The ProJo’s angry man Although op-ed columnist Edward Achorn is peerless when it comes to provoking cheers and jeers, his influence remains a subject of debate BY IAN DONNIS

IT WAS YET ANOTHER quintessential Rhode Island moment. A $20,000 stash of cocaine that had gone missing while in the care of the Providence Police Department turned up an hour before a July 1999 news conference held by Vincent A. "Buddy" Cianci Jr., and the city’s reigning rascal king declared, "There was no hanky-panky here." For many locals, the caper’s stranger-than-fiction quality was familiar and perhaps entertaining. Edward Achorn, the freshly arrived deputy editorial page editor of the Providence Journal, however, wasn’t amused.

In his first weekly op-ed column in the Journal, Achorn deemed the public reaction to the resurfacing cocaine even stranger than Rhode Island’s resemblance to "a veritable Mardi Gras of scandal." Recounting how a colleague saw some people at an outdoor café mimicking Cianci’s performance at the news conference, he wrote, "It’s as if they do not mind surrendering a certain percentage of their tax dollars to incompetence and corruption in return for such rich comedy. Call it an entertainment expense, like the monthly cable bill."

With this tart 769-word op-ed page salvo, Achorn etched several of the themes that would quickly become his calling card: politicians — or Democrats at least — are, at best, shifty characters who require close monitoring; Rhode Island and its residents suffer from a dysfunctional and outdated political culture; and there’s relatively little hope for improvement until residents shake off their collective state of "learned helplessness." No matter that the arriviste had covered "the swindlers and power brokers in Washington, DC, and the bully boys at the Massachusetts State House." Coming to Rhode Island, he announced, made him feel "like a boyish, wide-eyed innocent once again."

With elegant writing and sharp-edged views, Achorn has since established himself as the most high-profile editorial columnist at the Journal in decades, although not without becoming a willfully polarizing figure. He has been excoriated in absentia on the floor of the Rhode Island House of Representatives, singled out by Senate President Joseph A. Montalbano as an "outrage of the week" on the RI-PBS TV show A Lively Experiment, and nominated as a "Grinch of the Year" by the liberal advocacy group Rhode Island Jobs With Justice. Achorn has also won the gratitude of reform groups and the state’s perennially anemic Republican Party (not coincidentally, his column frequently marches in step with the views of GOP Governor Donald L. Carcieri and Cranston Mayor Stephen P. Laffey), and the columnist was deemed meritorious enough to be a finalist in commentary for the Pulitzer Prize in 2003, "for his clear, tenacious call to action against government corruption in Rhode Island."

To his supporters, Achorn is a beacon, a champion, someone who says things that desperately need to be said in a state with an apathetic citizenry, and a legacy of corruption and government boondoggles. In his early suspicion of Cianci’s cult of personality, the columnist can claim the upper hand — the controversial mayor was convicted of racketeering conspiracy in 2002 and remains in federal prison. To Achorn’s critics, though, he is an echo chamber with a fixed worldview who depicts politics as a simplified battle between good and bad (particularly legislative Democrats and public-employee unions), in the interest of advancing conservative ideals.

Achorn, who declined a request for an interview, citing Journal management’s typical practice of not speaking with the Phoenix, is, in many respects, everything that an editorial writer should be — hard-driving, opinionated, clear, and provocative. That his Tuesday op-ed column sparks more letters to the editor, variously denouncing and lionizing him, than any other ProJo staffer reflects his success in getting a reaction out of people. Considering his Republican-friendly orientation and what some consider a mean-spirited attitude, it’s hardly a surprise that Democratic stalwarts tend to have a visceral reaction at the mention of Achorn’s name.

