Governor Carcieri and his wife, Suzanne, in the East Greenwich home they moved into two years ago — to have more space for family gatherings.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

When the candidates for governor met in the WPRO studio recently for a radio debate, Lt. Gov. Charles J. Fogarty brought a folder full of notes, which he placed on the table before him. On the table in front of Governor Carcieri were photographs of Carcieri’s 13 grandchildren.

“It reminds me of why I’m doing this,” the governor said in an interview last week, explaining why he brings the photos with him on the campaign trail. “It’s the next generation. It puts a futuristic perspective on everything you’re doing.”

Carcieri keeps his family at the forefront of his life, and his campaign. On his campaign Web site, the largest photo on the main page shows the governor with a great-niece. His wife, Suzanne, appears with him in a print ad; they appear in a TV ad with their daughters and grandchildren, too.

Two years ago, Carcieri and his wife moved into a new house. It’s on Kenyon Avenue in East Greenwich, adjacent to the smaller house where they had lived the previous 17 years. They can see the old house from the circular driveway of the new one. The governor says they were perfectly happy in the old house – it was just that they needed more space because family gatherings were getting cramped.

Ask Carcieri what he does to unwind from the stressful political life, and the answer comes quickly. It’s not fishing or sailing or home-improvement projects. He simply says: “Well, family.”

The transition to public life wasn’t the easiest for Carcieri, who spent most of his career in the business world – 10 years with Old Stone Bank, culminating in a position as executive vice president, then 14 with Cookson America, a Providence-based metals company that provides industrial materials for the electronics, ceramics and precious-metals industries. (He was CEO at Cookson from 1991 until 1997.)

One particularly difficult moment came last year, when Democratic political operative Guy Dufault alluded, during a TV infomercial, to alleged marital infidelity by Carcieri. Dufault hadn’t realized the cameras were rolling; he later apologized. Carcieri, put on the defensive, denied any infidelity, as did his wife, who stood at his side during the news conferences he held to respond.

When it came time to announce for a second term, Carcieri weighed the decision carefully, and considered the way the job had changed his life. “We talked a lot about it, Sue and I,” Carcieri says.

Ultimately, he says, he’s running again for the same reasons he got into it the first time: “I really love the place. I’ve lived here my whole life. It bothered me that people would say ‘Rhode Island’ with negative tones.…I want it to be seen as a place that’s vibrant, that’s energetic, that’s not only a great place to live, but a great place to do business.”

Carcieri recalls something former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said on a visit to Rhode Island this month, to headline a Carcieri fundraiser. Giuliani said a second term as mayor was necessary to cement the changes he’d made during the first one.

Among Carcieri’s proudest accomplishments from the last four years, he counts his Fiscal Fitness initiative, including a “Big Audit” of state government, and changing pension benefits for state employees to lower the cost to taxpayers.

He’s proud of one veto that stood – a bill that would have required the state to negotiate with childcare providers, and which would have made the providers de facto state employees, according to Carcieri – and of a few that didn’t, including two budget vetoes, the casino referendum bill and a medical marijuana bill, all vetoes the General Assembly voted to override.

He boasts of working with lawmakers to pass an income-tax cut for the state’s highest wage earners, a deal to keep GTECH in Rhode Island, and an initiative to offer lower-cost health-insurance policies to small businesses. But by and large, the Democrats who control the Assembly are no fans of Carcieri, nor he of them. Democratic lawmakers and social-service advocates lambasted Carcieri for cuts he proposed to programs and services, such as ending state-paid health insurance for non-citizen children, and decreasing state financing for a grant program that gives money to agencies such as Meals on Wheels.

The Assembly undid Carcieri’s proposals, restoring financing for both, although non-citizen children who don’t currently have insurance through the state won’t be able to enroll. A willingness to oppose the General Assembly is one of the Carcieri campaign’s major points of pride, but the governor has also been criticized by national policy groups and publications for not succeeding in winning legislative support for his proposals by engendering a more cooperative relationship across party lines.

Carcieri sees a “natural tension” between the executive and legislative branches. “You have to pick the situations where you work together,” he says. “The things that are important, you have to fight for.”

For Carcieri, it’s a good thing when he says he tries to run state government like a business. Fogarty uses the same words as a slur, implying a heartless attitude and unilateral decisions. That characterization “shows he really doesn’t understand the corporate world,” Carcieri says of Fogarty, whose jobs have all been in the public sector. “The notion that you just decide, willy-nilly, because you’re the chief executive, this is what we’re going to do, everybody – that doesn’t apply,” Carcieri says. “That’s not successful. You need to convince people and talk about what it is you’re trying to do.”

Carcieri clearly still feels at home in the business world. On a recent visit to ATP Manufacturing, a North Smithfield maker of polyurethane foam inserts for footwear, he bantered easily with the company’s executives about globalization, assembly-line technology and bionics development at Brown University, and even threw around business lingo such as “OEM.” (In case you’re wondering, that’s original equipment manufacturer.) But Carcieri shook hands with everyone he met, not just corner-office types. He posed for a picture with an assembly-line worker and spent 10 minutes chatting with a receptionist.

The governor grew up in East Greenwich before it was a ritzy address. He met the first lady when she was 14, when her family moved there from Warwick.

Carcieri, 63, speaks often of his less-than-affluent roots. He’s the son of a public-school teacher, and his own first job after college was as a teacher. He worked for Catholic Relief Services in Jamaica for a year and a half. He is fond of mentioning that scholarships enabled both him and his wife to attend college, he at Brown University and she at the University of Rhode Island. He also delivered packages for United Parcel Service during college, working the 4 to 8 a.m. shift, to pay for an engagement ring.

But a successful career changed Carcieri’s financial straits. On filings with the state Ethics Commission, he reports owning two houses in East Greenwich, a summer house in Saunderstown and a condominium in Stuart, Fla. Besides the governor’s salary of $105,194, Carcieri received a pension from Cookson America of between $200,000 and $500,000 last year, as well as interest between $10,000 and $25,000 from a Bank of America account.

Carcieri spent more than $1 million of his own money on the 2002 race. This time around, he has not put in any of his own money thus far, save for $15,000 he deposited in the campaign fund this spring to pay legal fees in the court case over whether the national Republican Party broke the law by paying for a 2002 campaign ad that ran in Rhode Island. Carcieri “doesn’t want people to feel like they’re donating to the campaign to pay legal fees,” campaign manager Kenneth K. McKay IV explained last month.

As of Wednesday, Carcieri had spent $2.2 million this election cycle, but by law, he must include in that total all expenditures from his campaign fund since he took office in January 2003. Since the beginning of this year, Carcieri has spent $1.3 million, all money raised through private donations.

Carcieri says he fervently wants a second term, but sees his backup plan as not all that bad. There would be no more need to shoehorn the grandkids’ birthday parties between gubernatorial appearances. For the last four years, Sunday has been designated as “family day” for the Carcieris. If he were only grandpa, and no longer governor, every day could be family day.