O’Brien stressed issues of fiscal responsibility and her record of strong leadership, while longtime Beacon Hill insider Birmingham, who also began with a smoothly-edited video, pushed hard on his background as a labor union lawyer.
“He fights for us, and wins,” read his delegates’ hunter green t-shirts and signs.
Tolman, the 1998 Democratic pick for lieutenant governor, took a distinctly different tact with his 20 minutes.
His video, which opened with a clip of him singing “I’m a toll-man” to the tune of the Blues Brothers’ “Soul Man,” focused on a Back To the Future theme, using clips from the 1985 sci-fi thriller to “travel” through the course of his life, from his early days as a child in Brighton housing projects to his career in the state senate.
Former Massachusetts and national Democratic party leader Steve Grossman used a short video, but relied on the son of a local hero to speak for him.
Josh Zakim, the son of former Anti-Defamation League Boston Regional Director Leonard P. Zakim, spoke on behalf of his father who died of cancer in 1999. The younger Zakim stressed Grossman’s close friendship with his father, and the support he provided to the Zakim family upon his father’s death.
A Common Enemy
It was not moral character, or even proven leadership potential, that characterized the slant of most candidates’ pleas for support.
Proving that the best defense is a good offense, each candidate stressed why they were the party’s best chance to beat Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
O’Brien’s video presentation began as a mock tourist advertisement for Utah, complete with shots of forest and mountains, ending with the line “Scenic Utah. Let’s send Mitt Romney back,” and inspired widespread cheers from delegates.
O’Brien asserted what polls have shown—that she is the party candidate best suited to beat Romney in November.
“She can win for all of us,” read the practiced voice of an announcer at the end of the video portion of her presentation.
Birmingham accused Romney of attempting a “corporate takeover” of the commonwealth.
“We’re not just an economy,” he said. “First and foremost we are a society.”
Grossman went furthest, airing a roughly five-minute segment with a Romney stand-in (shot only from behind), getting cheap laughs in the audience over Romney’s lack of definitive policy positions.
Grossman ended his presentation with Elvis Presley’s “Return to Sender,” and he had members of his family with giant styrofoam red pointing hands sway to the music, hands in the air, symbolically sending Romney back west.
Except for the gags, however, Democrats were serious about regaining control of Beacon Hill’s corner office after 12 years of looking in from the outside in a traditionally Democratic state.
O’Brien blasted Republican leadership for failing to deliver on campaign pledges of financial reform and fiscal responsibility.
“Those were false promises then, and they’re broken promises now,” she said.
—Staff writer David S. Hirsch can be reached at hirsch@fas.harvard.edu.