FOGARTY

CRANSTON –– It was a stiff rebuke.

Democrat Cynthia M. Fogarty, a two-term City Councilwoman, had been in the spotlight for four years.

And her opponent in the party’s 2006 mayoral primary, Municipal Court Judge Michael T. Napolitano, was a relative unknown.

But when the Democratic City Committee gathered to endorse candidates in June of that year, the panel chose Napolitano by an overwhelming margin: 37-2.

The next few months were a struggle. Napolitano built a much larger war chest than his rival, virtually ignored Fogarty on the campaign trail and scored a rout in September, collecting 59 percent of the vote.

But if defeat was hard to swallow, the blunt-spoken Fogarty hardly sounded despondent.

“You think I’m at the top of the Jamestown bridge? No,” she said, in an interview with The Providence Journal. “This was a big challenge, we knew. It’s not the end of the world.”

And two years later, in the midst of another run for mayor, the former councilwoman insists there is no lingering bitterness.

Fogarty, 52, says she is confident she will unite city Democrats and defeat Republican Allan W. Fung, also a former councilman member, in November.

But that could be a challenge. Some party regulars are still miffed that Fogarty, a lawyer, declined to endorse Napolitano in the 2006 general election after she lost the primary.

And she was not the Democrats’ top choice to run for mayor this time around when Napolitano made the surprise announcement, in May, that he would not seek a second term.

Party leaders signaled support for state Rep. Charlene Lima or former City Councilman Mario Carlino instead.

It was only after Carlino, Lima and City Council Vice President Paula B. McFarland withdrew their names from consideration that Fogarty secured the party endorsement.

But even if the Democrats unite behind Fogarty, she could face larger problems.

With the city staring down a deficit of as high as $9 million this fiscal year, voters seem disposed to put a new party in the mayor’s office.

Polling this spring found widespread dissatisfaction with the direction of the city and broad support for Fung, 38.

And Republicans have been doing all they can to tie Fogarty, who served on the council from 2003 to 2006, to the Napolitano administration.

“She has been silent, almost completely silent for the past two years, as the city has continued to go down and down financially,” said David Exter, chairman of the Republican City Committee.

But Fogarty, who would be the first woman to serve as mayor of Cranston, says much of the financial difficulty has been beyond the control of the Napolitano administration.

“You can’t blame Napolitano for the entire nation’s problems,” she said.

Indeed, the financial crisis engulfing the country –– and the deep disenchantment with the Bush Administration –– is expected to help Democrats at the polls nationwide.

And whatever Cranston’s fiscal woes, Fogarty can claim a superior expertise in municipal finance: she served on the council Finance Committee during the city’s last recovery from a financial crisis, as she often notes, while Fung did not.

Fogarty seems to be building her campaign around the notion that she was a figure of substance on the council while Fung, who also served from 2003 to 2006, was not.

She points to an ordinance she drafted banning cement- and asphalt-mixing plants in the wake of a neighborhood uprising against a proposed plant in Western Cranston.

She talks of financial controls she championed in a city that had plunged into junk-bond territory in the early part of the decade.

And she boasts of an ordinance she backed giving the City Council a seat at the bargaining table, alongside the mayor, during contract talks with municipal unions.

Getting the council involved, she suggested, could restore public trust in an often secretive process.

But Republican critics note that Superior Court Judge Daniel Procaccini threw out the ordinance in June 2005, ruling that the council had exceeded its authority.

And they argue that the case was just one example of Fogarty going too far in her partisan zeal to attack then-Mayor Stephen P. Laffey, a Republican.

Fogarty did oppose Laffey at several turns.

She sided with the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union when it sued Laffey for allowing religious symbols, balanced by secular totems, in the city’s official holiday display.

She pushed for a $1-million infusion for the public schools’ budget over the mayor’s objections.

And she pushed to strip the mayor of his authority to award police and fire sick leave.

Fogarty defends each decision on the merits. And if she was caught up in any partisan sniping, the same could be said of Fung, who was a reliable Laffey supporter.

But Fogarty, who is married to Robert Fogarty, a professor of computer science, and has two children who have gone through the state’s Catholic schools, has tried to craft a biography larger than her City Council resumé.

Reared in Providence, Fogarty struggled at Rhode Island College after high school.

She worked in the banking industry before giving birth to her first child and taking a second shot at higher education.

Fogarty graduated from Providence College in 1994 with a business administration degree and a minor in accounting before earning a law degree at Roger Williams University in 1998.

She highlights her business degree and experience running her own law office as she makes the case to voters.

Fogarty, of course, could boast the same credentials when she ran for mayor in 2006.

But this time, she has the endorsement of a party that spurned her two years ago –– and the volunteers and fundraising clout that come with that endorsement.

Indeed, Fogarty made it clear from the outset that she would not run again without that endorsement.

Still, she does not seem entirely at ease with the party hierarchy. Fogarty suggests that the Democratic City Committee has not done enough to back women candidates, for instance.

But the fissures of the past have largely smoothed over, she insists. And this time, Fogarty adds, she expects a different result at the polls.

dscharfe@projo.com