The Skeleton in the Room

The courthouse across the way throws long shadows in the late afternoon. The shadows darken the offices in the building along Boston’s Merrimac Street that houses the Massachusetts Republican Party. The offices are largely empty now, the way most party offices are in the aftermath of an election. Unfortunately, this was not just any election, and the fact that the offices of the Massachusetts GOP look like the Joad household just after everyone up and went to Californny also functions as a cheap, easy, and not entirely inaccurate metaphor. “I would like to say there’s nowhere to go but up,” says state Senator Robert Hedlund, a Republican from Hingham, “but I don’t think that’s true.”

The modern history of the Republican Party here is that of an organization always right on the doorstep of a breakthrough against the almost ludicrous monopoly that the Democrats have on the politics of the state. But rarely has the GOP had the door slammed on its foot quite as hard as it did last November. When the dust cleared, and Kerry Healey was back in private life, the Republicans held no statewide constitutional offices. They are now outnumbered 7-to-1 in the state Legislature and 12 to nothing in the state’s congressional delegation. (There are a total of 24 Republicans in the 200-member Massachusetts Legislature. By comparison, redder-than-red state Mississippi boasts 26 Democrats in its state Senate alone – the same as the number of Republicans.) Only four of Massachusetts’s 10 Democratic members of the House of Representatives faced any opponent at all, and one of them, William Szych, who lost to John Olver in the western part of the state, didn’t even run as a Republican but as an independent. It was a cataclysmic beating, even by the standards of Massachusetts Republicans, which are considerable.

“We have to somehow convince people that there is some importance in having an opposition party,” Hedlund concludes. “The potential is there that we might not have bottomed out yet.”

The numbers themselves are daunting. Republicans make up only 12.7 percent of the registered voters in Massachusetts, and they don’t even do that well in the state’s three largest cities. In Boston, they were able to muster only a little more than 8 percent of the vote. There are endemic political advantages to being a Democrat in Massachusetts that the Republicans seem incapable of overcoming on a large scale. Organized labor is more powerful here than in many states, and the academic community is large and very active. And it’s not just Harvard, either. In Amherst, home to the University of Massachusetts, the Republicans account for a little more than 6 percent of the registered voters. It is true that the town’s largest bloc of voters – almost 50 percent as of last October – are technically independent, and they have helped elect charismatic outsider Republicans like Bill Weld and Mitt Romney as governor. However, pure mathematics makes building a statewide party daunting.

“We have some communities that are organized,” says Peter Torkildsen, who was elected last month to lead the state’s Republican Party. “But they are definitely the exception and not the rule – whereas the Democratic Party is so big here. They have numerous officeholders in place, so that, when there’s an open seat, nine times out of 10, their candidate is somebody already holding another office.”

A former two-term congressman from Danvers, Torkildsen plans to build a party infrastructure from the ground up. “We need to do a better job recruiting and training and targeting,” he says. “In the election for state chairman, there were candidates who said we should have candidates everywhere. For me, that’s a long-term goal. We don’t have the infrastructure in place to support 200 candidates. We have to pick our areas where we have a shot.

“In those places, we have to make sure we have an active town committee in place, so that if we do have a candidate in that area, we can go to the town committee and say, ‘These two people will help you with mailing. These three people will do your Internet outreach.’ So we have that in place, and our candidates don’t have to invent an organization from scratch.”

“I think Peter appreciates that a lot of this comes down to how many doors you knock on and how many people you meet,” says Charles Baker, the CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care who is perennially mentioned as the heir to Romney and to Weld, for whom he once worked, as the next great GOP gubernatorial hope. “The big problem he’s going to have – and that Republicans in Massachusetts in general have had – is that the message of the national party doesn’t play well here, and it creates a huge problem for anyone here who is a Republican.” In that, however, there may be a glimmer of hope.

The courthouse that puts the state party in the shade is named for Edward W. Brooke, who was a United States senator in the 1960s and ’70s – back when Massachusetts Republicans did things like elect United States senators. He is an African-American, the first one in the Senate since Reconstruction, back when Massachusetts Republicans still made history. And Brooke’s election was the inevitable consequence of a time in which Massachusetts Republicans were so influential and troublesome that, as we shall see, members of the other party felt obligated to try to kill them where they stood. With any luck at all, we may get back to that point again. Massachusetts Republicans may already occupy the ground on which all other Republicans will come to stand.

