A Place for Idealism

If the Great Pumpkin ever makes it to the Eighth Congressional District, he'll surely visit Tom Gallagher, whose vintage idealism recently cost him a place among the candidates to succeed Tip O'Neill.

The Allston state representative, a proud son of the 1970 student activist movement at Boston College, played his campaign by rules that simply didn't work in this media-ridden race. While front-runner Joseph P. Kennedy II was applying the major-league campaign tactics of Uncle Ted to a comparatively minor-league campaign, Gallagher used precepts that he might have learned in little league, where traditional sportsmanship is a larger part of the game.

Gallagher's low-key, low-budget approach included personal visits to some 20,000 homes, with a goal of 35,000 by election day. Perhaps this grassroots plan made a virtue of necessity, given the scarcity of wealthy patrons for Gallagher, who is an active member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Still, the candidate's refusal to hide behind prepared statements and overprotective staffers reflected an enthusiasm rare in modern technocratic politics.

Gallagher had a style that will be missed. He was certainly the only candidate in the Eighth to ascend Harvard protesters' plywood "Ivory Tower" and yell "Hey, this is fun!" from its summit.

In Gallagher's last speech as a candidate on June 21 he urged his opponents to debate each other in pairs instead of the usual packs. Gallagher's proposal would strip the veneer from some of the slicker candidates. The liberal legislator may not have been able to compete himself, but hopefully his attempts to make this a race among people rather than media consultants will not be lost.

In the pattern currently accepted for campaign forums, all of the candidates in the Eighth race, or at least all of the Democratic candidates, appear together. Hopeless hopefuls and serious challengers alike get equal dribbles of time in which to make prepared statements or answer a few predictable questions. Candidates are rarely caught off guard, and hence the most preposterous balloons of hot air are rarely pricked.

As Gallagher noted at his last rally, "I can recite every candidate's two-minute opening statement by heart...the voters aren't getting any more information than they would from a commercial."

The electorate of the Eighth Congressional District has yet to be offered a look at the people behind the campaign rhetoric. If the voters are to differentiate among the candidates, they must see each politician's skill in defending a position without ready recourse to an issues director. This can best happen in one-on-one debate, where candidates who have watched and analyzed each other for months will be able to go at each other freely and with ample time.

Gallagher is not the only one to advocate this change in debate format. James Roosevelt Jr. '68 has bought 30 minutes of air time on Channel 7 and is currently trying to pressure Kennedy into facing him during the prime-time slot on July 26.

However, past efforts to restrict the number of debaters at an event have been foiled by the charge of "elitism."

When the Belmont Town Democratic Committee scheduled a forum for only six candidates, James Spiegel sued them for leaving him out--and both Kennedy and King refused to participate unless all of the Democratic candidates joined them.

They hardly did so out of altruism. Rather, both of these top-ranked candidates appear best as orators, but they deteriorate under close questioning.

To obviate the "elitism" objection, a round-robin set of debates might be organized. Although Joe Kennedy and other front-runners might balk at spending time with the less prominent candidates, they ought to welcome such debates as chances to prove their superiority--that is, if they have nothing to fear.

However, Gallagher's departure suggests that the race may have lost its chance to become an open and genuine discussion of issues.