By JIM BARON

PAWTUCKET — He is running for mayor as an independent, but candidate Donald Grebien notes that his voter registration card still identifies him as a Democrat. His campaign touts him as an “independent Democrat.”

But the chairman of the Rhode Island Democratic Party, Pawtucket’s William Lynch, says you’ve got to pick one or the other. If you are a Democrat, he contends, you should run as a Democrat.
“It seems pretty straightforward,” Lynch told The Times Friday. “You are either part of the Democratic family or you aren’t.”
Earlier this week, Lynch wrote a letter to Grebien telling him it is “misleading and inappropriate for you to be campaigning as a Democrat, when in fact you have made the voluntary decision to run as an independent.”
Lynch said “the party has grave concerns with regard to you running as an independent candidate for Mayor while continuing to promote yourself (and your candidacy) as a Democrat.”
Lynch asks Grebien to “refrain from any continued activity that misrepresents your independent candidacy.”
Grebien’s answer is, in a word, “No.” But he has more to say.
To have run in the September Democratic primary, Grebien said in a statement issued Friday, “would have been to take part in what amounts to a rigged game” because most of the endorsements went to allies of his opponent, incumbent Mayor James Doyle.
“As Bill Lynch, who I have known for years and admire both personally and professionally, knows full well, I have been a registered Democrat all of my political life, including during my 11 years as an at-large member of the Pawtucket City Council,” Grebien said. “But while the virtues of political loyalty are not to be lightly regarded, being a faithful Democrat, as I remain, does not mean bowing down to a city political machine, of whatever stripe.”
Grebien asserts that it is “a core Democratic principle that the party is not a mere apparatus of, or for, the people who run it. At its heart it should be the spirit of the numerous people who comprise it, and their core beliefs.”
He explains that running as an independent was a “strategic decision” based on his late entry into the fray: He made the final commitment to run only on June 23, the first of three days in which hopefuls formally declare their candidacy.
To run in the primary, Grebien said, would require pulling the entire campaign together in just two months. He decided that his best opportunity would be to run in November, and the only way to do that was to run as an independent.
Grebien dismissed the flap as a political distraction.
“If the Doyle campaign thinks this is the one issue on everyone’s mind, they are further out of touch than I thought they were. When I knock on doors, people are not talking about party affiliation. They are talking about the tax increases over the last 11 years, about how they want to see change — they want to see some new ideas and someone with the energy to make these changes.”
His opponents, he said, want to keep the campaign “off issues. They don’t want to talk about the past 11 years. They are not running on their record, they are running away from their record.”
Grebien says half-seriously that, given the feedback he is receiving from voters, he might have been able to make a successful primary challenge in two months.
Attempts to reach Doyle for comment were unsuccessful Friday.
In his written statement, Grebien compares his situation to that of Lynch’s father, the late Dennis Lynch, former mayor of Pawtucket.
“Dennis Lynch in his first mayoral race had to run against the prevailing powers of his day. That was without the party’s endorsement — and ironically against the current mayor. So he took his case straight to the voters. They went on to elect him four more times.”
After first saying he thinks it “distasteful for Don Grebien to be pulling my father into this when he isn’t here to speak for himself,” Lynch answered that the elder Lynch ran in a 1973 special election as an unendorsed Democrat (against the very same James Doyle).
In those days, Pawtucket had non-partisan elections, with a primary to narrow the field to two candidates, That year, the candidates were Dennis Lynch and Doyle, aiming to replace Robert Burns, who had won election as secretary of state the previous November.