The ins and outs of winning in Massachusetts
IN 1938, when he defeated James Michael Curley for governor, Leverett Saltonstall distributed postcards adorned with a tribute from Daniel J. Lynch, who grew up in South Boston: ``Under his leadership as speaker of the House, our Commonwealth has been in the forefront in the passage of liberal, humane, and progressive legislation."
Saltonstall was a Republican in an era when liberal, humane, and progressive ideas did not make the GOP swoon in dismay. ``Salty" also campaigned as an ``insider" (what speaker of the House isn't?) when holding elective office was a plus. Today, both major-party gubernatorial candidates are paragons of purity, untainted by politics as they board the spinning carousel of ``outsider" ambitions.
Kerry Healey is lieutenant governor, rarely an insider office. Deval L. Patrick hopes to be the first governor elected as a rookie candidate since Edward J. King, who died last week at the age of 81. King ran an outsider campaign in 1978. By 1982, he was an insider and lost to the former outsider he had defeated, Michael S. Dukakis.
Patrick and Healey are making history in 2006, but the decisive year in Massachusetts politics was 1952, when John F. Kennedy dismantled the Democratic Party as a Senate candidate and voters last made an insider governor. No one was deeper ``inside" than Christian Archibald Herter. A Republican, he lived on Beacon Hill. His father painted the murals in the House chamber where Herter was speaker before he went to Congress in 1942, serving five terms before being elected governor in 1952.
``Chris Herter was the toughest, smartest politician I ever knew," his frequent opponent Tip O'Neill once said. ``He had Brahmin manners, but was thoroughly partisan." Herter became secretary of state for President Eisenhower, then trade negotiator for President Kennedy. Saltonstall went four times to the US Senate, where he was universally respected. Both proved that politics is an honorable calling.
In 1949, O'Neill became speaker of the Massachusetts House, and Democrats have dominated the Legislature since. In the 1950s, as television and suburbia weakened party ties, the rise of the Kennedys made the Democratic State Committee irrelevant. In 1952, JFK deployed at least one ``campaign secretary" in each town and more in the cities. They reported to him, not to insider officialdom. Would-be governors did likewise, forming a parade of outsiders fielding their own personal organizations and running against the Legislature (which remains powerful).
Foster Furcolo from East Longmeadow and, even more exotically, Yale, won in 1956 and 1958. He was succeeded in 1960 by John A. Volpe, a Republican businessman with no previous political experience. In 1962, Endicott ``Chub" Peabody, who chided fellow Democrats for presenting ``all-green" Irish tickets, defeated him, but Volpe returned for two more terms before becoming President Nixon's secretary of transportation. Volpe's lieutenant governor, Francis W. Sargent, won in 1970 by saying, ``I'm not a Boston politician," defeating Boston's mayor, Kevin H. White.
White's running mate was Dukakis, who was in, but not of, the Legislature. Dukakis was elected governor in 1974, 1982, and 1986. By 1990, outsider fever reached to Texas, birthplace of Democratic nominee John Silber, and New York, where the eventual winner, Republican William Weld, came from and later went back to. Weld's successor, Paul Cellucci, had some legislative experience and Jane Swift less before the Bay State's outsider impulse trekked to Utah and Mitt Romney.
Patrick, the toast of Chicago, and Healey, the pride of Daytona Beach , Fla., are both Harvard graduates who say they have the answers for Massachusetts. Healey has a tax issue, but in what may be a bad year for Republicans, how can she counter Patrick's incessant invocations of ``hope"? Healey needs to consult history, but carefully.
Henry Adams, scion of presidents, defined Massachusetts politics as ``the systematic organization of hatreds." The ethnic and economic struggles of the 19th and 20th centuries have faded, but her party's fearful superpatriots see one issue that may help Healey, the same one that propelled Henry J. Gardner of Dorchester to the governorship in 1854. He was the candidate of the American Party, a single-issue party better known as the know-nothing party. Its single issue was hostility to immigrants, the outsiders who by the millions have enriched, enlivened, and made Massachusetts the Commonwealth it is today.
Martin F. Nolan is a former Globe editorial page editor. 