Minimum dollar man

Kevin McAllister has smarts, problem-solving skills, and he refuses to obfuscate. But can he win a four-way Democratic primary for Congress with a paltry amount of money?

by Ian Donnis

Kevin McAllister

Speaking to 15 seniors during a recent coffee hour at Meadowbrook Village, an elderly housing complex in Warwick, congressional candidate Kevin McAllister talks more about his approach than his platform. Dressed in a dark blue suit, the 47-year-old lawyer exhibits the ease and speaking skills of an experienced officeholder. But from the start, McAllister, the president of the Cranston City Council, makes it clear that he's a different kind of politician. Most strikingly, he hopes to win the four-way Democratic primary in the Second Congressional District with the fumes of an already microscopic $45,000 war chest.

It's an article of faith among congressional candidates that they have spend a few hours on the phone each day, asking people for money. Sure, they don't like doing this. But when the average tab for running a successful race for the US House of Representatives comes to $650,000, the cash has to come from somewhere. The mania for fund-raising is far worse in the Senate, where a winning campaign cost an average of $5.2 million in 1998, according to the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, DC.

While a lot of candidates consider this inane, McAllister refuses to play by the rules -- he's deliberately running a low-budget campaign. Speaking to his Warwick audience, he describes the four-way primary on September 12 as a job interview in which the candidates' qualifications should be the criteria for selection. "Two of my opponents have raised a lot more money than I have, and I'm almost proud of that," he adds, referring to Secretary of State James Langevin and social worker Kate Coyne-McCoy, without mentioning their names. The corporations and unions that fuel campaigns, McAllister says, naturally expect something in return. "When you take the big money from them, you have issued an IOU," he says.

Although it's unusual to hear this kind of statement from a major party candidate other than a reformer like John McCain, the corrupting influence of money in politics is widely perceived even by those who don't vote. But Congress has shown no desire to dismantle a campaign finance system that benefits incumbents, meaning that serious candidates are left to describe zealous fund-raising as a necessary evil. Not surprisingly, there's a decisive correlation between campaign spending and winning. In 1998, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the higher spending candidate won in 421 of 435 US House races (44 of the races were unopposed), and 31 of 34 US Senate races.

In the community room at Meadowbrook Village, McAllister isn't buying it. He doesn't make digs at his rivals. His disdain for politics as usual is met with unsolicited affirmations from his audience. Five years after his unanticipated introduction to local politics, McAllister's blunt problem-solving approach has made him a leading vote-getter in Cranston, and his new friends in Warwick appear motivated to turn out for him en masse in September. In an age of rampant cynicism about politics, it's surprising that his unorthodox mode -- McCain writ small, without the conservative ideology -- hasn't attracted more attention.

In most states, of course, a candidate would be deluded to think they could run a credible congressional race with a paltry sum of money. Last year, McAllister set a maximum fund-raising goal of $200,000, and he's come up with less than a quarter of that. For some observers, the lack of cash shows that his approach is a matter of necessity. But while he had only $8,896 in campaign funds as of June 30, the candidate isn't given to quixotic causes. While he remains a definite underdog in the countdown to the September primary, McAllister hopes to stand the conventional wisdom on its head.

CAMPAIGN SPENDING FOR the five general offices in Rhode Island -- governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state and general treasurer -- has dropped significantly since the state adopted a reform measure in 1992. Before that, recalls H. Philip West, executive director of the state's chapter of Common Cause, Bruce Sundlun spent $4.2 million to become governor in 1990 -- more than William Weld used to reach the same office in Massachusetts, a state with five times Rhode Island's population and three times as many media markets.

The 1992 reform enables candidates who agree to spending limits -- roughly $1.5 million for gubernatorial candidates and $375,000 for the other general offices -- to receive a share of matching funds from the state. The only candidates who haven't taken part in this process (Langevin in 1994, when he was making his first run for secretary of state, and Sheldon Whitehouse in 1998, when he was campaigning for attorney general) "spent a lot [of their own money] and crushed their opponents," West says.

But spending for congressional races remains unlimited, resulting in what John Bonifaz, founder and director of the Boston-based National Voting Rights Institute (NVRI), has dubbed the "wealth primary" -- an exclusionary process in which those with money, or access to it, choose the candidates who are almost invariably elected to the US House and Senate. The need for a huge amount of money offers an enormous advantage to incumbents, discourages potential candidates, undermines public confidence in the political process, and favors those wealthy enough, like Langevin and Whitehouse, who can contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to their own campaigns.

