Capitol Hill is generally considered a den of publicity hounds, free agents, and egomaniacs–folks who mean well, perhaps, but would get low marks in the “plays well with others” category of any grade-school report card. There are clear incentives for this sort of behavior, thanks to a celebrity-worshipping media, but it’s not always the best way to get things done. That’s especially true when it comes to protecting the state’s interests in Washington. Some of the giants of Congress can make good things happen for the folks back home–a new highway, a new military base–with the snap of their fingers. But for members with more limited clout, it takes teamwork.

In fact, since the birth of the US Congress, individual representatives of each state have banded together to pursue their common interests and boost their collective clout. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, some delegations actually lived together in boarding houses. When the first Congress convened in 1789, members of Pennsylvania’s delegation used their house as a staging area for their plot to install one of their own–Frederick A.C. Muhlenberg–as the first Speaker of the US House of Representatives.

Nowadays it’s hard to imagine such big egos crowding into the same kitchen every evening (and who would do the dishes?). But most state delegations still think of themselves as a team. And just as every good team has a captain, every good delegation has a strong “dean”–an authority figure who is equal parts leader, judge, and enforcer. In his home state, a dean is expected to be a kind of junior senator, looking past his district to the good of the entire state. It’s up to him to spread his colleagues across key committees strategically, to coordinate the delegation’s positions, and to mediate the inevitable feuds and rivalries that arise when egos collide. The title is informal, and granted automatically to a delegation’s most senior member. But in a Congress built on hierarchy and tradition, the post brings real stature and responsibility. And in the Massachusetts House delegation, that role has just been passed on.

For more than a decade, until his death from leukemia in May, the title belonged to South Boston Democrat Joe Moakley, who himself became dean when Edward Boland of Springfield retired in 1988. Now the Bay State’s next most senior member, Malden Democrat Edward Markey, has taken on the mantle of leadership. The standard has been set high: The Bay State delegation has always had strong leaders, including such famous personalities as Moakley and former House Speaker Tip O’Neill. Markey’s job is made easier by having a delegation unified by party and, to a considerable extent, background and ideology. But any such collection of egos and agendas is prone to disputes, rivalries, and infighting requiring arbitration. Indeed, Markey’s deanship got off to a rocky start this summer, when some critics said he was too slow in uniting the delegation to defend one of its members, Lowell Rep. Marty Meehan, against state House Speaker Thomas Finneran’s plan to redistrict him out of his seat. Markey finally did get his colleagues to sign a joint letter urging the Speaker to keep the Merrimack Valley district intact. But he couldn’t prevent Newton Rep. Barney Frank, whose district includes southeastern Massachusetts communities that would gain a congressman under the Finneran plan, from recanting the next day.

As Markey adapts to his new role, he can consider the example set by Moakley. By dint of his power and personality, as well as pure seniority, Moakley was the consummate dean. He had excellent relationships with veteran Democratic leaders whom he’d come to know over his three decades in the House. He was a likeable and decent man, with a gentle personal touch, whom people trusted to settle their disagreements fairly–but who was not afraid to be firm. Moakley was “a good example of a guy who could exercise power without pissing people off,” says Frank. Perhaps equally important was the raw power that Moakley derived from being the senior Democrat on the powerful House Rules Committee, which sets the terms of every legislative debate.

People rightly remember Moakley for winning lavish amounts of federal pork for the state. But surely one reason he could do so was the way he kept the delegation working together to maximize its influence. Massachusetts’s bunch of white male liberal Democrats tends to agree on most issues, but sometimes the smallest differences can be the most intense. And when there are flare-ups, as one Massachusetts congressional aide puts it: “There needs to be someone who can get everyone in a room and calm everyone down and make a case for reasonable behavior.”

Kevin Ryan, Moakley’s former chief of staff, says Moakley “hated meetings.” But when the need arose, he would convene the delegation’s nine other members in his Washington office for a pep talk–or a stern lecture. If nothing else, Moakley kept his colleagues on message when it came to the state’s interests. When the Big Dig came under attack for cost overruns in late 1999, for instance, some members saw an opportunity to attack Gov. Paul Cellucci for alleged mismanagement. Moakley persuaded his colleagues to pull their punches rather than inflate the story and risk the loss of federal funding.

