Deval Patrick – Page 10

What Patrick meant

Gov. Deval Patrick did a decent job yesterday of deflecting criticism over his 9/11 remarks. “Let me be clear: I don’t think America bears any fault for the attack on us in 9/11, and I don’t think that any of the family members with whom I spoke that day heard it or saw it that way,” he said on the “Eagan & Braude” show on WTKK Radio (96.9 FM). The Boston Globe covers the story here; the Associated Press here.

Lest you forget, here is the section of Patrick’s speech that brought him to grief:

Because among many other things, 9/11 was a failure of human understanding. It was mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States. But it was also about the failure of human beings to understand each other, and to learn to love each other.

At the time, those words struck me as odd, and he obviously opened himself up to accusations that he was being insensitive to the victims of 9/11. But it’s an exercise in intellectual dishonesty to suggest that he really, actually meant to say that Al Qaeda wouldn’t have attacked us if only we had demonstrated love and understanding toward the terrorists. Naturally, the Massachusetts Republican Party and the usual suspects on talk radio nearly injured themselves from the speed with which they leapt to that conclusion.

The Phoenix’s David Bernstein digs deeply, and shows not just the context in which Patrick made his remarks on Tuesday, but on other occasions as well. Here, most tellingly, is a long excerpt from the commencement address Patrick gave this past May at Mount Wachusett Community College:

The events of September 11, 2001 were horrific, you know that. They disrupted individual families and our collective sense of security and well-being. It was a “wake-up” call to our own vulnerability. And it represents a catastrophic failure of human understanding. In its wake, I believe we have been governed by fear.

Fear is what drove us to round up people of Arab descent, many of them American citizens, and to hold hundreds without cause or charge.

Fear led us to lose focus on a known enemy in Afghanistan and invade Iraq instead.

Fear justified what I believe to be the greatest assault on personal freedoms (in the Patriot Act) and the greatest aggregation of Presidential power in much of our history.

Fear created the Guantánamo detention center, where the very rule of law that has made our democracy an envy of the world has been set aside.

Just a few months ago in a radio interview, a senior Pentagon official, Charles “Cully” Stimson, named some of the law firms providing free representation to the Guantánamo detainees and suggested that corporate America make those law firms — and I quote — “choose between representing terrorists and representing reputable firms.” He attempted to mark these lawyers as enemies of society. There was no subtlety in his message.

Speaking about this post-9/11 phenomenon, former Vice President Gore observed that, “Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction.” He quoted former Justice Brandeis, who said that, “Men feared witches and burnt women.”

The Vice President, I think, captured the spirit of the active citizen in the heat of danger when he said, “The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hanged as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk. Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.”

Like me, he wonders: “Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol?”

Fear is treacherous.

Now, I’m sure there are some conservatives who would disagree with those remarks, but they pretty much reflect what most liberals believe has happened during the post-9/11 era. Certainly no one would consider them to be particularly controversial. (Indeed, they’re now four months old and no one has said a thing.) Too bad Patrick didn’t express himself as clearly on Tuesday as he did in May.

Finally, have a look at Jay Fitzgerald’s post in which he links criticism of Patrick’s remarks to the idiotic brouhaha over MoveOn.org’s “General Betray Us” ad in the New York Times. Jay — a conservative, or at least someone who passes for one in Massachusetts — correctly notes that President Bush’s defenders are going berserk over these two issues because they can’t offer substantive arguments over everything that’s gone wrong in Iraq.

Personally, I thought Patrick’s remarks — or at least that one excerpt — were tone-deaf, and that MoveOn’s ad was silly and misdirected. But offensive? What’s offensive is the right’s knee-jerk response in attempting to turn everything into a attack on the other side’s patriotism.

If Patrick is guilty of anything, it’s failing to understand how the game is played. Too bad it’s a game, isn’t it?

Photo of Patrick (cc) by DoubleSpeakShow. Some rights reserved.

Peace, love and (mis)understanding

It looks like Gov. Deval Patrick is going to have a rough couple of days over an unfortunate (but not unfair) implication some critics are drawing from his 9/11 speech yesterday. I’ll get to that in a moment. But first I want to establish the context, so here’s the full text of his brief remarks (link now fixed; plus I’ve added paragraphing to make it easier to read):

We meet today to honor the lives and memories of the 206 sons and daughters of our Commonwealth who were lost six years ago in the tragedy of September 11th, 2001 and with them the thousands of others from across our nation and across the globe, who were lost in that tragedy as well.

Our tribute is for each of them and our condolences are with each of you and the families and survivors so touched by that day. Each of us felt the impact of the incidents of September 11th. But the mothers and fathers and sons and daughters, sisters and brothers and friends of those endured perhaps the most profound loss of all. This is your community and your community is with you today and everyday.