Perhaps most importantly, the ability of corporations, unions, and rich individuals to make massive campaign contributions gives them a degree of influence that ordinary citizens just can't match. Wall Street firms, for example, which stand to gain billions in new assets flowing into mutual funds, are lobbying hard for the privatization of Social Security. A panoply of industries -- alcohol, broadcasters, finance, the gun lobby, big tobacco, pharmaceuticals software, you name it -- steadily pour money into Washington.

The perceived benefit of making these campaign contributions enabled the Democratic and Republican parties to raise $256 million in soft money -- unlimited, unregulated donations that go the parties, rather than particular candidates -- during the first 18 months of the 1999-2000 election cycle, an 82 percent increase over the same comparable period in 1996, according to Common Cause. As a result, says West, "The public interest winds up not being addressed."

Reform groups like Common Cause and the National Voting Rights Institute want to level the playing field by introducing public financing of elections. But Congress, through periods of both Democratic and Republican control over the last decade, has remained unwilling to support even incremental efforts, such as a ban on soft money. Not surprisingly, the 2000 election season will be the most costly in US history.

In 1976, the Supreme Court struck down restrictions on congressional campaign contributions in Buckley v. Valeo, ruling that such limits violated First Amendment rights. But the National Voting Rights Institute, a six-year-old nonprofit devoted to challenging the constitutionality of our current campaign finance system, contends that the real issue is not the free speech rights of well-financed candidates and wealthy contributors. Instead, according to the NVRI, the issue is the Equal Protection rights of the candidates and voters who are being left behind because of their lack of money or access to it.

The NVRI is litigating a federal case in Vermont in which that state's GOP, pro-life advocates and ACLU chapter have sued the state, attempting to overturn its tough "clean elections" law. The three-year-old law regulates interest group spending on behalf of candidates, imposes limits on campaign contributions and establishes spending caps in statewide and legislative races. The Boston Phoenix recently reported that, regardless of the outcome in US District Court in Burlington, the other side will likely appeal, possibly hastening the day when the Supreme Court revisits the constitutionality of restricting campaign contributions.

Bonifaz, a Brown University alumnus who last year received a MacArthur "genius grant," accepts the idea that full public financing of elections and the demise of Buckley v. Valeo may be decades away. But after the elimination through the years of numerous other obstacles to voting rights -- property ownership, race, gender, poll taxes, high candidate filing fees and vote dilution schemes -- he sees it as a vital step.

"If society wants to set up a different structure and says we are going to have a class of elites, then let's formalize it and have them make all the decisions -- let's come out and be honest about that," Bonifaz told the Boston Phoenix. "But that is not what democracy is supposed to be all about. There are not supposed to be people, who with all their money and power, are supposed to have more influence. That's not democracy. That's plutocracy."

ALTHOUGH HE'S FOND of saying that his life's experience prepared him for this congressional race, Kevin McAllister got into politics more by accident than by design. In 1993, at age 41, he was the compromise choice of two factions to complete the unexpired term of a Cranston city councilor who had moved. McAllister discovered he liked the work, and his straight-talking, problem-solving approach proved popular with voters.

Part of a Democratic boom that supplanted the scandal-scorched administration of Republican Mayor Michael Traficante, McAllister helped to replace a $7.5 million municipal budget deficit with an $11 million surplus by privatizing the city's wastewater treatment facility. By 1998, in his third local election, he received almost 17,000 votes -- the most of any councilor -- and was elected council president.

In March, McAllister's penchant for taking unpopular stands gained statewide exposure when he was the only one of the four Democrats seeking the Second Congressional District seat to cross a picket line staged by Cranston police outside William Hall Library in Edgewood before a scheduled debate. While Langevin, Coyne-McCoy and Angel Taveras said they wanted to show their support for labor, McAllister points to the episode as a sign of his willingness to challenge unions and political orthodoxy. A lot of politicians mouth the rhetoric, but McAllister has more credibility than most when he makes statements like, "I don't tell people what they want to hear. I tell them the truth."

Although his approach to politics is unusual, McAllister is a standard Democrat when it comes to issues and ideas. His priorities include economic development, enhancing environmental protection, and the standard refrain of strengthening Medicare and Social Security, and lowering the cost of prescription drugs. While he acknowledges sometimes getting too agitated ("although I'm usually right," he adds with a laugh), McAllister comes across as a genial regular guy whose greatest campaign regret is that he had to skip coaching Little League baseball this summer.

