Kevin Sowyrda calls from his car phone to say he’s giving up. He’s tired of being “stalked.” He’ll do the interview. He’ll be right over.

Sowyrda, who is probably the most-quoted Republican political pundit in the state, has been trying to avoid this moment. He says he can’t understand why anybody would want to write about him. He’s not the story. The politicians are. The ones he slices, dices, and occasionally praises, in the pages of Massachusetts newspapers and on the airwaves.

But when he finally relents and starts talking, it’s hard to get him to stop. Sowyrda is especially interested in explaining why he has “raised the ire of certain establishment folks” in Republican circles–and why that’s fine with him, even “a badge of honor.” He doesn’t want them to like him.

“The day everybody says, ‘Oh, we love him,'” Sowyrda says, making loud, staccato smooching sounds against the back of his hand, “is the day I’ve failed. Because a good political analyst will aggravate everybody some of the time. If you are never aggravating anybody, you are not a good political analyst. You’re not a good political pundit. You’re not calling it the way it is. What you’re doing is you’re trying to curry favor. What you’re doing is you’re trying to make money. What you’re doing is you’re trying to profit from your position. I just don’t do that…. I think we are wrapped too tight in this town and we need to all loosen up and take a break.”

And this is just the warm-up.

Sowyrda, 34, burst onto the state’s political scene about two years ago. Few reporters apparently cared what he had to say–or even knew who he was–before 1996. Then suddenly he was appearing regularly in The Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, and several of the state’s smaller dailies, as well as on New England Cable News, WBZ radio, and other broadcast stations. Since the beginning of the current campaign season, Sowyrda estimates he has been quoted more than 200 times.

So who the heck is this guy and where did he come from?

Kevin John Sowyrda (pronounced so-WORD-uh) apparently knew how to attract attention as a young man. In 1985, while still in college, he started writing a weekly column called “Frankly Speaking” for his hometown paper, the Wilmington Town Crier. (He says he “started to become really spicy and big in town” with his account of one selectman breaking another selectman’s nose.)

The same year, he became the youngest school committee member in the state at age 21 when he won a seat representing Wilmington on the Shawsheen Regional Technical School board. (He himself attended Lexington Christian Academy, a private college prep school in Lexington.) After graduating from Northeastern University in 1987 with a degree in political science, Sowyrda got a low-level job at the Department of Revenue. He won a second school committee term, and decided to shoot higher.

But Sowyrda never held another elected office. He ran for the Legislature in 1990, campaigning full time for six months, but longtime Democratic state Rep. James Miceli beat him badly. Then he lost his third try for school committee, and he left politics for sideline commentary.

After a brief gig with WLLH radio in Lowell, he started doing occasional political analysis for WBZ radio while working days back at the Department of Revenue. But the way Sowyrda tells it, he got his big break from DOR Commissioner Mitchell Adams, who heard him on the radio and asked for his help promoting the “Deadbeat Dad” bill, which allowed the state to seize the assets of fathers who fail to make child support payments. The media campaign was such a success–making the NBC Nightly News, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and The New York Times–that Sowyrda realized, “Geez, I can take my Rolodex and go make money in the big world.”

About four years ago, he set up shop as a consultant, under the name Tremont Communications. His specialty, he says, is “getting media” for public and private sector clients. Last year, WBZ gave him the midnight-to-5 a.m. shift every Monday and he launched “The Kevin Sowyrda Show.”

Sowyrda says he never intended to become a political pundit. He insists it “just happened” because reporters found it “refreshing that there’s somebody who doesn’t couch every syllable and verb and pronoun.”

Indeed, in an industry that craves colorful quotes, he delivers snappy sound bites on any topic put to him, from the latest developments in the governor’s race to the Bay State’s long list of losing beauty-pageant contestants.

“I don’t think Scott Harshbarger believes in anything as human as pregnancy,” Sowyrda told the Herald this spring after Republican lieutenant governor candidate Jane Swift announced she was pregnant and columnist Margery Eagan wondered about the extra-curricular activities of Harshbarger, the Democratic attorney general who’s running for governor. “This is a guy who bans Christmas decorations,” Sowyrda added. “I don’t think he even has sex.”

