In the end, the guy who’d won the nomination amid a shockwave of voter anger never made things work with the party he’d just taken over. No, it wasn’t Donald Trump. The year was 1990, and the tough-talking outsider was John Silber, the Boston University president whose upset victory in the Democratic gubernatorial primary vexed most of his party’s establishment.
That October, when his fellow Democrats in the Massachusetts congressional delegation invited their new nominee to the Capitol, Silber stank up the room by criticizing the party’s state and national leadership. “I was standing behind him, so he couldn’t have stabbed me in the back,’’ then-congressman Chet Atkins, the state party chairman, quipped to a Globe reporter after the meeting. “How could you be so smart,’’ Silber’s odd-couple running mate, Marjorie Clapprood, said of him in an recent interview, “and yet make such a politically suicidal move as to trash the party you’ve been chosen to lead?’’
Silber, who narrowly lost to Republican William Weld that November and died in 2012, left behind an unusual example of what happens when a party and its nominee view each other with deep suspicion.
If Massachusetts in 1990 is any precedent, Trump won’t be able to unify a GOP whose leaders he’s gone out of his way to antagonize. Moreover, even though his campaign looks right now like a sign of great upheaval, Trump’s ascendance may not alter how his party operates in the future.
Silber’s insurgency didn’t. “It was as if it had no legs whatsoever beyond the era,’’ says Robert Donahue, who ran the campaign. “It didn’t change the system. It didn’t change the primary [rules]. It didn’t change a thing.’’
Lots of commentators, including me, have treated Trump’s success as a crisis of historic proportions for the Republican Party, and not just because of his incendiary comments about Muslims and Mexican immigrants. The real estate magnate’s opposition to trade agreements and his shifting stances on taxes and entitlement reform hint at a tectonic shift — a looming breakup between business-oriented conservatives and the aggrieved working-class voters who’ve become a core GOP constituency. In recent weeks Republican governors and members of Congress have fumbled in public over how much, if at all, to support Trump.
While Silber enjoyed some establishment support in Massachusetts, most notably from Senate President William Bulger, the BU president’s tart tongue and social conservatism unnerved the liberals who dominate the state Democratic Party to this day. He made statements like “when you’ve had a long life and you’re ripe, then it’s time to go’’ (about late-stage health treatments for the elderly) and “there’s no point in my making a speech on crime control to a bunch of drug addicts’’ (about Boston’s minority neighborhoods). In their time, so-called “Silber shockers’’ were startling breaches of political protocol.
Or, to many voters, refreshing moments of honesty. A week before the gubernatorial primary, Silber’s popularity helped force the sitting lieutenant governor, Evelyn Murphy, from the race. He beat a gifted politician, former attorney general Frank Bellotti, by 10 points.
All of the Silber-era political veterans whom I interviewed were quick to distinguish the erudite former philosophy professor from the presumptive 2016 Republican nominee. “Everything that Silber stood for in his life stood against the concept and the norms of reality TV,’’ Atkins says. Silber had a firm grasp of policy; Trump shows zero interest in details. Still, when a hard-edged GOP candidate with an authoritarian streak tries to reshape a party whose leaders mostly didn’t want him, a culture clash is inevitable, as Silber’s example shows.
Silber made a bizarre ticket-mate for Clapprood, a dedicated liberal who had won her own primary easily and got the tough job of easing tensions with women, gays, and other groups he’d offended. Donor networks can’t be built overnight, and after the primary Silber couldn’t entirely rely on help from vanquished rival campaigns. Bellotti’s chief fund-raiser, for example, signed on with Weld. “It didn’t really come together,’’ Maurice Cunningham, Silber’s field director, recalled. “You’ve got six weeks to the general election. Everyone’s tired. One side has a little more hubris than they should. The other side has more bitterness than they should.’’
Still, for a couple of months in 1990, it seemed clear that the Democrats who favored Silber were heading in a vastly different direction from the upscale professionals, the managerial class, and the good-government suburban liberals who’d gained power during the Michael Dukakis era. Cunningham, now a political scientist at UMass Boston, sees Silber as the last major Massachusetts figure to build a campaign around working-class Democrats. Clapprood says the 1990 campaign taught Republicans how to win the corner office with upbeat social moderates. The jovial Weld led directly to the selfie-taking Charlie Baker.
In retrospect, though, Silber’s primary win looks more like a spasm than the beginning of a movement. On the state level, the weird convention rules that almost kept Silber off the Democratic ballot still exist. Meanwhile, Massachusetts hasn’t voted for a Republican for president since 1984. With the notable exception of Scott Brown’s upset victory in a 2010 special election for Senate, the state keeps sending Democrats to Washington.
“The Silber phenomenon was, more than anything else, a temporary thing,’’ Atkins said, “and after the election people said, ‘Boy, was that a mistake. We need to make sure that doesn’t happen again.’ ’’
A political party, it turned out, can straddle major fault lines for years and defy change even after the occasional earthquake. The Civil War, the Depression, the civil rights movement — a few events do reshape the system. More often, the usual patterns reassert themselves, and political life goes on much as it always did.
Dante Ramos can be reached at dante.ramos@globe.com. Follow him on Facebook: facebook.com/danteramos or on Twitter: @danteramos.
