Driving home from Boston last week, I heard Gov. Deval Patrick on the radio.
I wasn't exactly a willing audience. I'd been trying to listen to the epic three-overtime Game Six between the Celtics and the Chicago Bulls. My radio signal crapped out somewhere in Auburn. After scanning static for an irritating minute or two, I switched over to the ever reliable WBZ 1030 AM, where talk host Dan Rea and his listeners were grilling the governor.
I listened just long enough to hear a question from a man "from the beautiful town of Wilmington" about some local road project that had been going on for nearly three years. The caller said he meant no disrespect, but, come on, it had been three years! In that straight-talking-Boston-accented-late-night-caller way that a lot of Rae's audience put across their irritation with state bureaucracy, the man from Wilmington urged Patrick to seek better coordination between the public agencies and utilities involved.
"Amen," said the governor, enthusiastically. (Nice when they feed you the answers, he must have thought.) He went on a minute about all the frustrating work he faces trying to get projects rolling. Then he asked the caller exactly where the particularly offending road project was, so he could look into it personally.
The governor spoke softly, eloquently, politely, empathetically. He sounded far younger than 52—more like a bright student in a grad school interview. When Rae closed the segment, he thanked Patrick, invited him back and said that it was good for the governor to get out on radio shows and talk to the voters. Deval agreed, thanked everybody and offered to "get back" via email to any callers who didn't get to talk to him on air.
The rehabilitation of Deval Patrick will, if nothing else, be interesting to watch.
Like many voters, I didn't see in the fall of 2006 the possibility that Patrick would end up squandering nearly all of his popularity, becoming, by the middle part of his first term, the embodiment of a hacked-up pol, a far cry from the reformer he promised to be. But with an election coming and his poll numbers sinking, the governor has no choice but to hit the trail.
Deval shouldn't mind. From what we've seen, he campaigns easily. It's the governing that's come hard.
For all of my criticisms of Patrick—he strikes me as an almost perfect blend of the worst of Democrats and Republicans, a free market-worshipping hack with a plum job for every crony and a smug remark about the politics of cynicism for every critic—I can't entirely give up on him just yet. As big a mess as he's made, I'm fully aware that, yes, indeed, we could get worse.
I thought about the governor's travails as I read Maureen Turner's story last week about Springfield and the effort to extend its two-year mayoral term to a four-year term ("Twice as Long, Twice as Good," April 30.) The best argument, in my view, for longer terms of office is the possibility that putting more distance between election cycles will entice politicians away from the practice of perpetual campaigning. The movement in Springfield, sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce, reflects a desire by many business leaders to see more long-term planning and more consistent management of projects than they're seeing from officials who face re-election every two years. The case for longer terms is made, most often, by people who'd like to see more management and less politicking from elected officials.
Were gubernatorial terms only two years, Patrick likely wouldn't be governor right now—unless he wisely avoided getting bogged down in a series of patronage scandals, hard on the heels of squandering his first year on a failed effort to legalize casino gaming. More likely, however, if he'd only had a two-year term, the extra urgency might have forced him to be more disciplined. With four years, he had time to get himself into trouble.
Question now is, does he have time to get out of trouble?
Of course, there is another possibility if you believe the Boston press: Patrick as President Obama's appointment to the Supreme Court?
It's not the first rumor of Patrick's imminent departure from the hot seat. As before, the governor's people insist he's a "100 percent" lock to run for re-election.
Meanwhile, whatever good comes from being on a short list for a presidential appointment is overshadowed by the negative commentary coming from people like Alan Dershowitz, whose summary of Patrick is, sadly, as plausible as it is facile: "He's a mediocre governor, mediocre lawyer."
