For Howell, Libertarian view hits home
By Sarah Schweitzer, Globe Staff, 10/18/2002
Last in a series of profiles of the Massachusetts gubernatorial candidates.
On the campaign trail, Carla Howell is a woman of mechanical motion. At a meeting of the Danvers Fish and Game Club, she shakes every hand in the room, but moves on quickly, no time to chat. At Harvard University's Sever Hall, she launches abruptly into her stump speech, not so much as a light aside to warm the room. Throughout, she refers to herself in the third person.
For Howell, connecting with voters is not about being chummy or about being liked. It's about making them see the flaws of government - and the need to eliminate them, like gun regulations, drug laws, public education, and the income tax. It's a message she offers in robotic sound bites over and over, along with numbers that she says prove it.
Yet sitting at the kitchen table of her Wayland home, the 47-year-old Libertarian gubernatorial candidate casts her eyes downward as conversation turns to her political awakening. She sits silently, dangling a fork with a speared piece of canteloupe. Then, haltingly, she offers an answer that is strikingly visceral.
"It was devastating to me to see people getting hurt when it was totally preventable," she said.
The year was 1987. Howell was working as a manager at a Burlington technology company when her mother developed a swelling in her arm. A CAT scan at a local hospital revealed a lump in her liver. Tests revealed cancer.
"I remember waiting with her for tests and they would be rescheduled and then results would be delayed," Howell said. "Toward the end, there was one day when I got to the hospital and she was lying on a gurney outside a testing room. She said she had been there waiting, under a loudspeaker, for two hours."
Seven weeks after her diagnosis, her mother died at 59.
Howell's entanglements with the health care system would multiply over the next few years, each bringing new frustrations. Her brother-in-law underwent 13 surgeries for a hernia condition. In 1990, Howell learned that she was infertile and embarked on a six-year medical odyssey, featuring a range of treatments and drugs. During that period, she suffered two miscarriages, went through the breakup of her first marriage, and then her second, which ended shortly after she abandoned her quest to have a baby.
She began scouring health care policy tracts and medical journals, searching for solutions for a system she saw as bloated, burdened with red tape, and oblivious to the pain it inflicted.
She found it in a Libertarian pamphlet entitled "Patient Power." It blamed health care woes on intrusive government regulation that rendered the system unresponsive to patients' needs.
"When I read it, it was like: `Yes, that's it!"' Howell said.
Howell's epiphany, friends and family say, was a fitting one: born of an emotional wellspring, transformed by reason and logic, capped by a neatly compacted solution.
Yet there was little indication that Howell's path would lead to the fringe of American politics. Her family roots are solidly establishment, dating back to the 17th century and the Mayflower. Howell's childhood was comfortable and middle-class. A math whiz, she gravitated early on to the world of business and rarely gave politics more than a passing thought for her first four decades.
Howell's parents, both Democrats, were not active in party politics or local affairs, in part because they moved so much. Her father, Charles Howell, a graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Business School, was a manufacturing executive whose job dictated moves from Massachusetts to Maine, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Her mother, Carla (Winsor) Howell, a Wellesley graduate and descendant of Myles Standish, leader of Plymouth Colony, devoted her time to volunteer causes, helping immigrants settle in Boston and working with the Junior League in Pittsburgh.
The Howells were socially active, hosting dinner parties for a wide network of friends, many met though tennis. They were devoted Unitarians; so much so that they founded a church during a stint in Birmingham, Mich.
Howell was the third of the family's five children. The oldest, Charlie, was autistic and lived much of his life in an institution and later in a group home. Carla was the family's academic star, earning high marks in public schools, excelling on the tennis team, and playing piano and guitar in her spare time.
"She was a very high achiever," said her father, a World War II veteran now living in a Westwood retirement home.
Yet Howell hated school. She says now that classes, even advanced ones, were boring and seemed forced upon her. "It was one pace of learning and it had to suit all the kids in the class," she said.
Howell particularly disliked history. "I thought it was irrelevant," she said. "I wanted to know what was going on now."
Perhaps that disdain explains how she only recently learned during a conversation with a cousin of her own illustrious lineage: a great-grandfather who rose to the pinnacle of the Massachusetts political establishment, occupying the office she now covets.
William Eustice Russell was the son of a Cambridge mayor, graduate of Harvard College and Boston University Law School, who was governor from 1891 to 1894.
Russell was a loyal party man, a Democrat at Harvard when his friends, and their fathers, were overwhelmingly Republican. Yet Russell also exhibited a Libertarian streak, staunchly opposing tariffs and prohibition - views Howell attributes not to genetics, but to the right thinking of early liberals.
Howell's own distrust of government emerged in snatches during high school. During her teen years in suburban Detroit and Pittsburgh, she was part of the hippie clique, a group of bell-bottom-wearing, flower-power types who opposed the Vietnam War. Like her "colorful and intelligent and eccentric" friends, she protested on high school grounds, driven in part by fear for her draft-age brother.
When she graduated a year early at age 16 from Fox Chapel High School outside Pittsburgh, her nascent activism would not go with her. At Bethany College in the rolling hills of West Virginia, she studied mathematics and computer science. The small liberal arts college was a bubble Howell happily ensconced herself in, surrounded by a patchwork of farmland and woods.
