enlarge Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

Jesse Connolly, campaign manager for the No on 1 campaign, talks with supporters at the Holiday Inn by the Bay in Portland on Tuesday night. To many, regardless of the outcome, Connolly is a hero.

Saturday evening, just as the battle over same-sex marriage in Maine shifted into overdrive, Jesse Connolly quietly stepped out from his job as campaign manager of No on 1/Protect Maine Equality for a very important, very personal engagement. His 2-year-old son, Finn, was waiting at home dressed up like a polar bear.

"I'm taking my son trick-or-treating for the first time," Connolly, 31, said with a proud smile. "Damn right I'm going to sneak away for that!"

He comes by his priorities naturally. And as he sat in a coffee shop on India Street Saturday afternoon – a rare moment of reflection amid the chaos of a statewide campaign with national implications – Connolly confirmed what many have suspected these past few months.

"I've been thinking a lot of my father," he said. "I hope he would be proud of what I've chosen to do."

No doubt.

Thirty-six years ago, at a time when gays and lesbians registered nary a blip on the political radar screen, two young upstart state representatives from Portland turned heads in Augusta by filing what would be the first of many unsuccessful bills outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation.

One was Gerald Talbot, the first black ever elected to the Maine Legislature. The other was Laurence D. Connolly Jr., who would go on to forge a political legacy by lending his voice to the poor, the imprisoned and others who might otherwise go unheard.

Then in 1987, it all came crashing down. Larry Connolly, at the peak of his political career, died of heart failure at 43. He left his wife, Nancy; daughters Maggie and Sarah; and young Jesse.

"I was 8," Connolly said. "I was in second grade at Reiche School in the West End."

Meaning he was just old enough to know, as he watched the dignitaries and common folk stream into the funeral Mass at St. Dominic Catholic Church, that his father was no ordinary man. And that there's no nobler calling than to dedicate one's life to helping others.

"My sisters and I were raised by the community," Connolly recalled. "My mother went back to school immediately after he passed away to get her degree at the Muskie School. And she did it at night because we didn't have any savings or a life insurance policy. So we had a different baby-sitter in our house every night."

"We called it the child-care consortium," Nancy Connolly recalled with a hearty laugh Tuesday. "And to see Jesse now giving back to the community that was there to support him – I'm just so proud of him."

A star soccer goalkeeper at Portland High School, Connolly went on to study politics at Bates College – his thesis, buttressed by his reading of every floor speech his father delivered over eight terms in the Legislature, centered on the still-evolving effort to pass equal rights legislation for Maine's gay and lesbian community.

No surprise then that, upon his graduation from Bates, politics beckoned.

In 2004, Connolly managed the Maine presidential campaign for Democrat John Kerry. George W. Bush won re-election, but Kerry took Maine.

In 2005, after Maine finally passed a law placing sexual orientation under the protective umbrella of the Maine Human Rights Act, Connolly became campaign manager for Maine Won't Discriminate – the coalition formed to beat back a people's veto of the measure. The law survived the challenge.

In 2006, Gov. John Baldacci tapped Connolly to manage his re-election campaign. Another win.

"I'm very, very proud of him," said Baldacci, who served with Larry Connolly in the Legislature and still recalls the scholarship fund lawmakers formed for Jesse and his sisters after their father died.

"To see him develop into this kind of campaign manager, a politico extraordinaire, is so satisfying," Baldacci said. "We're all really proud of him, as a parent would be of a son or a daughter. You know that Larry's smiling – and realizing...