Just as we stepped onto my colleague’s front porch last weekend, ready to rush off to an event in Chicopee, a neatly but casually dressed middle-aged man carrying a clipboard climbed the stairs to meet us. I did my best to brush him off.
“So sorry… late for an appointment… no time to talk,” I said, officiously shaking my car keys to underscore the urgency of our mission.
“Yes, well, then, by all means, get to your appointment. But can you just tell me: will you be voting for Deval Patrick on Election Day?” the man asked.
My colleague and I were already getting into my truck as the man, having climbed up onto the porch, began his descent.
“What choice do we have?” I shot back. I grinned, hoping that was enough to put the man’s mind at ease and let us slip away without further discussion. It didn’t work. The man frowned, consulting his clipboard as if looking for an answer to my rhetorical question.
“So, um, you will be voting for Deval?”
“Like I said, what choice do we have?” I repeated. Then I saw the man still frowning, still looking at his clipboard. I felt bad. “Sure. Guess we’re voting for Deval. Can’t let the other guys win, right?”
The man’s mood instantly brighted.
“That’s right! OK, two for Deval! Have a great day!”
More than five hours later, on our return trip from Chicopee, my colleague turned and asked, “Are you really planning to vote for Deval?”
“Yes,” I said. “Probably. Patrick or Stein. I should go for Stein, but… I don’t know. Lately I’ve been making up my mind in the voting booth. Or letting my nine-year-old tell me what to do.”
From his silence, I guessed that my colleague was in just about the same place that I was, the same place that hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts voters and millions of voters around the country find themselves each November.
Which is to say, we’d love to take a flyer on an attractive third-party candidate, but are hesitant to do so—not because there’s much we like about the Democrat, but because we’re scared that our effort will prove, as it almost always does, quixotic. So unless we want to help the Republicans, we do exactly what the Democrats expect us to do. We “come home” to the Democrat.
This year in Massachusetts, the choice is a hard one. Deval Patrick hasn’t nearly lived up to the promises he made four years ago, nor the hope he inspired. He’s squandered his political capital not on brave new ideas, on but casino gambling and merchant power plants—crap his hack-infested party has been fooling with for years. Still, he’s just one guy, and even when he’s tried to do the right thing—for example, trying to cut the budget for the state Department of Probation, a patronage playground that epitomizes the corruption of the Democrats under the leadership House Speaker Robert DeLeo and his Western Mass. lieutenant, State Rep. Tom Petrolati (D-Ludlow)—his party simply overrides his vetoes.
Patrick is lame in the face of the sleaziest elements of his own party and far too soaked in corporate culture to challenge a system that continually rewards fat cats. But Republican Charlie Baker is a Weld-era hack, a legacy player who, just like dear old dad, went to Harvard and got into politics. In 1998, after Weld left office, Baker took a break from terrorizing welfare moms to fatten up his wallet as CEO at Harvard Pilgrim Heath. Now, no doubt inspired by Scott Brown’s taking Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, Baker runs as a fiscal conservative with moderate social values.
Baker talks much about his private sector experience, but in fact, Baker has spent more time and made more money in the public sector than Deval Patrick. Moreover, if Patrick’s party is sleazy and weak in its commitment to the “working families” to which it constantly panders, Baker’s party is simply bat-shit crazy. Can we trust Baker to temper the most reactionary impulses of the so-called teabaggers? Not for a second.
So here comes Jill Stein, an accomplished physician and inspiring activist, who pushes her way into the gubernatorial debates despite the resistance of the mediocrities in the Boston media (yes, you, Boston Globe) and offers the only real path to positive change. She is bright and articulate, though not nearly as polished on the stump as Patrick, Baker or Independent candidate Tim Cahill (a Democrat hack in a new, Indy package). And so the media declares her “irrelevant,” a mantra that gains volume as Election Day approaches.