On January 24, Senator John Kerry BOWED TO the increasingly obvious and announced that he would not try to run for president again. Instead, Kerry said, he would stand for reelection to the United States Senate. In response, Torkildsen and other Republicans immediately announced that Kerry would be vulnerable in that election and was out of step with the voters of Massachusetts. A number of possible contenders were immediately bandied about. These included the inevitable Baker, as well as Peter Blute, a former congressman who is now a talk-show host in Worcester, Republican moneyman Christopher Egan, US Attorney Michael Sullivan, defeated gubernatorial candidate Kerry Healey, and former White House chief of staff Andrew Card, who first ran for governor here in 1982. (An even more interesting notion was floated when a WRKO poll showed surprising support from its listeners for Red Sox ace Curt Schilling, who pronounced himself flattered.) Given the fact that Kerry’s announcement came hard on the heels of the inauguration of Governor Deval Patrick and, therefore, of the beginning of a term in which Republicans were passing rare at the State House, this was an impressive example of Torkildsen’s ability at rapid response. Of course, the bench is not a long one, and registration figures belied the optimism. They always do.

“It’s always an uphill fight,” says Blute, who served two terms in Congress representing a traditionally Democratic district around Worcester. “Republican candidates have to be like Joe DiMaggio. They have to be exceptional. And when you get in as a Republican, there’s no safe election. When Democrats get in, they can relax. When I got in, I had to work my ass off. I had to fly back here every weekend to raise money or whatever. In three years, I was physically exhausted.”

The national Republicans didn’t come out of the last election cycle much better than the Massachusetts Republicans did, losing their majorities in both houses of Congress. The worst beating was taken by moderate Republicans in the Northeast. They lost House seats in New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. They lost both House seats in New Hampshire, and Lincoln Chafee’s Senate seat in Rhode Island. There are those in the national Republican Party who think that was a good thing, but there are others who noticed that to lose these seats was to lose control of Congress. (Just reelecting Chafee would have been enough to hold the Senate.) They see the future as one in which the national GOP becomes increasingly a Southern regional party with an overlay of public piety.

“When Ronald Reagan was elected, that was a reorienting election,” says Nebraska Republican senator Chuck Hagel, who has publicly broken with the Bush administration on the war in Iraq. “This may have been one of those, too.”

So it was no surprise that when President Bush faced the new landscape in his State of the Union speech last month, he toned down his imperial bombast. He talked about healthcare and education. He even made what amounted to a political deathbed-conversion on the subject of global warming. He seemed to be stepping, finally, into more conciliatory territory. Massachusetts Republicans, fashioning a legislative agenda for their corporal’s guard in the State House, were already there, waiting for him.

“New England Republicans have a long and proud history of being successful in advocating a brand of Republicanism that’s more traditional in that it’s libertarian on the social issues, more conservative on fiscal issues,” says Richard Tisei, the minority leader of the state Senate. “Every Republican who’s been successful in Massachusetts has run as traditional New England Republican.”

“Social issues are by their nature divisive,” explains Bradley Jones, the minority leader of the Massachusetts House. “We are trying to get things to work that have universal support within our caucus. We can do a lot of that on the environment. We’re the party of [Theodore] Roosevelt – what’s wrong with talking about hybrid vehicles and green buildings? The national party should be talking about that.” Perhaps the Massachusetts Republicans, spavined and beaten here, can find a way forward for the rest of the party across what is a radically transformed electoral landscape, in which all the major political issues – from war and peace to the environment to political reform – seem to have turned against them. Perhaps they can chart a way for the party to find its future in its first principles.

