| From State House News Service's weekly email roundup*: "We pulled back," Patrick said of the administration's 2007 retreat from a grassroots offensive against tax-resistant legislators, "and I'm sorry we did to tell you the truth, because it doesn't quite keep faith with the notion of democracy that citizen involvement would be … a deterrent to good policy. Now, we went back to this in the last few weeks with the reform agenda. And I think it was important, and I think it helped." Going to keep that up, Guv? "Sure. Oh yeah."
The new-old outside-in thing has definitely been better. In January 2007, Patrick locked himself in the office to study the budget -- to try to get on top of all the levers and buttons he could push. Didn't really address the press or the grassroots or the public -- just got right down to work. Admirable, really. But he's also supposed to have good staff that can do some of that for him, and give him bottom-line assessments and recommendations. Anyway, if you don't have the figurehead of the governor out there driving the agenda, the agenda gets driven by someone else. And so we were left with Caddies and drapes. (Still immensely stupid that that still gets mentioned.) And while a good working relationship with the lege arguably produced decent results on their own merits (i.e. some good economic development work in '07-08), it didn't provide the wholesale cultural shakeup that people had hoped for when they voted for the outsider-as-governor. Should I have said this years ago? Yup. *(Are you not getting this? It's gold. Free gold.) |
