Deval Patrick famously dressed down a group of Massachusetts newspaper publishers in a speech delivered days after his election, telling the news honchos that many of their reporters just didn’t get it. “Whether it was skepticism, distraction or the cynicism so many of us will try to pass off as sophistication, some of your reporters missed it,” he said of the idealism his outsider campaign had sparked.
Two years and a few months later, Patrick now seems to be the one that doesn’t get it. Yesterday, the governor offered his most extensive comments to date on the string of recent controversies that have dogged his administration, including the tin-eared patronage appointment of state Sen. Marian Walsh to a $175,000-a-year job that had gone unfilled for a dozen years and the impolitic moves of his supposedly politics-savvy transportation secretary, Jim Aloisi.
Let’s just say the governor’s comments did not help his cause.
The Walsh hire has badly undermined Patrick’s credibility as an agent of change on Beacon Hill. But rather than showing some understanding of the public anger over the appointment and addressing the criticisms on their merits, Patrick simply dismissed anyone who dares to raise such questions as a cynic engaged in trivial pursuits. “One of the challenges in life is concentrating on the meaningful and letting the trivial take a back seat,” Patrick said. “And I sometimes feel like I’m in a profession now where that is completely upside down.” (The suggestion that politics might not be his strong suit was no doubt an unintentional echo of a former Patrick rival.)
What Patrick seems to regard as “the trivial” are issues that, in symbol and substance, help define him in the public eye — and will help determine his success or failure. That he seems unable to grasp this is particularly puzzling given the degree to which his own meteoric rise in politics rested on the power of symbolism and rhetorical flourish.
In his “Just Words” speech on the Boston Common three weeks before the 2006 election, Patrick offered eloquent testimony to the ability of symbols and words to serve as the inspirational underpinning for sweeping efforts to make “meaningful” change. Patrick quoted famous lines delivered by Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, mockingly dismissing each as “just words” in order to shoot down Republican barbs that he was offering Massachusetts voters nothing but fancy verbiage.
In weighing the wisdom of the Walsh hire — which he should simply reverse — and any other high-profile moves he may ponder, Patrick would do well to heed the words of another towering 20th century figure and endeavor to have his administration “be the change” he claims to want to bring to state government.