We have lived the last six years in the shadow of that tragedy. We carry the vivid reminders of the pain and the anger we felt. But we must also carry the vivid reminders of the compassion and generosity that was shown that day and the days and weeks that followed. The coming together that happened not only in communities that lost a loved one remember them, and not only in New York, Virginia or Pennsylvania and Washington DC or not only in the United States but all across the world.

That is the spirit in which we re-convene today, and that is what must last. Because among many other things, 9/11 was a failure of human understanding. It was mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States. But it was also about the failure of human beings to understand each other, and to learn to love each other. And it seems to me that that lesson and that warning is something that we must carry with us everyday.

Fortunately, for human beings, the human heart is not designed to carry grief forever. Somehow we manage to move on and that might be in some ways our greatest strength. We live in a rare place, where our ideas, our shared goals, and our common humanity will and must be more powerful and must ultimately win out over intransigence and anger and violence and division.

Tempered by these losses, we will emerge a strong and better place. That is how we best serve the memories of those we love. We do that not in anger at the horror of their loss, but in honor of the beauty of their lives. We miss them not because they are gone, but because they were here.

The part that’s causing Patrick problems, obviously, is this: “Because among many other things, 9/11 was a failure of human understanding. It was mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States. But it was also about the failure of human beings to understand each other, and to learn to love each other.”

A Boston Herald editorial today — headlined “Hearts, flowers just aren’t enough” — begins with this sarcastic observation: “If only Osama bin Laden had been hugged more as a child.” The editorial continues:

Unfortunately, the governor’s fuzzy recollection of that terrifying day seems to be in keeping with a certain “blame us” mentality that so many of his supporters embrace, along with a failure to acknowledge the continuing threat of evil that Americans face.

A little while ago, the Massachusetts Republican Party sent out a press release that quotes party chairman Peter Torkildsen as saying, “The only failure of understanding is Governor Patrick’s failure to understand the 9/11 attacks were a cowardly, unprovoked act of war aimed at destroying our democracy and our economy. Terrorists murdered 3,000 innocent people on 9/11, and they were attempting to murder many thousands more that day.” It continues in that vein for several more paragraphs. (So far, the release doesn’t appear to be available at the party’s Web site.)

Bloggers are beginning to react as well, as you can see from this Technorati search.

As you can see from Patrick’s speech, nearly all of it is exactly what you would expect an elected official to say on such occasion. I don’t think his remarks about the human failure to understand and love one another were taken out of context; but I do think they need to be seen within their full context, which was a speech clearly aimed at honoring the victims of 9/11.

As for the part that the Herald and the Republicans are upset with, I’d call it a sloppy bit of rhetoric. I’m all for peace, love and understanding, but Patrick’s words lend themselves too easily to being interpreted as meaning that the attacks came about, at least in part, because we failed to love our enemies.

Look for the inevitable clarification later this week — if not later today.

Is Botsford in trouble?

The Herald’s Laurel Sweet reports that Gov. Deval Patrick’s nominee for the Supreme Judicial Court, Superior Court Judge Margot Botsford, has some pretty close political ties to the governor: Her husband, Boston lawyer Stephen Rosenfeld, was so enthusiastic about Patrick’s gubernatorial campaign that he donated three times the legal limit.

Botsford is well-qualified and progressive, but this has the aroma of a quid pro quo. You could argue that she’s not responsible for her husband’s political donations, but come on. As a judge, she can’t make political donations anyway. (Or at least she shouldn’t.) And why didn’t someone at the Patrick campaign flag the excess donations and return them?

Rosenfeld was a top aide to Michael Dukakis when he was governor, which gives Herald columnist Howie Carr an excuse to stroll down memory lane.

This strikes me as being on the line. It could go away quickly, or it could blow up into yet another Patrick kerfuffle — especially if the Globe’s new metro editor, Brian McGrory, is upset enough about getting beat on this.

Deregulatory blues

I’m almost 51 years old. I don’t smoke. My weight’s OK, although it could be better. I run, badly. I’ll give myself a B or a B-plus in the personal-health department. So why should I have to pay higher medical-insurance rates to cover people too lazy to get off their rear ends or too undisciplined to quit smoking?

Because the whole point of insurance is to spread the risk so that those who need less will help pay for those who need more. Which is why I predict that Gov. Deval Patrick’s experiment in auto-insurance competition will end badly, just as it did 30 years ago when Michael Dukakis tried it.

The Outraged Liberal says he’s “tired of subsidizing bad drivers.” Well, he’s going to develop chronic fatigue syndrome once he has to start subsidizing bad drivers who are now unemployed because they can’t afford auto insurance and can no longer get to work.

