Is Speaker Murphy getting a bad rap? Although the House leader can be less than agile in shaping his public image, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s turning into a hubristic autocrat BY IAN DONNIS

BY THE TIME of St. Patrick’s Day, when House Speaker William P. Murphy was slated to offer a humorous interpretation of "Murphy’s Law" during a March 17 corned beef luncheon at the Federal Reserve, the West Warwick Democrat was probably more than a little ready for a few moments of levity.

The previous week had been something of a public-relations mess. An outing in which Murphy treated a bunch of representatives to a Celtics game in Boston sparked questions from the media. Republicans cried foul when the speaker helped to give $300,000, without convening the spending arm of the legislature, to a production company filming a Showtime series in Providence. Reformers and the GOP were still smarting over House rules changes made in February. The House lagged behind the Senate in taking up the implementation of separation of powers. And a lawsuit against Murphy by former speaker and one-time ally John B. Harwood, over the tab from when Harwood’s official portrait was unveiled during a State House reception last year, represented a tawdry spectacle.

All in all, it was the kind of attention that reinforces negative perceptions of the General Assembly, at least for those predisposed to seeing the legislature in a dim light. It was all the more surprising, too, since Murphy, who gained the speakership after succeeding Harwood in 2003, seemed poised for smoother sailing when he defeated a leadership challenge by Representative John DeSimone (D-Providence), 45-30, in early January. For someone commonly described as the most powerful man in state government, the speaker seemed to be having more than his share of difficulties. "It’s starting to look like he has a tin ear, which is disappointing, because I didn’t really think he was going to have that problem," says a Democratic State House source supportive of Murphy.

The speaker, although he acknowledges having had better stretches, downplayed the sequence of events. "What does it amount to?" Murphy asks. "In my opinion, it’s a whole lot of nothing. I can tell you that I am finding things much smoother this term that I did for the past two years. I think things are running in the right direction, and the leadership fight is over. There are still some lingering scars with some members that probably won’t heal, but with other members we have opened up dialogue and been communicating and so forth. I think last week there was much made about nothing."

Indeed, although House Democrats not uncommonly show a penchant for being their own worst enemy, some of this stuff was overblown. Take the matter of the $300,000 payment to the production company making the Showtime series Brotherhood, which was moved forward by Murphy and Senate President Joseph A. Montalbano. In a prominent front-page story on March 9, the Providence Journal headline indicated darkly, "State secretly paid $300,000 to TV firm." Three paragraphs in, Scott Mayerowitz’s story noted, "The deal was originally worked out this summer by the state Economic Development Corporation but was not finished in time for the $300,000 to be added to the agency’s budget. So last month, Murphy personally authorized the grant from the budget of the Joint Committee on Legislative Services (JCLS), although he never called a meeting of the group."

Not surprisingly, House Minority Leader Robert Watson (R-East Greenwich), a member of the JCLS, took offense, and some observers might have seen a faint glimmer of how Harwood used to operate the panel basically as a personal fiefdom. (Then again, Murphy remains far more open and accessible than his predecessor, who, after once hiring redistricting consultants, didn’t bother to inform his Senate counterpart about it for months.)

In retrospect, Murphy acknowledges that perhaps he should have gathered the JCLS, but he defends his action. "From a public relations point of view," he says, "maybe I should have held a press conference the day that we decided to go ahead and say, ‘Hey, look, we have to honor this agreement. EDC doesn’t have the money. This is a good thing for the state of Rhode Island. There’s nothing secret about it. It’s not done in secret — there was a signed contact between EDC and Showtime.’ Sometimes you have to grab the bull by the horns and go forward."

Some of the things that have brought negative press for Murphy — particularly the rules changes, and the House’s slower implementation of separation of powers — stem from the demands of satisfying his ruling Democratic majority and fending off the challenges posed by the coalition of Republicans and dissident Democrats. Yet just because the speaker’s handling of some issues has been less than agile doesn’t mean he’s set down the traditional road in which legislative leaders become hubris-plagued autocrats.

Murphy can be ham-fisted on occasion. News reports about the Celtics trip, first reported by WJAR-TV (Channel 10), raised the question of whether public officials were receiving largesse from a corporate entity. Murphy told reporters he would pay for the chartered mini-bus and tickets, but he initially declined to specify the company (Coca-Cola, as it turns out) providing a luxury box. As ProJo political columnist M. Charles Bakst observed, "In terms of public relations, count on General Assembly heavyweights to take an awkward situation, or an innocent one, and make the worst of it."

If the week or so before St. Patrick’s Day is an indicator, the third year of Murphy’s speakership seems beset by far more rough sledding than the comparable period in Harwood’s tenure. This could be largely due to how Murphy, although certainly intelligent, is considered far less politically shrewd than the tandem formed by Harwood and his highly astute one-time majority leader, George Caruolo. Ironically, the negative public image that can emerge from Murphy’s recent rough stretch is that of more nonsense from Smith Hill when, in fact, it’s far more benign.

A Charlie Hall caricature of Murphy in the good government group Operation Clean Government’s current newsletter depicts him as a crown-wearing, scepter-bearing potentate, laying down "Murphy’s Law" to a quiescent camp of sheepish House supporters. It would be foolish to dismiss the changes that can come with a growing taste for power. But some liberals sympathetic to the speaker have already concluded that he’s not a king and doesn’t want to be one.