Stick A Fork In Him

Thursday, March 8, 2007

Jeebus, that didn't take long. Deval Patrick hasn't even been governor for two months, and he's already a complete and utter joke. First it was the Cadillac SUV, then the drapes, then giving his wife a secretary on the state payroll and now he's in Dutch for making an ill-advised phone call trying to score a loan for a company he used to serve on the board of.

What a political embarrassment this guy is. Politicians are always a bit on the self-aggrandizing side, to be sure, and if you look around it's not hard to see plenty of pols who have secured themselves, their families, and their assorted followers all manner of personal perks and luxuries. It is part of the game we play with our elected officials -- we overlook some petty (and sometimes not-so-petty) self-enrichment as long as they give the appearance of working for some useful purpose and occasionally pass the spoils on down to us once in a while. In fact, people seem to prefer a degree of embellishing -- anyone old enough to remember when Mike Dukakis was governor will recall that he was ridiculed for riding the T to work and mowing his own lawn. But people cannot bear a politician who sets out to gild his own lily before he does anything to merit it.

What's all the more disappointing, though, is that this guy pulled off one of the most unlikely outsider campaigns in Massachusetts political history and carried the mantle of being "not like the rest of them" right through the election. That means quite a lot in a state like this, where the Democratic party is so thoroughly entrenched at every level of power in government that most of the regular politicians are simply content to wait for their "turn" for the top of the pyramid.

At least a machine pol would have learned a few lessons about public humility and discretion. Even non-stop self-promoters like Bill Galvin know when to shut up and keep quiet about certain things. And Galvin was smart enough to back out of the governor's race early in the face of the groundswell of support Patrick was able to muster, figuring that he would be better off not going up against such anti-incumbent sentiment.

What makes Patrick look especially greedy and stupid through all of this is that everybody has fairly fresh memories of Republican Jane Swift doing the exact same sort of bonehead things during her worthless occupation of "the corner office". Her desire to pluck the big shiny ring of executive privilege cost her entire political career in the end, left to be an asterisk in the history books. Luckily, as far as Jane Swift goes, she was only temporary. This guy is just starting a full term and has already turned himself into a complete laughingstock.

I really wanted this guy to be different. To be the one who gave the Democrats a new direction and the chance to reclaim some semblance of a legitimate platform from which they could restore the devastation that the Republicans have wreaked on American government and free society. Instead, he's managed to prove that the allure of the perks held greater appeal for him than any real agenda for governing, putting him squarely in the same league as generations of worthless political hacks.

Somebody give me a recall petition to sign.