Last week, as I watched the Sept. 21 gubernatorial debate in Brighton, I had a feeling that Gov. Deval Patrick might be in deeper trouble than the polls throughout most of the summer seemed to indicate.
It’s not that Patrick has lost his poise and polish; he remains a smooth rhetorician and almost likeable. Nor did Republican challenger Charlie Baker land any major punches. With a debate format that allowed no more than 30-second answers and a Ken Doll moderator in the person of CNN’s John King, the fireworks were held to a minimum; what little acrimony surfaced between the two front runners was quickly diffused whenever one of the other two candidates in the debate, Treasurer Tim Cahill, a former Democrat turned Independent, and Rainbow/Green Party Candidate Jill Stein, got a turn. In the end, I found myself agreeing with the pundits: this debate was about as dull and forgettable as they get.
And with a bit more than a month to go, that is to Charlie Baker’s distinct advantage.
In a piece about the debate in the next day’s Boston Globe, columnist Scott Lehigh noted that while Baker “has all the charm of a perturbed porcupine … in a year when voters are frustrated and angry, Baker combined a sense of determination with a command of specifics that made him seem the most fearless about tackling tough problems.”
The situation is more complicated that Lehigh makes it seem—the important question he leaves unaddressed is, what is making voters frustrated and angry?—but I think he’s right that many voters will go for the candidate who appears fed up and feisty without regard to the quality of the arguments he or she is making. Isn’t that what happened for Scott Brown in his insurgent campaign against Martha Coakley for Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat?
Many pundits believe the frustration and anger among voters today was fully encapsulated in a question asked of President Obama last week by Velma Hart during a CNBC town meeting. Hart, the African-American chief financial officer for a group representing veterans, told the president, “I’m exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are right now … I voted for a man who said he was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class. I’m one of those people, and I’m waiting, sir. I’m waiting. I don’t feel it yet.”
But while rightwing chatters delight in holding up Hart’s critique as evidence that even Obama’s base is fed up, they must also know that Hart’s growing dissatisfaction with Obama and his party doesn’t translate into growing enthusiasm for Republican candidates. Hart, like many voters who have supported Obama—and like many voters in Massachusetts who have invested hope in Deval Patrick—is impatient, unsure whether the president and his party are corrupt or just gutless when it comes to delivering for the middle class.
For Obama, the mid-term elections look bleak not because the GOP is converting people like Velma Hart to its belligerently anti-middle-class policies, but because Obama and his party have so far failed to reverse some of the very worst policies of the Bush years, particularly a tax policy that takes from the vast middle of America to reward a small but ever-growing wealthy class. Obama allows his effort to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to wait until after the midterms at his own peril.
For Patrick, who this week saw Baker draw even with him in the polls, fear and procrastination on the tax issue may be his undoing. More than his failed casino gambit, Patrick’s support for gas and cigarette tax hikes, for higher state fees and slashed local aid budgets, make him vulnerable. He looks like a tax-and-spender and a draconian budget slasher all at once, too scared to lead the way to a fairer, more progressive income tax policy.
Both political parties tax; both political parties spend. It is in the debate about taxing and spending that each party defines its goals. For too many years, Republicans have successfully intimidated Democrats on the subject of taxes. Bush showed more balls than brains when he pushed tax cuts that hugely favored the rich while simultaneously running up the deficit on two wars and gutting spending on education and other vital social services, but he moved his agenda. Obama and Patrick may be smarter, more prudent, less extreme than Bush and Baker, but what does it get them?
