Alum Gains in Quest for Governor

The Democrats of Cambridge’s 8th Ward will send an Eliot House senior to the party’s state convention this June, while Democratic voters in Boston elected a Matthews Hall freshman as one of their delegates.

Both students, Gregory M. Schmidt ’06 and Margaret C. Jack ’09, have vowed to support outsider candidate Deval L. Patrick ’78 in his quest for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

And if Patrick wins the Democratic primary, that would set the stage for a face-off between two Harvard alums in the November general election. Lieutenant Governor Kerry M. Healey ’82 is the overwhelming favorite for the Republican Party nod.

The 8th Ward Democrats gathered Saturday afternoon in the cafeteria of the Graham and Parks Alternative Public School in Cambridge to elect eight delegates—all of them pro-Patrick—to the party’s June convention.

Patrick faces an uphill battle against the state’s attorney general, Thomas Reilly, in the September Democratic primary.

In order to appear on the primary ballot, a candidate must receive the backing of 15 percent of the nearly 5,400 delegates at the June convention. A candidate who is backed by the majority of the delegates also receives the endorsement of the state party committee.

Despite Reilly’s frontrunner status, the nearly 100 rank and file Democrats who compose the core of Cambridge’s liberal 8th Ward made clear their support for Patrick within moments of the caucus’ opening.

“This is the Deval Patrick slate, and I want all of you to know that,” one delegate said to a loud round of applause.

Another delegate, Christopher R. Mackin, spoke highly of both Reilly and Patrick but stated that Patrick was clearly the better of the candidates.

“Tom Reilly is a very fine man,” said Mackin, who holds a doctorate in human development from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “But Tom Reilly is the past and Deval Patrick is the future. It would be a fine opportunity to vote for him.”

Brian P. Murphy ’86, a Cambridge city councillor who will also be a convention delegate, spoke of the need for a Democratic governor after 16 years of Republican rule, drawing on his experiences in the State House under both Democratic and Republican administrations as evidence.

“I was in the House when Mike Dukakis was governor and again when Bill Weld [’66] was there, and trust me, there’s a big difference,” Murphy said, just as his young son Joseph leapt forward to try to hug his father’s leg. “We’ve been in the wilderness for 16 long years,” Murphy concluded, before introducing his son to the amused caucus-goers.

Eliot House’s Schmidt, a Social Studies concentrator and the former president of the Harvard College Democrats, said that Patrick has sparked student interest at college campuses across the state and that he shows “why government matters and why it can be used as a force for good.”

Patrick and Reilly have drawn their support from very different constituencies, with Patrick being more popular among younger and more liberal voters.

Pro-Patrick activists will outnumber Reilly supporters by a two-to-one margin among committed delegates at the June convention, according to the Boston Globe. An African-American who served in the Clinton Justice Department as the nation’s top civil rights enforcement official, Patrick has rallied caucus-goers with his liberal stances and his compelling life story.

Growing up poor on the South Side of Chicago, Patrick attended high school at the Milton Academy in Milton, Mass., on a scholarship, and he became the first in his family to attend college. After graduating from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Patrick went on to hold high-level corporate posts at Coca-Cola and Texaco after his Clinton administration stint.

But while Patrick has more extensive corporate experience than his rival, Reilly has a far larger campaign war chest. The attorney general has more than $4 million on hand, compared to Patrick’s $700,000, according to the Globe.

And while Patrick has never won elected office, Reilly is a veteran of local and state politics. He served as district attorney of Middlesex County, of which Cambridge is the seat. And in nearly two terms as state attorney general, he has gained a reputation for aggressively investigating the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston in the priest abuse scandal.

Despite his strong roots in Middlesex County politics, Reilly garnered little support from the 8th Ward activists. Schmidt, summing up the caucus’ mood, told the crowd that while “there is a huge amount of enthusiasm about Deval, there is literally none about Reilly.”

Another of the elected delegates, Elizabeth W. Vorenberg, took the floor in the final minutes of the caucus to vouch for Patrick on a personal level.

“I have known Deval for over 30 years,” Vorenberg said, “and he has never once disappointed me.”

Vorenberg, the former master of Dunster House and wife of the late James Vorenberg ’48, the former dean of the Law School, told The Crimson that Patrick, who lived in Dunster during his years at the College, inspired her to run as a delegate to the state convention for the first time this year.

—Staff writer Paras D. Bhayani can be reached at pbhayani@fas.harvard.edu.