Even some of the columnist’s sharpest critics credit him with building support, through a persistent drumbeat of columns, for the eventual passage into law last year of separation of powers, a long overdue measure to more evenly distribute authority between Rhode Island’s three branches of government. Some of Achorn’s broader philosophical themes — describing the value of every single vote, for instance, and his fierce aversion to limiting free speech — are unimpeachable. His sense of moral outrage, as with a March 8 column about baseball’s steroids scandal, can be spot-on. And certainly, the dominant Democrats in the General Assembly can be their own worst enemy at times. Since the enactment into law of separation of powers, the House, for example, has hardly hastened to lay the necessary groundwork for its implementation. Similarly, even if Speaker William P. Murphy or some of his supporters had genuine questions about whether the new law applied to the powerful Lottery Commission, his brief attempt to exempt the commission was contrary to the spirit of separation of powers.

Some observers, though, believe Achorn has undercut his own credibility because of an overly harsh tone, and that even for an editorial columnist, he lacks a desirable element of balance. Indeed, the columnist’s instinctive practice of believing the worst about the legislature may detract from his exhortations encouraging more citizens to get involved in the process. Achorn’s biting style was on display in a November 30, 2004, column, about Representative John DeSimone’s ultimately unsuccessful leadership challenge to Murphy, which began with this memorable phrase: "It’s a little like the Iran-Iraq war. You almost want no one to win." He went on to write that the 15 Republicans in the House "have concluded that Mr. DeSimone is the skunk who stinks less."

To be sure, such stuff is red meat for Rhode Island’s long-suffering Republican minority, but does it do anything beyond fostering cynicism? Will we ever see the same vitriol applied to the Bush administration’s absence of planning for the occupation of Iraq, or the White House’s credentialing of Jeff Gannon, the pseudonymous "reporter" for a conservative Web site? Are such topics, even the possible frailties of Republican-affiliated pet causes in Rhode Island, off the table?

OVER THE YEARS, the personality of the Journal’s editorial page has gone through a series of changes, transmuting from an early hostility to immigrants to a kind of moderate Chafee-esque Republicanism that supported abortion rights and environmental protection. Michael P. Metcalf, the sainted publisher who sank big bucks into the newsroom and died in a mysterious 1987 bicycle accident, embraced a more rabidly conservative editorial page approach under the guidance of Phil Terzian (who recently left his op-ed columnist’s post for a job with the Weekly Standard). Things moderated again when former publisher Stephen Hamblett promoted Robert B. Whitcomb, a thoughtful contrarian with experience at the Journal and the International Herald Tribune, to serve as editorial page editor in 1992.

Generally more sympathetic to Republican than Democratic causes, the ProJo’s editorial page is nonetheless more independent-minded and unpredictable than its critics may recognize. A case in point was how the paper offered an emphatic endorsement earlier this year for Speaker Murphy when he was locked in his leadership fight with DeSimone. Similarly, Whitcomb, who declined to comment on Achorn, says he strives in the op-ed pages "to have it as open as I possibly can with all points of view, to sometimes press the envelope on points of view, making it as wide and free-ranging as I possibly can."

Still, although liberal thinkers appear on the Journal’s op-ed page — John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine, contributes a monthly column, to the consternation of local conservatives — Achorn, who is in his late 40s, has come to singularly embody the conservatism once associated with the editorial page as a whole. He stands out all the more since the ProJo, at least compared with dailies in such larger Northeast cities as Boston, New York, and Washington, has a relatively small amount of commentary spread throughout the paper.

Achorn came to Rhode Island from the Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where he served as executive editor. Along with occasional digressions into literary and political history and odes to baseball, the columnist has made a sideline from his fourth-floor aerie in criticizing Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Michael Dukakis, American Beauty, the Dixie Chicks, and other perceived emblems of Democratic or liberal dubiousness. (Although Cianci, the target of Achorn’s initial Journal column in 1999, was a Republican-turned-independent, the piece cited a string of Democrats — including Clinton, former Massachusetts Senate president William Bulger, US Representative Barney Frank, and former congressman Nicholas Mavroules — in outlining the author’s low regard for politicians.)