The ideal insurance system would reward good drivers while at the same time not penalizing the bad ones so excessively that they’re forced off the roads — or forced to drive without insurance as a matter of economic survival. Guess what? The system we have today looks an awful lot like that ideal.

A Globe editorial today puts it well:

In Massachusetts, about 80 percent of drivers pay a little more so that 20 percent of drivers can pay a lot less. That subsidy is a significant reason that Massachusetts has the second-lowest rate of uninsured motorists in the nation. It would be a shame, and a potentially costly one for all insured motorists, to see that rate rise.

I’ll admit that I’ve got two self-interested reasons for wanting to keep things the way they are. First, I’m not such a great driver, although I’m better than I used to be — the last surcharge, for a speeding ticket I incurred in New Hampshire six years ago, is scheduled to come off my insurance in August. Second, I’ve got two kids, and insurance for teenage drivers — already excessive — will likely go through the roof when this “reform” takes hold.

I realize that Massachusetts is the only state that regulates auto insurance so tightly. But rates are affordable, and they’ve been going down. Deregulation is a non-solution in search of a problem.

Patrick versus Romney

Much comment out there about the Globe’s poll regarding Gov. Deval Patrick’s first 100 days in office, as well as a similar State House News Service poll. The Outraged Liberal: It could be worse. Hub Politics: Actually, it couldn’t be much worse. Blue Mass Group: It’s pretty good! David Bernstein: It’s pretty bad, but don’t write Deval off.

What’s missing from all this is context. How is Patrick doing compared to Mitt Romney at a similar point in his term? Media Nation comes to the rescue. It turns out that the Globe conducted an almost-identical poll in April 2003 (online here; scroll down), around the time Romney had been governor for 100 days. What follows are some numbers from both Globe surveys.

Personal popularity

Romney: 55 percent positive; 32 percent negative
Patrick: 63 percent positive; 25 percent negative

Job performance

Romney: 55 percent positive; 39 percent negative
Patrick: 48 percent positive; 33 percent negative

State of the state

Romney: 39 percent, right track; 47 percent, wrong track
Patrick: 44 percent, right track; 56 percent, wrong track

Budget leadership

Romney: 51 percent, approve; 40 percent, disapprove
Patrick: 56 pecent, approve; 30 percent, disapprove

Much as I’d like to make more comparisons, the tabular data from 2003 are not online.

So what can we learn from the Romney-Patrick smackdown? At roughly the same point in their governorships, they were in a similar position with respect to public perceptions. Patrick is better liked. Although a higher percentage of respondents approved of Romney’s job performance, a higher percentage disapproved, too. Apparently more people are watching and waiting with Patrick.

Each governor dug himself into something of a hole rather quickly. As we know, Romney never dug himself out — and, after a while, he stopped trying, as he decided to run for president by making fun of Massachusetts rather than govern.

Despite Patrick’s stumbles coming out of the gate (some real, some media hooey), he seems genuinely dedicated to trying to do a good job. The relatively high marks he receives for managing the budget put him in a decent position from which to mount a comeback. And he has a reservoir of goodwill on which to draw.

Bill Galvin’s other foot

This is pretty amusing. It turns out that Secretary of State Bill Galvin, who blew the whistle on the privacy-violating aspects of Gov. Deval Patrick’s Web site, DevalPatrick.com, is engaging in some dubious practices of his own.

According to a story by Ken Maguire of the Associated Press, the Corporations Division of Galvin’s office contains all sorts of personal information about people, including, in some cases, Social Security numbers, purchase records and even images of personal checks. The purpose, Galvin says, is to make it easier for lenders to vet would-be borrowers. But anyone can log on.

Galvin offers Maguire two responses:

1. Everyone’s doing it. “We’re not taking down the site. This is standard practice in the business world. It’s necessary for commerce. There are people who are reliant upon this system.”

2. This is an official government function, unlike Patrick’s campaign site. “The governor’s site is a political committee. Our site is a governmental function. This is an essential part of commerce.”

Naturally, David Kravitz, co-editor of the pro-Patrick site Blue Mass Group, calls Galvin’s excuses “lame” and “crap.”

Well, no. In fact, there are all kinds of government functions that invade our privacy. I do think the fact that it was Patrick’s political committee (complete with a “Contribute” button) that was violating our privacy made it uniquely offensive. There may be no practical difference, but there’s a huge difference symbolically and philosophically. (On the other hand, the Patrick folks fixed their mistake almost immediately; Galvin says he ain’t doin’ nuthin’, at least not right away.)

Besides, virtually every resident in the state is in Patrick’s database. By contrast, when I tried searching the Galvintron this morning, entering the names of random people I know, I couldn’t come up with much of anyone. (Kravitz is right about this: You will find information about the governor and his wife.)

