| Nah, the Times article didn't really tell you anything you didn't already know about Deval and Sal ... and actually did tell you some things that aren't true -- for instance, that his entire agenda is stalled in the House. Still, the article reflects the conventional wisdom about the Governor's first year-plus in office: Charismatic crusader stymied by establishment. Well, maybe-kinda-sorta. How did Patrick get into this position? It's only a small part of the picture, but was he blindsided by the fact that many of his supporters couldn't get behind casinos? Well ... he didn't ask us -- how would he know what we thought? Patrick continues to be pretty invisible to much of the state. And so the way that most of us see him is behind the drapes curtain of Beacon Hill. He doesn't get out to town hall meetings; he doesn't hold events with the general public to take the temperature of the body politic; in other words, he has indeed lost his political touch. I don't believe in "political capital"; you're either doing what the public wants, or you're not. And indeed, governing is usually a matter of responding to externalities; if you don't respond to what the public demands, you end up like the Bush administration, with miserable approval ratings that most politicians can't or wouldn't bear. Governor Patrick has the talent to get involved in that public conversation, perhaps better than anyone I've ever seen. He has the ability to listen, and to be listened to; in other words, to respond to and even create externalities, to shape the Zeitgeist. That was the genius of his campaign: He asked what people wanted from government (eg. property tax relief; an end to a wasteful, unaccountable Big Dig Culture; more generally a strategy of playing to the state's economic and educational strengths) and told them they could have it if they worked for it: Together We Can. If the Governor gets out of the State House a little more often, he'll slip right back into the flow of the public mood, and figure out how to use it to his advantage, and ours. So far his term has suffered from a bit of a tin ear; he's capable of bringing a lot more poetry to the prose of governance. |