The Republican Party in Massachusetts was born, like the Republican Party nationwide, in 1854, as a vehicle for rebellion – first against the laws of the day and, later, in opposition to the armed rebellion that those same laws produced. It was a party made inevitable by abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and symbolized in office by Charles Sumner, who, in 1856, rose on the floor of the US Senate and floridly denounced, among other people, Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina for his support of slavery. Hearing about this speech, congressman Preston Brooks, a South Carolinian who happened to be related to Butler, moseyed on over from the House side of the Capitol. Brooks did not appreciate Sumner’s gift for rhetoric. Catching Sumner as he worked on some correspondence at his desk in the Senate chamber, Brooks proceeded to beat Sumner senseless with a metal-crowned cane.

The Massachusetts Republican Party was not born in the spirit of bipartisanship.

After Sumner hit the floor, Republicans dominated the politics of the state for the next 70 years. The Democrats didn’t elect consecutive governors until the redoubtable James Michael Curley succeeded Joseph Ely in 1935. Curley most conspicuously represented the rise to power of the immigrants who had flooded into Boston starting in the 1840s. As such, he represented the rise of the city political machines against the genteel estate politics of the traditional Massachusetts WASP ascendancy. And, further, quite simply, the old-line Protestant Republicans weren’t breeding enough.

“The Republican Party,” recalls Edward Brooke, “realized that it was beginning to lose membership because the old Yankees weren’t having children at the same rate the Democratic families were. It was as simple as that.”

Brooke arrived in Massachusetts after World War II to study law at Boston University. Entering politics in 1950, Brooke chose to run as a Republican. It was the party of reform, the party standing against the corruption of the by-then-entrenched Democratic machine, which was marching to the trumpets sounded by Democrat Joe McCarthy and dragging its heels conspicuously on civil rights. In fact, the Massachusetts Republican Party was considered so progressive at the time, Brooke writes in his recently published autobiography, Bridging the Divide, that the American Communist Party regularly endorsed its candidates, including Edward Brooke, becoming so much of a nuisance that Brooke once wrote personally to Nikita Khrushchev begging the Soviet premier to get his fellow travelers to stop trying to help him. That, remarkably, is where the Massachusetts Republicans once were.

In 1962, Brooke was elected attorney general, becoming one of the highest profile African-American politicians in the country. The national GOP was just beginning to define itself as a party of racial reaction, attempting to harness the energy (and the votes) of the people who were actively resisting civil rights and the legislation that inspired it. The party was headed west and south, and it was moving toward the political heirs of Preston Brooks and away from the philosophical descendants of Charles Sumner. In 1964, this transformation produced the candidacy of Barry Goldwater, a conservative ideologue from Arizona whom Brooke refused to endorse, becoming the only statewide Republican candidate not to appear at a Goldwater rally at Fenway Park. The party faithful booed the mention of his name. Nevertheless, two years later, Ed Brooke was elected to the United States Senate, where he served until Democratic congressman Paul Tsongas beat him in 1978.

In that election, Brooke was buffeted by ethics charges of which he was later cleared. He also was roughed up in the primary from the right by what would come to be called “movement conservatism,” the gathering forces that would help elect Ronald Reagan to the presidency and hand a Republican congressional majority over to Newt Gingrich in 1994. Those forces eventually would put Massachusetts Republicans in a permanent political bind. As the Republican Party entrenched itself nationally in the legacy of the Goldwater campaign, Republicans in Massachusetts found that the great conservative wave broke and rolled back at the New York border. But at least they didn’t have to worry about Communists endorsing them anymore.

Of course, with the Democrats in charge of everything and a rookie in the corner office, it’s entirely possible that they will hand the Republicans just the kind of gifts that a party defining itself in opposition might need. Taxes, for example. The property tax, in particular, was an enormous issue in the election last fall, and the Republicans have served notice that they will combine their newfound moderation on social issues and their sudden turn to green strategies on the environment with their traditional position on taxes.

“The Democrats learned an interesting lesson,” says Charlie Baker. “They discovered that if they stopped talking about raising taxes, everybody else would stop talking about cutting them.” It is in that area, Republicans believe, that the Democrats can fall over their own feet as a monopoly party. It is as good a chance as any they have.

