Deval Patrick's campaign for governor of Massachusetts in 2006 was a dress rehearsal for Barack Obama's current campaign for President: same themes; same campaign director. Here is a review, from the not unsympathetic source of the NYT, of what happens when the rubber meets the road for an executive who has won on the rhetoric of "hope" rather than any actual governing experience. I would also like you to notice that Deval Patrick is a Democratic governor in a heavily Democratic state with a Democratic state legislature, since his party affiliation seems to have gone missing for most of the article. (We conservatives have a parlor game called Name that Party! that we play whenever the troubles of a Democratic politician are reported in the MSM; somehow the party affiliation of Republican politicians in trouble always manages to make it into the first sentence of the article.)
March 27, 2008
Early Dazzle, Then Tough Path for a Governor
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
BOSTON — Gov. Deval Patrick has lately addressed doting crowds around the country as a surrogate for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, his friend and fellow gifted orator. Last month, Mr. Obama even acknowledged borrowing language from Mr. Patrick’s stump speeches, casting a flattering light on a novice politician barely known outside Massachusetts.
But there is no such glow at home for Mr. Patrick, the first Democrat to lead his state in 16 years and the nation’s second elected black governor.
Mr. Patrick, who easily won office in 2006 after dazzling voters with a message of hope and change, suffered a nasty defeat last week at the hands of the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, which quashed his proposal to increase revenues by allowing three resort casinos in the state. None of the governor’s major policy proposals have cleared the Legislature, in fact, and he and Salvatore DiMasi, the speaker of the House, have taken to trading barbs publicly.
Mr. Patrick is faring better than a year ago, when he was under siege for spending more than $10,000 on drapes for his State House office and upgrading his state car from a Ford Crown Victoria to a Cadillac. (He later agreed to reimburse the state for the drapes and part of the car lease.) By his third month in office, Mr. Patrick had announced that his wife was being treated for depression, and by his fourth, he had overhauled his staff.
But even now, governing is not coming easily for Mr. Patrick, 51, a former civil rights lawyer and corporate executive who came to Massachusetts on a prep school scholarship in the ’70s.
So why has he struggled for traction in a heavily Democratic state with a Legislature that should be on his side?
He blames Speaker DiMasi, a veteran of Beacon Hill who embraces old-school ways of doing business and holds far more sway than the governor over his members. Mr. Patrick believes his casino bill could have passed if Mr. DiMasi, who said gambling would be a scourge on the state, had not pressured lawmakers to oppose it.
“It’s part of what we ran against, and it needs to be called out,” Mr. Patrick said in an interview last week on the day before the House overwhelmingly killed the bill. “We’re going to keep working on it until we get a Democratic process that’s functioning.”
In addition to the gambling plan, which would have allowed up to three resort casinos here, Mr. DiMasi has rejected Mr. Patrick’s proposals to let towns raise certain taxes and to eliminate a century-old property tax exemption for telecommunications companies. But the casino plan drew the most attention and is Mr. Patrick’s highest-profile defeat to date.
“He’s got to score some major successes to prove he is relevant,” said Paul Watanabe, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. “One thing you don’t want to be is irrelevant, especially with the kind of appeal that he had as a candidate and is similar to that of Barack Obama.”
Mr. DiMasi, who supports Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York for president, has openly tried to link Mr. Obama to Mr. Patrick’s difficulties, suggesting, along with other critics, that the two are alike in their lack of executive experience. Before the Massachusetts primary in February, Mr. DiMasi said that he did not want a president “in there on a learning process” during his first year in office. (Despite endorsements from Mr. Patrick and Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John Kerry of Massachusetts, Mr. Obama lost to Mrs. Clinton here by a wide margin.)
But Mr. Patrick dismissed the comparison, saying Mr. Obama had far more political experience than he, and defended his own record.
“I don’t accept that we can’t get anything done because we lose one issue,” he said in the interview. “Come on. People around here act like the only thing that happened last year was picking these drapes and buying a car. There’s a whole lot more.”
In particular, Mr. Patrick said the state had increased spending on education, housing and public safety; that 300,000 residents had acquired health insurance under its universal care system; and that with the legislative leadership, he had killed a proposed constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman.
He and his aides played down the significance of the casino plan as it foundered last week, saying that other economic development proposals — including a $1 billion plan to expand the life sciences industry here and another to generate more business tax revenue by closing loopholes — are far more important. Versions of both bills are moving through the Legislature.
“Even the speaker doesn’t want to be in the position of saying no to everything the governor brings forward,” Mr. Patrick said. “Even he appreciates that there are consequences to his members that come from that.”
Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Patrick went to law school at Harvard and rose in politics by casting himself as an outsider and an agent of change. Both men used powerful, inspiring language to win broad grass-roots support.
Mr. Patrick took a different path to power, however, serving as assistant United States attorney general for civil rights during President Bill Clinton’s first term, then as a top executive at Texaco, where he helped carry out a race discrimination settlement, and at Coca-Cola.
He declared his candidacy for governor in 2005 and was thought to have no chance against his Democratic primary opponents, both seasoned politicians whom he beat soundly. He connected with voters, using his outsider status to build excitement and grass-roots support.
“I came here to change politics as usual,” Mr. Patrick said at the state Democratic convention in 2006. “Because what’s missing from politics as usual is hope. We have been governed for too long by fear and low aim and salesmanship.”
Even some of Mr. Patrick’s strongest supporters have lost a little faith, including liberal Democrats who oppose casinos. (“Has Patrick become a lesson in the limitation of words?” a local radio host, David Boeri, asked at the start of a show on the subject last month.)
Others say it is far too soon to judge the governor, and that in fact, he is changing the paradigm on Beacon Hill, where a string of Republican governors cut taxes and the Legislature, eager to shake the “Taxachusetts” cliché, often went along.
“He put on the table the presumption that we are going to need new revenue,” said Stephen Crosby, dean of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts, who served on Mr. Patrick’s transition team. “In that sense he changed the conversation totally from where it’s been for 16 years.”
It is also too soon to predict whether Mr. Patrick will ascend beyond state politics, as so many other Massachusetts lawmakers have done. He will continue campaigning for Mr. Obama, his aides said, though they stressed he would do so only on personal time. He has ruled out cutting his term short to join an Obama administration, telling reporters in Washington last month, “I love this job.”
Mr. Crosby said Mr. Patrick’s failed bid for casinos did not portend trouble so much as the recent “bomb tossing” between him and the speaker.
“This feels like there might be some serious personal antipathy,” Mr. Crosby said. “If it’s true, that’s a problem.”
The state is also facing a $1.3 billion shortfall in its $28 billion budget, making the prospect of gridlock all the more troubling.
Regardless, Mr. Patrick said he felt new momentum this year, partly because he has realized the importance of building support for his proposals inside the State House and out. “The other thing I would say is I have a better idea this year about who to trust and who not to,” he said. “And you better believe that’s helped.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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