A fool's errand?
“I am an optimist. But not a foolish one.”
- Gov. Deval Patrick in his inaugural address, Jan. 2007
If that’s really true, then we can surely expect an announcement soon that, after careful consideration, the governor has decided to pull a Delahunt and get out while the getting’s good. Tim Murray, come on down.
But after 38 of the more foolishly-handled months in modern-day Massachusetts political history, an educated guess is there will be no such wise retreat. Like the B-52 erroneously dispatched to bomb Moscow in the Cold War thriller Fail Safe, those in the know say the Deval Patrick re-election campaign is past the point of no return.
Efforts to abort the mission by anxious Democrats all the way up to the White House have been rebuffed by the dismissive pilot. A bright, ambitious man with no apparent thirst for spectacular failure, Patrick nonetheless is clinging desperately to saffron-thin threads of hope that his opponents will split the anti-Patrick vote, that the economy will somehow turn around in time, that he will be swept back into office by a grateful Red Sox nation after he leans out of his box seat and interferes with a foul pop during Game 7 of the World Series, enabling the Sox to get the extra at-bat they need to squeeze out a win.
Most elections featuring an incumbent turn out to be a referendum on the incumbent, and this one is no exception. The most recent poll repeats the same story we’ve been seeing for two years now – substantial majorities of voters don’t like the way the state is heading, don’t approve of the governor’s performance in office, and don’t want to keep him around for another term.
Why? In a counter-intuitive twist on the old cliché, Patrick’s failure has a thousand fathers.
Before he even took office, the governor-elect needlessly antagonized the news media by lambasting a gathering of newspaper publishers as clueless cynics who had – despite their generally fawning coverage of his campaign – “missed” its transcendent nature. (This was the first of many moments in which the congenial, humble listener-par-excellence persona of the campaign was stripped back, like the yuppies in the Foxwoods ad peeling off their regular selves, to reveal thin-skinned petulance.)
And in his first act as governor he telegraphed how easy it would be to roll him by restoring hundreds of millions of dollars in state spending vetoed by outgoing Gov. Mitt Romney, including $100,000 to build a new gazebo on town land in Braintree, a structure likely coming soon to an attack ad near you. This clue was seized upon by the public employee unions, who conned Patrick into giving them veto power over potentially cost-saving pension and health-care reforms, and easily coaxed him into trying to stifle genuine education reform by burying it under a costly, phony “readiness” bureaucracy.
Browse the Daily Digest on the State House News Service website (subscription required) and it all comes rushing back to you, the seemingly unceasing string of blunders that have become engraved in the electorate’s consciousness so irrevocably, they are evoked by single words or phrases, the way jazz fans recall Ella or World War II vets speak of The Big One:
The Caddy.
The drapes.
“A failure of human understanding.” (What caused 9-11.)
Marian Walsh.
“Trivial” criticisms.
Jim Aloisi.
The gridlock snowstorm.
The book deal.
The robo-call for Dianne Wilkerson.
Gas tax.
Sales tax.
Candy tax.
And so on. (Add the ones I missed in the comments section below.)
During one early media availability, Patrick told a group of us: “You’ve never seen a governor like me before.” But that wasn’t true. We had all seen Jane Swift, a well meaning but under experienced bumbler unable to learn from failure, respond constructively to criticism, and break her own fall. This governor is busy making those memories fonder than they have any right to be.
Every major political figure and activist I have spoken to privately about Deval Patrick over the last three years, every one of them Democrats, most of them folks who could have and should have been allies he could now rely on as he seeks re-election, has told me the same story: He pretends to listen, but really doesn’t. You meet with him about something important, and think you have a reached agreement on the way forward, and the next day you read in the paper that he’s done the opposite. He needlessly antagonizes you, then acts shocked and offended when you call him on it. He acts like he’s entitled to treatment that everyone else has to earn. You don’t want to bring him bad news or offer constructive criticism, because he gets on his high horse and treats you like the plague from then on.
I’ve cleaned up the language they used, in most cases. None of those people, or their people, will be with Patrick in November. Enough of them may well relish the chance to send a message to him to give protest candidate Grace Ross the 15% she needs at the Democratic Convention in June to make the September primary ballot. Don’t ask me to tell you who they are, but you could call up Tim Cahill and Charlie Baker’s campaign donor lists and figure some of them out for yourself.
But those are the insiders. What about the “grassroots” voters that Patrick and his Titanic crewmates insist they are now busy energizing for the re-coronation? Outside of a meager crew of true believers and sophomoric online groupies, they likely fall into one of two categories. There are folks who simply will not buy Patrick’s painfully labored reinvention as an outsider, a reformer, an independent soul, by God, a….Scott Brown Democrat, because he is a powerful incumbent, not an outsider; he had to be pushed by political backlash into “signature” reforms like the flagmen (he didn’t even know what police details were when he took office, and couldn’t stand charter schools until they became the key to getting desperately-needed federal education funds); and he rides around in a Caddy, not a pickup truck. And there are folks who might support him again if they weren’t so anxious and angry about being unemployed, a condition his administration has done little to remedy.
Keep in mind, all this fear and loathing set in barely 17 months after the same electorate swept Patrick into office with high hopes and good feeling, and well before the economy fell off a cliff. It has calcified into a profound dislike for a once well-liked Prince Charming during a time when he has had control of the bully pulpit and an array of clumsy foils to play off of, including a scandal-plagued Legislature and an inept Republican Party.
Anti-Patrick sentiment has become a huge, hardened boil that the governor has just eight months to lance in the face of focused, withering criticism from opponents with more than enough dough to get their message across. His flacks like to play pretend that an economic recovery is going to bail him out, touting each sliver of hopeful economic news as if it’s word of Lindbergh’s safe landing in Paris, their tweets rendered ridiculous by each subsequent wave of fresh economic decay.
And the split-vote theory? It could happen. None of his challengers have yet demonstrated a capacity to light up the night sky with hope, and flood the streets with milk and honey.
But this election isn’t about them, and my guess is it never will be. It’s about getting rid of a failed politician whose freshness date, dismayingly, seems in hindsight to have begun expiring as he left the stage on election night. Patrick is said by sources close to him to be well aware of how bleak his re-election prospects are, but is forging on nonetheless. Give the man the due his life story demands, he knows what it’s like to be counted out and isn’t going to let that stop him.
An optimist, yes. But not a foolish one? I doubt it.
