Flashback Friday: ‘Mouth of Massachusetts’ Shakes Up Gubernatorial Campaign

Described by columnist George F. Will as the most interesting candidate in the country, Boston University President John R. Silber was drawing a lot of attention twenty years ago this summer — not only from his two rivals for the Democratic nomination for governor of Massachusetts, but from a national media fascinated by what might come out of his mouth next. 

Silber, 63, was never one to mince words, speaking freely about anything and everything that crossed his mind. Nobody held a candle to the tough-talking Texas native when it came to challenging political orthodoxy.

Silber was controversial, to put it mildly, long before entering the political arena and certainly had his fair share of detractors in the academic community, including the late historian Howard Zinn, who described the one-time liberal as “an intellectual bully, a person who destroyed civil liberties on the Boston University campus and created an atmosphere of fear among faculty and employees, basically by punishing people who disagreed with him.”

Running as the last angry man, Silber promised to fix the state’s fiscal mess by slashing about $1 billion in spending, creating prison schools at abandoned military bases, and adding 12 cents per gallon to the state gasoline tax to stimulate the state‘s sluggish economy.

A fiscal conservative who had twice voted for Ronald Reagan and at times sounded like George Wallace in the 1960’s, he also wanted to crack down on welfare by cutting off public assistance to teenage mothers with more than one child.

Believing that society’s major problems — drugs, crime and poverty — all stemmed from a failure of the educational system, he made educational reform a major theme of his campaign.

Dubbed the “Mouth of Massachusetts,” the dark-horse candidate didn’t really care whom he might offend on the campaign trail, including the state’s elderly population, which then accounted for 13.6 percent of the state‘s six million inhabitants.

“When you’ve had a long time, and you’re ripe, then it’s time to go,” he said, questioning the futility of saving the lives of terminally ill elderly people.

Silber, who won a spot on the Democratic primary ballot by garnering the necessary 15% of delegates at the party’s chaotic state convention in June, was pitted against former state attorney general Francis X. Bellotti, the party’s endorsed candidate, and Lt. Gov. Evelyn Murphy for his party’s nomination.

Murphy, whose candidacy unraveled when she failed to win the party’s endorsement, withdrew from the race a week before the primary and supported Bellotti.

The 67-year-old Bellotti, who had been the party’s nominee in 1964 when he defeated Endicott Peabody in the Democratic primary, was regarded as the frontrunner heading into the September 18 primary. But Bellotti’s own supporters were deeply worried about Silber’s potential at the ballot box, particularly in a volatile election year like 1990 when voters across the country were growing increasingly restless with the status quo.

“If he makes the ballot,” warned one of Bellotti’s advisers, “he’ll be impossible to stop.”

And that‘s exactly what happened.

The bantam educator, whose name barely registered in the polls when he announced his candidacy in January, captured the Democratic gubernatorial nomination with 562,222 votes to Bellotti’s 459,128. Murphy, whose name remained on the ballot, received 30,054 votes in the primary.

Some observers described his victory in the primary as a stunning upset.

Silber, however, couldn’t stand success and eventually proved to be his own worst enemy during the autumn campaign.

Though he made a concerted effort to tone down his rhetoric, his tongue finally did him in when he told a Boston television reporter that the “overweening materialism” of two-career couples had created a generation of neglected children whose parents “thought a third-rate day care center was just as good as a first-rate home.”

Silber’s comments naturally infuriated women, particularly married women with young children. 

The remark itself, as Michael Barone poignantly observed, caused an uproar  “not so much by those certain it was wrong as by those who feared it contained an uncomfortably large grain of truth.”

Ralph Nader, who shared Howard Zinn’s disdain for Silber, was arguably the conservative Democrat’s sharpest critic during that campaign.

Believing that Silber would try to parlay the Massachusetts governorship into a bid for the presidency in 1992, the longtime consumer advocate denounced the Boston University president as a “very dangerous man. I think he’s going to take the Democratic Party down with him,” said Nader.

Though viewed as a formidable general election candidate who could bring so-called Reagan Democrats back into the fold, Silber was defeated in the general election, losing to moderate Republican William Weld by 76,000 votes.

Not surprisingly, Weld — the first Republican elected governor of the Bay State since liberal Republican Francis W. Sargent in 1970 — enjoyed strong support from women and young married couples with children.

Silber, who had fervently hoped to be named Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration when Terrel H. Bell stepped down in 1985, reportedly considered seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992. According to Newsweek, he was also briefly considered as Pat Buchanan’s vice-presidential running mate on the Reform Party ticket during the 2000 presidential election, but was apparently ruled out because he was pro-choice.

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