McAllister's four grandparents came to Rhode Island from Ireland, and he grew up in the Elmhurst section of Providence, the third of four sons born to a minor league baseball player and a teacher. Starting as a young child, he worked summers at Cavanaugh's Cafe in Matunuck, which was run by his relatives for close to 50 years. It's this kind of strong local tie that McAllister is counting on to pay dividends on primary day.

After graduating from Holy Cross, McAllister worked in Washington while in his early 20s for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, processing high-level security clearances. He returned to New England to attend the Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire, and settled in Cranston with his wife, Susan Craft McAllister, an educator at the New England Institute of Technology. McAllister started his own legal practice in 1985 and merged it six years later into what is now Brennan, Recupero, Scungio and McAllister, a nine-lawyer firm with offices in Providence and Taunton, Massachusetts.

Based on his experience -- among other things, working for the federal government, starting a small business, living in Vienna for a year while in college, a proven record in a city with 76,000 residents -- McAllister calls himself the most qualified and well-rounded of the four Democrats in the Second Congressional District race. A run for Congress, he says, is a logical next step.

McAllister is familiar with the accepted mode of primary campaigns -- candidates try to raise the most possible money, and then blitz the airwaves in the four or five weeks before the election. He doesn't buy it. Rhode Island is "so small, so tribal, you don't need to do that," he says during a recent interview in his campaign office, located over a travel agency on a commercial strip of Reservoir Avenue in Cranston. McAllister believes he's better known across the Second Congressional District than Coyne-McCoy, and that his level of recognition approaches Langevin's.

The Second District seat is open since the incumbent, Robert Weygand, is running for the Senate seat held by Lincoln Chafee. Noting that Weygand won the seat with 20,000 votes during a three-way Democratic primary in 1996, McAllister is banking on a corps of more than 150 volunteers, and a web of personal and professional ties, to deliver the votes on primary day. "I believe I can get 20,000 people to vote," he says, "and I'm convinced that's enough to win this."

FROM THE START of her campaign, Kate Coyne-McCoy has aggressively targeted fund-raising. It's her success in this arena (she outraised James Langevin in the most recent three-month period, bringing her war chest to $408,350) that has made her a bona fide competitor, judging by much of the coverage in the Phoenix (see "The insurgent," News, November 19, 1999) and Providence Journal. Coyne-McCoy, a social worker and union activist who leads the state chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, minces few words. "It would be nice not to have to do it, but it's necessary in 21st-century politics to raise the funds to run a competitive campaign," she says. "I would say [fund-raising] is, without a doubt, the way to prove that you are a credible, viable candidate.

Based on recognition gained during two terms as secretary of state, Langevin was anointed the front-runner in the Second District race. He has a big advantage by being able to self-finance his campaigns, and has contributed almost $300,000 to this race. Langevin's wealth is thought to come from the $20 million lawsuit filed by his parents after he was accidentally shot by a Warwick police officer in 1980, leaving him paralyzed below his waist. At the end of June, his war chest stood at $482,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Much of the money for the Langevin and Coyne-McCoy campaigns has come from various interest groups (Emily's List, which works to elect pro-choice female congressional candidates, gave her $69,466, for example, while Langevin received $10,000 each from the Association of Trial Lawyers of America; the Laborers Union; and the National Association of Home Builders). While accepting the big bucks, the two perceived front-runners have also used donations to rap each other; Langevin faulted Coyne-McCoy for accepting too much from out-of-towners, while Coyne-McCoy criticized Langevin for taking money from the Susan B. Anthony List, a pro-life Virginia group, which almost always supports Republican candidates.

Meanwhile, the two also-rans in the money race -- McAllister and lawyer Angel Taveras, an associate at Brown, Rudnick, Freed & Gesmer in Providence, and the first Hispanic to run for Congress in Rhode Island -- have received a fraction of the media attention. The greatest difference among the four Democrats, of course, is between Langevin, who although a reformer on open government issues, veers socially conservative (he's pro-life) and has garnered the backing of the Democratic establishment, and McAllister, Coyne-McCoy and Taveras, who are pro-choice and more progressive.

Certainly, Coyne-McCoy, who has collected a raft of endorsements, is doing everything she can to define the primary as a two-way fight between her and Langevin. And Langevin, except when responding to criticism that he's ducking debates, has predictably tried to act as if his challengers don't exist.

Given this scenario, McAllister soldiers on, steadily working coffee hours and summer festivals, flying largely under the radar while trying to engineer the most unlikely of upsets. If nothing else, his campaign will reflect the extent to which an appealing mainstream candidate can become a part of the Washington establishment while defying its rules. "You couldn't do this in most other places," McAllister says. "This is truly a Rhode Island schtick."

Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis[a]phx.com.