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THE 2002 CAMPAIGN: THE ACCUSATIONS

THE 2002 CAMPAIGN: THE ACCUSATIONS; Tight and Heated Race Rages in Massachusetts

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November 2, 2002, Section A, Page 12Buy Reprints
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This week, the talk of the razor-close Massachusetts governor's race has been a single word.

It is the word ''unbecoming,'' which Mitt Romney, the venture capitalist and Republican nominee, used in a debate on Tuesday to describe what he saw as the aggressive demeanor of his Democratic opponent, State Treasurer Shannon P. O'Brien.

Ms. O'Brien and the large number of women who support her quickly called Mr. Romney's choice of language sexist and demeaning. ''I certainly think that he wouldn't use the term 'unbecoming' if he were talking to a man,'' Ms. O'Brien told reporters.

Mr. Romney has responded with a tortuous defense. First he said in a telephone interview that ''unbecoming'' could be used for either sex. Then he called back with more explanations. ''The most familiar usage of that term is 'conduct unbecoming an officer,' which is a military term and in that context it is overwhelmingly male,'' Mr. Romney said. He said that at Harvard, where he went to law and business school (Ms. O'Brien graduated from Yale), '' 'conduct unbecoming' is a term that's used for disciplinary cases.''

Finally, Mr. Romney said, ''I realize it's not a word that's frequently used, but I was an English major and occasionally I will use words that are not that common.''

A lot of energy to expend on an adjective, it seems. But this is a tooth-and-nail fight, a sharp-elbowed campaign in which each candidate accuses the other of distortion and fakery.

A Romney commercial shows a dull-eyed basset hound representing Ms. O'Brien sitting idly while men in suits loot cash from the treasury and pile it into a van labeled ''Enron.'' (Ms. O'Brien's husband, R. Emmet Hayes, lobbied for Enron while Ms. O'Brien was treasurer, although, the advertisement fails to note, not when state pension funds were invested in the energy company).

An O'Brien commercial shows a steelworker who lost his job at a Kansas City plant after Bain Capital, an investment firm where Mr. Romney was an executive, bought the company and closed the plant (although Mr. Romney says that when the plant was closed, he had essentially left his job at Bain).

Polls have been yo-yoing since the campaign began.

''If you look at the polls, it's like a scissors, it goes up, down, up, down,'' said David A. Paleologos, adjunct professor of politics at Suffolk University here. ''And it could change two more times before the election.''

The most recent poll, published today in The Boston Globe, found 41 percent for Ms. O'Brien and 40 percent for Mr. Romney.

Mr. Romney, 55, a son of George Romney, former Michigan governor as well as a former presidential candidate, failed in a bruising campaign to unseat Senator Edward M. Kennedy in 1994. Most recently, he headed the Salt Lake City Olympics and was credited with burnishing the Olympics' hobbled image.

Mr. Romney bounded into the election in March after Jane M. Swift, the Republican acting governor, was elbowed out by Republicans concerned about her baggage from political missteps and the state's flagging economy.

Democrats tried unsuccessfully to get Mr. Romney off the ballot, contending that his tax records showed he was legally a resident of Utah.

Mr. Romney, named one of People magazine's ''50 Beautiful People,'' has run on a common-man approach, staging ''work days'' in which he hauled garbage, drove a tractor, cleaned fish and slung sausages outside Fenway Park.

An advertisement hailing the work days fell flat, and so did a syrupy commercial in which Mr. Romney and his wife, Ann, describe their first date and Mr. Romney, shirtless and in swim trunks, tosses his five sons into a lake.

Mr. Romney has promoted his business experience and tried to paint Ms. O'Brien as the consummate insider who allowed the state pension fund to lose money, lobbied for a pay increase for state employees, including herself, and would provide no counterweight to the overwhelmingly Democratic Legislature.

Ms. O'Brien, 43, from generations of politically influential O'Briens, talks about how she became treasurer after a corruption scandal in that office, helping clean things up and expose cost overruns in the Big Dig, Boston's mammoth highway construction project. ''People recognize that I don't need on-the-job training,'' Ms. O'Brien said.

Ms. O'Brien bested three men in the primary, lightly touching the gender issue with a Western-themed commercial asserting that her opponents were attacking her and saying, ''Whoa, boys.''

Now she seeks to be the first woman elected governor here and the first Democrat in 12 years, ending a Republican reign that has been an anomaly in Massachusetts, where all other top elected officials are Democrats.

Ms. O'Brien comes across as a tireless campaigner, tough, calm, always on message.

''She's been a status candidate,'' said Lou DiNatale, a political analyst at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. ''You vote for her because she's the Romney killer, because she's from western Massachusetts, because she's a woman, because she's Irish. But her failure to further define herself put the race back in play, and that's where we are today.''

The biggest election issue is the state's budget shortfall of $1 billion to $2 billion. Mr. Romney says he will not raise taxes in the first year and proposes savings by cutting patronage positions and consolidating government agencies.

Ms. O'Brien says Mr. Romney's numbers are phony and will result in cutting needed programs. She says only she has a real cost-cutting plan, one she hopes to achieve without raising taxes.

The candidates also differ on issues like bilingual education, which Ms. O'Brien supports, and capital punishment, which Mr. Romney supports.

In a state with 13 percent registered Republicans and 36 percent registered Democrats, independent voters are key. Opinions are in flux, and analysts are stumped over the outcome of the race.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 12 of the National edition with the headline: THE 2002 CAMPAIGN: THE ACCUSATIONS; Tight and Heated Race Rages in Massachusetts. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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