On the other hand, the GOP never looked better than it did on the day after the election of 1990. The state was fed up with Michael Dukakis, the outgoing Democratic governor whose ill-starred 1988 presidential campaign had crashed and burned shortly before his vaunted “Massachusetts Miracle” did. William Weld, an amiable former US attorney, was elected governor, and a former college football player named Joe Malone was elected treasurer. Moreover, the state elected 16 GOP senators, giving Weld a veto-proof Senate. Over the decade between Brooke’s defeat and Weld’s victory, the Republicans’ fortunes had been positively febrile, and the registration numbers remained daunting throughout the 1980s. In 1986, when Dukakis ran up the score in preparation for his presidential bid, no Republican candidate for statewide office had come within 10 points of his or her respective Democratic opponent. Now, though, four years later, Dukakis’s political career was in ruins, and the Republicans were in the best shape they’d been in for decades.

“That could have been a big, transformative election,” recalls Blute. But, as always seems to be the case, the state party picked up its opportunity and dropped it on its foot.

In 1992, Republicans lost seven of the 16 state Senate seats they’d won in 1990, but both Blute and Torkildsen were elected to Congress, breaking up what had been a unanimously Democratic congressional delegation in place since Tsongas had defeated Brooke. And 1994 was shaping up to be a genuine opportunity for the party. Weld was enormously popular across party lines, and, with his eyes on challenging US Senator John Kerry in 1996, he campaigned for reelection in such a way as to roll up as big a margin as possible against his overmatched Democratic rival, Mark Roosevelt. The problem was that Weld’s full-court press left no room – and, more important, no money – for down-market races elsewhere in the state.

“It’s a textbook example,” says Robert Hedlund. “He wanted to run up the score against Roosevelt rather than investing his capital in legislative races.”

That same year, Blute and Torkildsen found themselves victims of their party’s national success. Reelected in 1994 as part of the Gingrich-led revolution that handed both houses of Congress back to the Republicans for the first time in 40 years, they found themselves saddled with Gingrich’s hard-right ideologies and no-holds-barred style of politics. And that made them seem to be the heirs in Massachusetts to all those things in the Goldwater campaign that Ed Brooke had rejected.

“Image-wise, it was driven by a lot of Southern conservatives – Gingrich, Dick Armey, [Tom] Delay,” says Blute. “That whole crew was bad for local Republicans. In 1996, I was running as a Reagan Democrat, real blue-collar stuff. I was endorsed by every newspaper that covered my district, including the Globe. But the success of Southern conservatives nationally hurt the moderates in New England.”

That year, Weld and Kerry staged a monumental fight for the US Senate. Meanwhile, President Bill Clinton came to the state a dozen times to campaign. The turnout for Democratic candidates was massive. Despite all those newspaper endorsements, and despite the fact that he got more votes than he’d gotten either time he’d won, Blute lost to Jim McGovern. Torkildsen was defeated, too. Weld lost to Kerry. The Massachusetts congressional delegation was solidly blue again.

After his loss, Weld disappeared from public life, with the exception of his short-lived 2005 candidacy for governor of New York. Meanwhile, by 2002, the party had found itself another star. Like Weld, Mitt Romney came from outside the formal party structure, and, also like Weld, he seemed to have his eye on bigger things. Given the formidable mathematics that work against any Republican in this state, the party had little choice but to go out and find itself another paladin to ride to its rescue. Unlike Weld, however, when Governor Romney became frustrated with the Democratic Legislature, he decided to do something about it.

In 2004, he actively recruited candidates from around the state. “Give him credit,” says Hedlund. “This was the best crop of Republican candidates I’ve seen in a long time. There were professors, stockbrokers, professional people. These were people who were not from what we would call a Republican background.” Some of them were wealthy enough to finance their own campaigns. Romney promised to help them raise money, and he campaigned hard for them around the state. However, the campaign seemed centralized in Boston and its message generic.

“They put together good direct-mail pieces,” Hedlund recalls. “And in big, bold letters, it said, ‘Massachusetts Republican Party.’ The problem was that they were running on a one-size-fits-all strategy, running on statewide themes rather than issues pertinent to the districts. It didn’t seem a grass-roots kind of thing.”