After graduation, she went to work for Westinghouse Electric as a systems engineer, based primarily in Pittsburgh. But her father, now back in his native state of Massachusetts, was talking up high-tech and opportunities in Boston. At age 25 Howell heeded his advice and took a job in 1981 at Computervision, a Burlington firm specializing in computer-aided design and manufacturing. She rose quickly through the ranks, becoming the head of an engineering division unit by 1984.
"Some bosses try to be buddy-buddy," said Nancy Murphy, a onetime Howell employee and now a campaign volunteer. "She wasn't like that. Business was business. She gave you a project and she kept tabs on it. She was always accessible - not open for chatting but if you had problems you could always go to her."
Howell left after a decade for business consulting work at high-tech and health care firms in the Boston suburbs. But as she thrived professionally, her worry was growing about whether she could have a child.
"In the beginning you don't call yourself infertile because you don't want to believe it. It's a process. At first you're just one of the people for whom it doesn't work and then you move to the hard-core treatment," she said. "I did the whole nine yards."
She began with diagnostic testing in 1990, followed by drugs, none of which worked. In 1993, her five-year marriage to a fellow Computervision employee dissolved. The same year, she met a software engineer who would become her second husband. Soon after, she turned to in vitro fertilization. In 1995, she suffered two miscarriages. Howell says she considered adoption but decided against it because her marriage was fraying.
In 1996, she underwent a final in vitro fertilization procedure. It failed. She was 40. "It was horrible," she said. That year, she ended her quest. In 1997, she and her second husband separated.
Howell pored over health care policy papers, searching for an understanding of a system that failed her, in part, she believed, because of its bureaucracy and red tape. She read and read, until one day she stumbled upon a bright light: the Libertarian brochure.
She sought out area Libertarians and attended party meetings on health care. In 1995, Howell went to her first Massachusetts Libertarian convention. She read works by Harry Browne and David Bergland, Libertarian Party leaders and presidential candidates. The next year, she again attended the party's state convention and this time, the broader Libertarian philosophy clicked.
"I saw a pattern," she said. "Big government didn't work - whether it was guns or health care or education - it just didn't work."
In 1997, Howell was elected chairwoman of the state party. In 1998, the Libertarian candidate for state auditor bowed out and she took his place. She won 6 percent of the vote. Two years later, she ran against Senator Edward M. Kennedy, delighting supporters when she placed a close third with 12 percent of the vote, one percentage point behind Republican Jack E. Robinson.
For friends and family, Howell's transformation from high-tech business consultant to third-party candidate preaching the dismantling of large chunks of government was a stunner - and yet, somehow fitting.
"I was totally surprised. It was kind of like falling off a log for her," said Kate Howell, her younger sister, but adding, "It brought something out of her - a passion that we hadn't seen."
"The Libertarian thing seemed like it just came upon her and made a lot of sense for her," said Tasker Smith, her stepbrother.
Michael Cloud, currently the Libertarian candidate for Senate and Howell's romantic companion since 1998, likened her political maturation to her college work of disentangling mathematical problems: "She's relentlessly methodical. Once she gets on a path that makes sense, you won't distract or deter her. If you tell her half an answer, she will not rest until it fits into an overarching one."
It is an intensity that Howell has already used to alter the landscape of this year's race, leading the successful drive to get an initiative on the Nov. 5 ballot that would eliminate the state income tax - an effort run from her modest gray clapboard home in Wayland that doubles as campaign headquarters and home to Howell, Cloud, and three cats.
On the campaign trail - stopping at a mix of suburban gun clubs, college campuses, and the occasional hemp festival - she is embraced by some as a savior. At the Westwood Gun Club this month, a man interrupted her in midsentence to rush to the dais with an offer of two crisp $20 bills.
Howell, who seldom displays humor in public, thanked him politely and told him to make sure he signed campaign finance forms.
The ramrod seriousness belies a warmer side. Howell composes campaign jingles on her keyboard and guitar in her home office. Her refrigerator is papered with photographs of her nieces and nephews, whom family members say she showers with attention. She and Cloud hope to adopt a child after the election.
On the stump, Howell shows nothing of this persona, saying that her ideas - free of distractions from her personal life - are a more powerful motivator for voters. Indeed, for her supporters, Howell represents the force that will loosen the grip of the major parties, which they say are becoming increasingly similar and unsupportive of issues they care about.
"We're not wackos; we're grandfathers," said Tony Vinci, a retired electric company serviceman and gun enthusiast from Stoneham. "But we get totally ignored by the Democrats and the Republicans. I know she doesn't have a ghost of a chance, but I don't want to leave my ballot blank."
And yet, she is still beyond the pale for many. She drew criticism when she campaigned on the anniversary of Sept. 11 this year, saying that it was the perfect time to talk about the real tragedy: that pilots were not able to arm themselves. Within her family, there are mixed feelings. Her older brother is an environmentalist in Seattle who seeks to enforce the very regulations Howell would scrap, making for lively reunions at the family's Cape Cod home on Buzzards Bay, where her political signs have been ripped from the yard.
Howell is undeterred.
"I am doing a job," she said. "There are serious issues to be discussed and I only have so much time. My first priority is to tell them that what I offer is small government."