Deval Patrick’s Trivial Pursuits
Can it be that barely halfway into his term, Gov. Deval Patrick has already spoken the words that will become his political epitaph in Massachusetts?
“One of the challenges in life is concentrating on the meaningful and letting the trivial take a back seat,” Patrick said in the Senate reading room, after a reporter asked him whether patronage-packed Beacon Hill still has credibility with the public. “I sometimes feel like I’m in a profession now where that is completely upside-down,” he added.
Of course, he’s wrong about the first part. What is that phrase that high school basketball coaches drummed into our heads? Take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves.
Patrick has never bothered to take care of the little things–the car, the drapes, the chopper, the book deal while the casino bill went down in flames–and now the big things are slipping out of his grasp.
Now, it’s true that if we got rid of every no-show hackerific pol on Howie Carr’s hit list we still wouldn’t be that much closer to solving the budget problems, but to suggest that such things are “trivial,” goes beyond tone deaf and into the realm of arrogance.
Patrick’s press people tried to spin it later:
Joe Landolfi said, “The governor understands the significance of the recent issues and has made that perfectly clear on a number of occasions. The governor was clearly responding to a question about his perceived credibility and was not trivializing in any way recent issues.”
But he hasn’t and he most certainly was.
So here’s a big issue. The governor played a game with the legislature over toll hikes. By forcing the Turnpike Authority board to enact toll hikes in lieu of his transportation plan which needed to be passed by the legislature, and then having his transportation secretary antagonize the legislature to the point where they had no desire to pass anything, the governor was forced to delay the whole thing until July.
He gambled and he lost. And as good gambler knows, you don’t play the cards you’re dealt, you play your opponent. Patrick strengthened his opponent’s hand when he hired Marian Walsh and James Aloisi and his sister made it even stronger. But then Patrick has never been that good on the gambling front, either.
The “trivial” matters. The little things matter. He’s had two-plus years to figure that out and if he doesn’t learn it soon, the big things might be left to someone else. Again.
