Candidates Vie for Cape and Islands Seats

By CHRIS BURRELL

On paper, the race for the Cape and Islands senate seat in the state house looks like a battle of the brains.

A pediatrician with a Harvard MBA, Republican challenger Dr. Gail Lese is trying to bring down a history professor, the incumbent Democrat Sen. Robert O'Leary. A third candidate, Luiz (Lou) Gonzaga, running as an independent, holds a doctorate in business administration.

All top-heavy resumes aside, the politics in this race are anything but tepid.

As candidates have geared up on the issues - staking out positions on health care, wind turbines in Nantucket Sound, educational funding and affordable housing - they've also proved a willingness to take off the gloves and start slugging.

"It's a failure of leadership," Dr. Lese told the Gazette in a telephone interview Wednesday, describing her opponent's first two terms.

This is a franchised campaign, Boston-based. It has nothing to do with the Cape and Islands," declared Senator O'Leary during an interview in the Gazette newsroom Tuesday morning.

Mr. O'Leary traveled to the Vineyard to meet face to face with a Gazette reporter and editor. Dr. Lese was unable to make time for a trip to the Island this week, her campaign managers claiming last Friday that her schedule on the Cape was too heavily booked to allow an interview in person. Mr. Gonzaga could not be reached for comment.

A dominant plank in Dr. Lese's platform centers on improving access to health care statewide. Quick to cite statistics, the doctor from Yarmouth said 50,000 people on the Cape, the Vineyard and Nantucket have no health insurance.

"Eighty per cent of the people without insurance are actually working," she said. "It's unconscionable."

Her plan to address the problem mirrors the one being pitched on a national front by President Bush, namely passing legislation that would allow small companies to pool together and leverage lower premium rates with insurers.

"I'm really proud of this idea," she said.

Tax credits for small businesses round out Dr. Lese's health care access solution. The goal is to give business owners a break on state income taxes if they offer health insurance to employees.

Paying for the plan would require tapping into the state's $750 million surplus of tax revenue, she said.

A deep concern about health care defines not only Dr. Lese's candidacy but also her conversion from Democrat to Republican and, oddly enough, her decision to ditch a career in medicine for a job managing mutual funds at Fidelity Investments in Boston.

She worked as a pediatrician in Los Angeles, often encountering children and families without health insurance. In her view, the root of the problem was economic, and she concluded that the solution lay in gaining skills in the world of business and finance.

In Boston, shepherding stocks and bonds and volunteering with teenagers at Dorchester High School, she also became disillusioned with the rhetoric of Democrats.

"I was a member of the Democratic party, and they were saying ‘kids, kids, kids‚' to get elected. But a toll-taker in this state can make $80,000 a year and a teacher on the Cape makes $30,000," she said.

Dr. Lese moved to the Cape from the North Shore of Boston earlier this year and announced her candidacy in March, one of more than 100 Republicans recruited by Gov. Mitt Romney to challenge Democratic incumbents across the commonwealth - a move aimed at veto-proofing at least the Senate.

Money is clearly a factor. The governor pledged $500,000 to back his party's contenders.

As of the last filing date for campaign spending - Sept. 7 - Dr. Lese had outspent Senator O'Leary by a massive margin, $164,897 compared to $14,636.

"An amazing amount of money has flowed into this race like never before," he said.

Dr. Lese has plunked down $75,000 of her own money to help finance her bid for the Cape and Islands seat. Senator O'Leary, admitting that he's concerned about his shot for a third two-year term, has ramped up his fund-raising efforts.

"I've raised a lot of money, about $50,000, more than double what I've ever raised," he said, then offering a bit of sports analysis.

"In every race, I've raised less than my opponent - and won," he said.

This campaign, the senator conjectured, could be one of the most expensive in state history. The money is financing television and radio ads, newspaper inserts and mailings. The candidates have had two debates on the Cape.

One issue Dr. Lese and Senator O'Leary appear to agree on is their opposition to Cape Wind, the proposed wind farm on Nantucket Sound. Neither candidate is opposed to wind farms, but they don't support the one planned for the Sound.

"The business model is flawed and so is the location," said Dr. Lese.

Senator O'Leary said: "It's essentially a public project, and the public has little or no control over, and I'm disturbed by that."

On the topic of affordable housing, Mr. O'Leary said he is hopeful that towns in the district will approve the Community Preservation Act, creating a real estate transaction surcharge that would generate funds for affordable housing and conservation projects.

Dr. Lese has a different answer: To rewrite the formula for Chapter 40B, a state law that allows developers to skirt most zoning bylaws for affordable housing projects.

She also said attracting new businesses to the region would create higher-paying jobs and enable home buyers to afford housing in today's real estate market.

While Dr. Lese has trimmed her platform around health care issues, Senator O'Leary has made educational funding a central theme in his campaign.

A part-time professor of American History at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, Mr. O'Leary's goal is to revamp the way the state allocates money to local school districts, shifting the formula from property values to median income levels in a community.

"It's the single biggest problem for the Cape and Islands. For me, public schools are central to the community," he said.

He said state funding for schools is critical in the era of Proposition 2 1/2, the state law that caps the amount of money towns can raise from local property taxes.

A bill cosponsored by Mr. O'Leary to retool Chapter 70 - the state law governing funding for schools - won unanimous approval in the state Senate and still needs approval in the House.

"We're halfway down the track. It would redistribute $60 to $70 million statewide, the bulk of it to the Cape," Mr. O'Leary said.

In his discussion with the Gazette this week, the incumbent state senator responded to a range of issues affecting Vineyarders. On the topic of the drawbridge between Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs, he said: "I'm probably going to get in trouble for this, but my instincts are you should not build a temporary bridge. Once you do the temporary one, it will be there 20 years." But he also said he will take his cue from the people of the Vineyard. "We will stand on that bridge like Horatio if it's something you don't want. This shouldn't be a Big Dig," he said.

On Steamship Authority issues, Mr. O'Leary said the focus is simple: "Keep the fiscal house in order and improve the quality of service."

What about efforts by Nantucket to split from the SSA? The senator said he played no role in the draft legislation that surfaced last spring, other than meeting with the late Nantucket boat line governor Grace Grossman.

"I made it clear to her. This was something to be entertained, but there had to be demonstrated benefits on the financial end and the service," he said. "In the end, you [the two Islands] have more in common with each other, like not bankrupting the people who go back and forth on the ferries."

Mr. O'Leary told the Gazette last month that the Vineyard vote is vital to his reelection, saying flatly that if he loses here, he can't win. But he also said the real fight in this election is being waged on the mid-Cape where party affiliations are evenly split and where voters sided with Mitt Romney back in 2002 by wide margins. Back on the Vineyard, the landscape is decidedly more hospitable to Democrats. They outnumber Republican voters two to one, 33 to 15 per cent, with the remainder unenrolled. Two years ago, Island voters in every town but Edgartown cast significantly more ballots for Governor Romney's Democratic rival, Shannon O'Brien, in the gubernatorial race.

"I think I have a base on the Vineyard," Dr. Lese said this week from her home in Yarmouth. She came to the Island last month for an interview with Plum TV. Next week, she plans to spend a half day on both Islands.

Senator O'Leary also plans a trip to the Vineyard next week, in the homestretch to election day. The senator and his staffers like to lump the Islands and Provincetown into a similar category, he said. "They're high-maintenance areas. That's a form of affection," he said. "The people are more intense, more engaging."