Another problem arose on the national level. When Romney launched his effort, Kerry was floundering around with Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich at the bottom of the Democratic presidential polls. But by Election Day 2004, Kerry was the Democratic candidate for president, and his home-state coattails had swamped Romney’s candidates. By the end of the evening, the Republicans had lost three of their nine seats in the state Senate, and there were fewer Republicans in the Legislature as a whole than there had been at any time since 1867.

“At that point,” Blute says, “I think Mitt was looking for an exit strategy.”

Which, of course, he found. He’s now running for president himself, and he’s down there in South Carolina – from where folks once sent Preston Brooks dozens of canes to replace the one he’d broken on Charles Sumner’s head – telling people how tough it is to be a Republican in Massachusetts.

It’s possible that Charlie Baker will be the next Republican superstar summoned to recover the corner office, although he laughs about it when you ask him. “It gives you an idea of how short the list is,” he says. “I mean, I’m as tall as the other two of them. I’m taller than Bill or Mitt, actually.”

He’s in a cafeteria in the headquarters of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Inc., in an office park near where Route 128 crosses Route 9 in Wellesley, and he also is talking about how hard it is to be a Republican in Massachusetts. Before coming to HPHC in 1999, Baker spent eight years in the administrations of Weld and his successor, Republican Governor Paul Cellucci, first as secretary of administration and finance, and then as secretary for health and human services. In both capacities, he was reckoned to be the smartest man in state government, which, people whispered, included his bosses. After leaving government, Baker turned around HPHC, which had reportedly lost $227 million in the year before he arrived. He’s young, handsome, and involved in an issue (healthcare) that is at the front of the minds of the voters and the top the political agenda, both nationally and locally. He’s done a series of folksy radio spots for his company that have made his voice as familiar as the Giant Glass jingle. He’s tied into various networks through which politicians can raise a lot of money, and he’s always mentioned in any conversation that involves the future of the Republican Party in Massachusetts.

“The big problem you have [as governor] is what all Republicans have in Massachusetts in general,” Baker muses, having returned to the table after greeting one of his employees who’s just come back to work after a long stretch of cancer treatment. “That’s not a new phenomenon, either. Even when Weld ran, he was saying, basically, I’m a pro-gay, pro-gun Republican. He deliberately tried to create his own niche. So did Mitt. He ran on his skills and experience as a manager. His big message was that Massachusetts had a lot of fiscal problems, and that’s what I do, I solve fiscal problems.”

Baker almost got in the last time. It looked as if Tom Reilly was going to be the Democratic nominee, and it would have been a good race to make as an outsider, as a management, good-government type in the Romney mold. He had an organization gearing up, and people were straining at the leash to raise money for him. But he couldn’t get the decision through committee at home. “The kids were brutal,” he says. “To the point where we had to make the dinner table a no-politics zone.”

So, he passed, and then Deval Patrick stepped in as the outsider in the race, and suddenly, the dynamic changed for the foreseeable future. “I thought it was the right decision at the time, and I still do. The hard part for me is that you don’t know if the opportunity is going to be there again,” Baker says. “Four years from now? Eight years? That’s a lifetime in politics. You know, though, someone asked me what would have happened if I’d run instead of Kerry Healey. I told them the biggest difference is that the Republican loser would have been taller.

“It would have been a bad time to be a Republican [candidate], anyway. I don’t care who you are. The scandals in Washington and the war in Iraq and the message from the national party. The problem that creates is that every party needs a story, and the Republican story in Massachusetts was discipline – fiscal discipline – and nonwackiness on the social issues. Somewhere near the middle, where most people are. Then you have this Republican overhang coming from Washington, which was not moderate on social stuff and includes a huge federal deficit, and war and corruption and scandal.”

Of course, that Republican Party was thoroughly thrashed around the country last November, just as badly as the Republicans here in Massachusetts were thrashed by Deval Patrick and the Democrats. But, in what Baker says, it’s possible that the way out of the Republican Party’s ongoing national debacle will wend through the Commonwealth. Fiscal discipline. Nonwackiness. Even with Mitt Romney playing us for laughs before the descendants of Preston Brooks down South, maybe the time’s coming for Republicans around the country to listen to ours and stop beating them over the head.

Charles P. Pierce is a Globe Magazine staff writer. E-mail him at pierce@globe.com.