long hot shower after voting for Weld]
Weld and Celucci were popular, seeing as they both presided over unprecedented state economic growth (high-tech and biotech) during the Nineties. But when Celucci left office to be George Bush's ambassador to Canada, Lieutenant Governor Jane Swift was left in charge, and left holding the bag when the state economy tanked (though not as badly as the post-dot.com bubble national economy). That, combined with a whiff of scandal (state-funded aides babysitting her kids, and state-funded helicopter rides to her Western Mass. home) contributed to the single-digit approval ratings that paved the way for Mitt Romney's candidacy after she dropped out of the race.
So, this is the best chance in fifteen years for the Democratic Party to take back the corner office in the State House. But will Reilly's negative ad endanger this chance? Healey's inheritance of Romney's negatives might trump everything.
The three Democratic candidates - Reilly, Patrick, Gabrieli - are holding a debate tonight. We'll see if this breaks the deadlock. Patrick is the better orator, Reilly can be a bit stiff on camera. As always, Gabrieli is the wild card.