His profile grew last year after he lashed out at fellow Republicans in a Globe story about Gov. William Weld’s campaign to become U.S. ambassador to Mexico. Thirty Republican State Committee members who wanted to sink the appointment threatened to enlist the help of right-winger Jesse Helms, the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee–a move Sowyrda considered unconscionable. “The Republican State Committee is made up of 50 percent sycophants and 50 percent psychopaths,” he told the Globe. “It’s been known for years that the Republican State Committee attracts wackos like dogs attract fleas.”

Though most of Sowyrda’s analysis is tame by comparison, it was these kinds of comments that got him into trouble with the Republican Establishment, especially the GOP State Committee. By April, when it came time to dole out press credentials for the Republican State Convention, Sowyrda was the only one shut out. (He told people he had a “bug,” though later announced on his radio show that he spent the day painting his roof deck and “had the best Saturday I’ve ever had.”) New England Cable News had requested the pass for Sowyrda to be the station’s analyst on the convention floor. “There wasn’t any way we were going to allow that to happen,” says Marc DeCourcey, the party’s executive director. He insists he doesn’t mind occasional criticism, “but when it becomes the rule, that’s disturbing.” DeCourcey, whose job it is to make sure Republicans are portrayed in the most positive light possible to help increase their paltry ranks in state government, adds: “If he wants to be part of the party, he should consider being a member of the team.”

It’s true Sowyrda has some odd allegiances. Sure, he’s plastered the walls of his South End condo with posters of Richard Nixon and he loves to criticize the Kennedys. But he also calls Harry Truman his hero and recently announced on his radio show that he’d “give very serious thought” to campaigning full time for U.S. Sen. John Kerry were he to run for president.

State Rep. Brian Cresta, R-Wakefield, who had Sowyrda design a media strategy for his last campaign, says he is “probably the consummate Bill Weld Republican.” And Sowyrda calls himself the “least partisan Republican in Massachusetts, there’s no question about it.” He says the vast majority of his political clients have been Republicans, but he accepts Democratic clients if they’re the “right type of Democrat”–one with “guts and integrity” who is willing to break party ranks.

The problem with the GOP State Committee, according to Sowyrda, is that its members don’t understand the views of the rank and file. He wants to see the Republican Party become “more activist,” especially in dealing with what he terms the “dangerous” and “destructive” welfare culture in this country. “In the next century, the big issue will be protecting people who do work from those who don’t,” he says. It’s the job of the Republican Party to do that, making government a better advocate “instead of the sloppy, lazy, inefficient advocate it’s been in years gone by.”

The day Sowyrda visits, it’s clear he has run out of patience for the Republican State Committee and for DeCourcey, whom he says has been bad-mouthing him all over town (a charge DeCourcey denies). Sowyrda once worked for the Committee, helping legislative candidates attract media attention in the 1996 elections. DeCourcey says his contract was later “terminated”; Sowyrda says the organization simply couldn’t afford to pay him anymore. In any event, it’s obvious he has no desire to play on that team.

He returns to this point again and again, each time trying to come up with a more outrageous turn of phrase. He starts by calling DeCourcey and the band of GOP Weld detractors “ridiculous, frivolous, invisible little ants who should just be put away someplace” and eventually begs to be quoted saying it’s time they get over their “fatal attraction” to him.

After a while, it’s impossible not to wonder who has a “fatal attraction” to whom.

“To say that the Republican State Committee speaks for Massachusetts Republicans is like saying that O.J. Simpson speaks for African-Americans. Quote me,” Sowyrda says at one point. “Yeah. It’s absolutely ridiculous. They are so out of synch with the average Republican in this state, that it’s beyond belief. And that’s why they ought to be abolished.”

“They’re just the Moe, Larry, and Curly of Massachusetts politics,” he adds later. “There are some good members on the Committee, but I think they suffer dementia. I do. You can quote me. I think they suffer dementia.”

Then it’s: “Here’s a better quote for you. I think Marc DeCourcey should spend less time hating me and more time recruiting Republican candidates…. It seems to me the only commander of a ship who had a worse track record than Marc DeCourcey was Capt. Smith on the Titanic.” And so on.