At other times, he intervened in clashes between the interests of individual House districts. In 1993, Meehan, then a freshman, lobbied to land a new Pentagon facility in his district, angering his colleagues, who had spent months working in unison to convince the Clinton administration to steer that project, and its 4,000 jobs, to Southbridge, in Richard Neal’s district. An irked Moakley publicly rebuked Meehan for “stomping on somebody else’s territory,” and warned that competing demands could cost the state the facility altogether. Meehan backed off.

Ever cognizant of whether Massachusetts was getting its share of the federal pie, Moakley also made sure the others were pulling the state’s weight on the committees to which he had helped assign them. When Moakley felt in 1999 that Amherst Rep. John Olver, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, wasn’t helping his colleagues win funding for pet projects, he vented his frustration to the local media. “He doesn’t feel he’s the Massachusetts guy on Appropriations,” Moakley complained. Of course, nowhere is it written that a congressman elected to represent the constituents of his particular district must feel he is his state’s “guy.” But that didn’t make any difference to Joe Moakley.

Moakley would be a tough act for anyone to follow. And around Boston, Ed Markey is hardly the beloved character that Moakley was. But in Washington he is a formidable figure. After 25 years in the House, the 55-year-old Markey is, by all accounts, a savvy and highly regarded Democratic veteran with strong ties to his party’s leadership. (House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt recently flew to Malden for a party celebrating Markey’s quarter-century in Congress.) This past winter Gephardt even considered recruiting Markey for the influential post of chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, according to one House leadership aide.

Markey is humble about his new role as dean. “I’ve been in every meeting for 25 years,” he says. “The most common phrase out of Tip O’Neill’s mouth when we all sat there was, ‘Whaddaya think?’ He’d be listening.” But some suggest that the role of dean has gotten trickier, with congressmen working harder to play to the media–and inevitably stepping on one another’s toes in the process. “Ed will be challenged by the fact that the institution of Congress has changed,” Neal says. “The media rewards independence, and voters reward independence–but the system rewards team play.”

Markey also takes over a delegation whose ability to exercise continued clout will be tested. Republicans have stubbornly maintained control of the House, marginalizing Massachusetts’s liberal Democrats. And conservatives look askance at a state that reaped massive funding for the Big Dig and, in the eyes of some, mismanaged and wasted billions of it. Markey will be leading an uphill fight to press the state’s agenda, which members say centers on fighting to protect Massachusetts from the spending cuts–especially in the areas of Medicaid and other hospital funding–they fear as a consequence of President Bush’s tax cut.

Some also wonder whether Markey, who is known as more of a policy wonk than a pork grabber, will take to the money-grubbing role. But overall, the delegation is well-positioned to fight for the state’s interests, with several of its members in senior positions on vital committees: Olver on Appropriations, Neal on Ways and Means, Frank on Financial Services and Judiciary, Meehan on Armed Services. Markey himself is the ranking Democrat on the house subcommittee that handles telecommunications and the Internet, and is the third-ranking Democrat on the House Resources Committee. And in a farewell gift to his protégé–and to the state–the dying Moakley demanded that Worcester Rep. Jim McGovern replace him on the Rules Committee, albeit with a more junior ranking.

Still, Moakley’s death means a loss of nearly 30 years of experience fighting for Massachusetts. That’s not easily replaced. The best hope for the state may be the possibility that Democrats will win the six seats needed to reclaim control of the House in 2002. The state already benefited enormously from Jim Jeffords’s party-switch this spring, which put Democrats back in control of the Senate and vastly influenced the clout of senators John Kerry and Ted Kennedy. A similar shift in the House would put the Democrats from Massachusetts in the driver’s seat, a prospect the new dean views with relish.

“Combined with Kennedy and Kerry, we will without question be a delegation at least in the top 10 in terms of clout,” says Markey. Nothing would have made Joe Moakley happier.