Coupe Deval
barnett, dean
Coupe Deval The unhappy fi rst year in offi ce of Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick—Barack Obama’s friend and oratorical model. BY DEAN BARNETT Boston Early last week, the...
...Many Americans may wonder what’s happened to Patrick since he arrived at Boston’s goldendomed state house with a mandate to be hopeful and aspirational...
...Also noteworthy is the fact that Patrick now has a new signature issue, something that cuts an odd fi gure within the politics of hope...
...Both ostentatiously sought out a style that would transcend politics as usual...
...Nevertheless, his message of hope resonated, and he easily defeated formidable opponents in both the Democratic primary and the general election...
...But it’s not as if the Patrick administration has lacked magnifi - cent victories for the politics of hope...
...Patrick didn’t start his race for governor with the advantage of celebrity that Obama brought to the presidential race...
...In an attempt to make the matter go away, Patrick decided weeks after the story broke that he would pay the state the $543-a- month difference between the pedestrian Crown Vic and the more elegant Caddy...
...Given the narcissistic nature of the politics of hope, it’s unsurprising that much of the Patrick administration has revolved around the whimsy and caprice of Deval Patrick himself...
...This apparent effort to balance the budget on the backs of the gambler community may ultimately be effective, but it seems awfully cynical for a hopemonger like Patrick...
...Yet the Bay State turned out to be one of Hillary Clinton’s last redoubts of strength, giving her a comfortable double-digit victory...
...Where Patrick is short and doughy, Obama is tall and taut...
...In November 2007, USA Today quoted Obama as saying, “But you see, I am not asking anyone to take a chance on me...
...He announced his decision with characteristic politicsof-hope self-aggrandizement, saying, “I cannot in good conscience ask [state] agencies to make those [fi scal] choices without being willing to make them myself...
...The Globe also reports, Of the management hires in the administration, 19 percent are minorities, more than double the Romney administration’s numbers...
...An Obama administration in Washington wouldn’t necessarily be a replay on a larger and more important stage of the stumbling Patrick regime...
...Don’t be fooled by the Globe’s vague and contradictory wording...
...As Patrick has proven, translating hope into policy is harder than campaign speeches make it sound...
...The scheduler who got the decidedly light task of scheduling fi rst lady duties for a woman with an all-consuming full-time job was the female half of the husband and wife team who had coordinated Patrick’s campaign fundraising...
...The irony of both Obama and Patrick’s using that particular line is that when a candidate runs a campaign like Patrick’s in ’06 and Obama’s today, voters who give them a victory are taking a very big chance...
...If anything—and you may fi nd this difficult to believe—the Patrick campaign was less substantive than the Obama campaign...
...In 2006, Massachusetts’s overwhelmingly Democratic legislature had passed Mitt Romney’s universal health care law...
...Patrick deemed Romney’s ride insufficiently opulent, and yet defended leasing the much more expensive Caddy by insisting that Ford had discontinued the Crown Victoria...
...Obama may also prove to be a better chief executive than Patrick has...
...The Commonwealth agreed to pay her $72,000 a year for her services...
...The Boston Globe reported on his ambitious redesign of the governor’s offi ce back in February: Governor Deval Patrick spent more than $10,000 on damask drapes for his State House offi ce as part of a $27,387 makeover that also included a new desk, settee, and other furnishings paid for with taxpayer money...
...Most of his agenda remains stalled in the Legislature...
...If the voters ratify such a campaign, they give the candidate the kind of blank check that a victor who ran on a less frothy agenda could only dream of...
...Patrick was just getting warmed up...
...Only when the story became public did Patrick once again cut the Commonwealth a check...
...Patrick has hired a staff that is made up of 27 percent of people of color and more than half have been women...
...Patrick also showed the world that he didn’t crave creature comforts only on the road...
...Even the liberal Boston Globe, in a review of Patrick’s fi rst year as governor, acknowledged that it had “been marked by initial high-profi le missteps, political frustrations, and a senior staff shakeup...
...As to the substance of the Patrick regime, there still hasn’t been any...
...Patrick’s formidable ego has dominated his fi rst year in offi ce, and Obama is no slouch in that regard...
...Both men ran campaigns based on hope...
...I am asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations...
...Such candidates base their campaigns not on their policy promises (such as the Patrick campaign’s still unkept vow to get 1,000 more police offi cers on the Commonwealth’s mean streets), but on their personalities and leadership...
...Then again, with no mandate from the voters to guide him on specifi c issues and a much more complex set of problems confronting him (not to mention his lack of management experience), he may turn out even worse...
...The taxpayers footed the bill...
...He hired a full-time scheduler for his wife, a partner at one of Boston’s biggest law fi rms...
...I’m asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations...
...Obama also appears to be much sharper and savvier than Patrick...
...The Patrick campaign appeared to provide something of a blueprint for Obama...
...Patrick wants to license three resort casinos in the Commonwealth...
...Patrick came to offi ce seeming determined to glorify himself with unprece dented gubernatorial fl ights of ego...
...In Massachusetts, Barack Obama received the endorsements of Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and of course his secret sharer, Deval Patrick...
...Obama in many ways seems like a refined and perfected version of Patrick...
...And yet Patrick won the race relying on hollow rhetoric like, “I want you to understand, I am not asking anybody to take a chance on me...
...BY DEAN BARNETT Boston Early last week, the presidential campaign was rocked by the “bombshell” that Barack Obama had borrowed certain rhetorical flourishes from Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign...
...Originally, Patrick didn’t spend a cent on damask drapes or the other little touches...
...Not surprisingly, given its “double threat” status of being both vague and vapid, the line about the aspirations is one of the chestnuts that Obama has recycled during the presidential race...
...The revelations were not universally regarded as shocking...
...The economy was good...
...They shared a strategist, David Axelrod, who had penned vacuously uplifting prose for John Edwards long before Edwards became an angry populist trapped in a 28,000square-foot mansion...
...Mitt Romney had used the same Ford Crown Victoria for his entire four years in offi ce...
...It turns out the governor has spent his first year in office all dressed up with no place to govern...
...While Patrick often sounds as if he just took a swig of helium, Obama speaks in a soothing baritone...
...As if to underscore the fact that rhetoric matters a lot more on the campaign trail than in the corner offi ce, Patrick capped a year of embarrassments with a 9/11 reminiscence in which he labeled the attacks of that day “mean and nasty” but also “a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other...
...Anyone who was aware of the existence of Deval Patrick prior to the publication of this story could see the similarities between the Obama and Patrick campaigns...
...Patrick’s wife was the fi rst Massachusetts fi rst lady since Kitty Dukakis to rate her own scheduler...
...One of his initial executive decisions was to lease a brand new Cadillac in which he would be chauffeured around the state—at taxpayer expense, even though Patrick and his wife are extremely wealthy...
...It’s worth pondering: What is it that Massachusetts Democrats have learned about the “politics of hope” that the rest of the country hasn’t...
...This escapade earned Patrick the nickname “Coupe Deval” from hostiles in the local media...
...Only Ford hadn’t discontinued the Crown Vic, much to the relief of police forces everywhere...
Vol. 13 • March 2008 • No. 24