It’s easy to see why Sowyrda is successful. At least in small doses. “He gives you really great quotes,” says Steve LeBlanc, State House reporter for Community Newspaper Co., which owns The Middlesex News and more than 100 other local papers across the state. “People know that’s sort of his role–to be a bombthrower. There are enough Democrats with big mouths; it’s good to have a Republican.”

“He makes people realize that politics doesn’t have to be such a serious process. It can be a fun process,” says Rep. Cresta. “Some things I think people have taken too literally.”

Lou DiNatale, a senior fellow at UMass-Boston’s McCormack Institute of Public Affairs who is probably the most-quoted Democratic analyst in the state, says that often Sowyrda is “dead flat right.” He adds that the state needs Republican analysts who “aren’t in the Republican tank, and that’s Sowyrda’s strength, frankly.”

Sowyrda is nothing if not entertaining. He rarely sits still during the hour-long interview, playing with his flip phone, pounding the table, swigging from a bottle of Diet Pepsi. He describes newspaper stories as “delicious,” people’s records as “scandalous” and says things like, “Believe me when I tell ya” and if such-and-such isn’t true, “I’ll buy you dinner at the Ritz.” His clothes are nearly as flashy as his quotes–an electric-blue shirt, large gold rings, and thick-framed tortoise-shell glasses.

But after a while, he becomes less amusing and just plain exhausting. He suggests no fewer than 19 people to call who would vouch for him–including lieutenant governor candidate Jane Swift, DOR head Mitchell Adams, Senate President Tom Birmingham, six political reporters, and even a few party activists–almost all of whom he describes as “dear friends.” Within 24 hours, three of them–Rep. Cresta, former Republican Party executive director Bill Vernon, and activist Beth Myers–call to defend him.

Outside of the Republican State Committee, the most common criticism of Sowyrda is not what he says, but what gives him the standing to say it. Some observers wonder whether he’s worthy of so much attention when he has spent relatively little time in the trenches compared with veteran political consultants, such as Democrat Michael Goldman or Republican Charles Manning. One member of the State House press corps says Sowyrda doesn’t merit a phone call: “I won’t quote him. I don’t have any respect for his political judgment.”

Some people are even harsher. One member of the Cellucci administration (who asked not to be named because Sowyrda supposedly has sent his lawyer after people who say derogatory things about him) says that no one inside Republican circles takes Sowyrda seriously because he has “no real credentials.” “You could ask Joe Smith on the street what he has to say and it would have as much credibility as Kevin,” the administration member said. “He’s just not a player, and his whole shtick is the air that he’s pumped himself full of.”

Sowyrda defends his record, saying, “I’ve done a lot.” He mentions his own run for office (though he says losing was the best night of his life) and his contract with the State Committee in the 1996 election cycle (though Cresta was the only one of his candidates who won). And he worked for the town of Foxboro in its efforts to keep the New England Patriots there.

But lately, Sowyrda says, he’s been trying to divorce himself from political clients to make himself more objective in his punditry–he’s not representing anyone in this year’s statewide races. Exactly who his current clients are and how many he has are among the few subjects he doesn’t want to talk about. When pressed, he acknowledges working for Republican state Sen. Richard Tisei and Democratic Boston City Councilor Paul Scapicchio. On the corporate side, he’ll only say he’s working for Boston Check Cashers and a McLean, Va. company that has a contract with DOR to help establish paternity in child support cases.

Not everyone sees the need for vast campaign or consulting experience to comment on politics, especially in a traditional Democratic stronghold that offers so few Republican analysts to choose from. “I’ll tell you what makes you qualified,” DiNatale says, “following it. And how hard is it to follow Republican politics? There are only four of them.”

As for Virginia Buckingham, she says she barely knows Sowyrda “and therefore he really doesn’t know me.” She says they rarely interacted when he worked at DOR. And so, she adds, she can only assume he says what he does about her–and about everybody else–“to get in the paper.”

Sowyrda maintains that’s the farthest thing from his mind. In fact, he says he’ll probably have to give up political analysis at some point if he wants to keep his corporate clients happy, and he swears it won’t bother him a bit. “There should be term limits for pundits,” he declares. “Anonymity is the greatest of blessings. Yeah, who the heck wants to be in the newspaper?” And so on.