Privacy and the government is an enormous issue, and Galvin should commit himself to taking a lot of this stuff offline. There are many records that ought to be public for anyone who needs them, but not simply thrown up onto the Internet for everyone to see.

Galvin is right that what he’s doing isn’t as egregious as what the Patrick campaign did. But he’s wrong in taking such a dismissive attitude toward the whole thing.

Score three for Patrick

Media Nation has been rough on Gov. Deval Patrick — though no rougher than he deserves. Still, I find myself agreeing with Charley Blandy of Blue Mass Group, who says that one positive aspect of Patrick’s victory is that we no longer have a governor standing in the way of progress, such as stem-cell research and Cape Wind.

Today, a third example: Andrea Estes and Lisa Wangsness report in the Boston Globe that Patrick has ordered the state Department of Public Health to record the marriages of 26 out-of-state gay and lesbian couples, reversing an action taken by his Republican predecessor, Mitt Romney. Good for Patrick.

And don’t miss today’s “Doonesbury,” which neatly skewers Romney for his flip-flop on gay and lesbian rights.

Crowdsourcing the governor

I want to try a crowdsourcing experiment today.

Lisa Wangsness reports in the Boston Globe that law-enforcement officials, community activists and the like are trying to restore $11 million in funding for an antigang program that Gov. Deval Patrick proposes to eliminate so that he can pay for the first 250 of the 1,000 new police officers he promised during his campaign. State Sen. Jarrett Barrios, D-Cambridge, whose progressive credentials are unquestioned, discusses the issue on his blog.

So far, this sounds like a classic clash of priorities, with Patrick on what is arguably the wrong side. According to Barrios, the Charles Shannon Community Safety Initiative, as the antigang program is known, helps fund “community-based outreach programs, summer jobs programs, reentry programs, after-school programs and community policing initiatives targeting gangs and youth violence.” Yes, we all want more police officers, but we also know that a comprehensive approach to crime is the only thing that works in the long run.

But wait — this isn’t just a clash of priorities. According to this March 2 Globe story by Andrea Estes and Wangsness, the 250 new police officers are largely being funded by taking other money away from police departments. Here’s what they reported back then:

According to the administration, the money to hire the additional officers would come from a new $30 million account for local police. However, $20 million of that money would be taken from the police grant program, which is traditionally distributed to local police by the Legislature. And some of it is already used for hiring police officers, raising questions about whether the Patrick plan would actually add the number of officers that he asserts.

So what, precisely, is it that I want to try crowdsourcing? I want to know if this is as bad as it looks, or if there is some explanation. What Estes and Wangsness describe sounds like a grotesquely exploitative shell game. There’s got to be more to it than this. Patrick couldn’t be this cynical. Could he?

I’m not going to be chained to my laptop all day, but I’d like to post comments and links as I’m able. I’ll point to the most informative of them right here on the front page. At best, this could be an interesting exercise in group media criticism. At worst — hey, it’s still Friday.

Update: Maybe this is as bad as it looks. One Media Nation reader points to this March 11 Globe story on the $11 million cut. Here’s an excerpt:

“We were shocked,” said Emmett Folgert, describing reaction to Patrick’s elimination of the $11 million in antigang funding. The veteran director of the Dorchester Youth Collaborative, a Fields Corner outreach program, said the money not only helped Boston, which received $3 million, but began to seed new prevention efforts in New Bedford, Fall River, and other cities dealing with youth violence problems. “To abort these new programs that have already achieved success and community support is unthinkable,” said Folgert.

Another Media Nation reader wonders if Patrick is “desperate” rather than “cynical” — that is, he’s so intent on fulfilling his campaign promise to hire 1,000 new police officers that he’s doing more harm than good. An interesting theory.

What controversy?

Check out what Blue Mass Groupie Kate says after several days of well-documented privacy problems at DevalPatrick.com (fixed, fortunately) and concerns expressed even by the Outraged Liberal, a Patrick admirer, about soliciting campaign contributions on a site that’s supposed to be a high-minded exercise in online governance:

For those involved in Deval Patrick’s innovative, grassroots-driven, decentralized, and empowering campaign, any “controversy” about the governor’s relaunched website is much ado about nothing. It appears that those who attack this website are threatened by ordinary citizens being active and engaged.

And what is the reaction of BMG co-editor David Kravitz? “Well said, Kate!”

Priceless.

The right direction

In following up on DevalPatrick.com this morning, I found that the privacy concerns have been largely addressed. Now, when you try to create a new account, the very first thing you have to do is enter an e-mail address. Next, you are prompted to enter your name, address and community. I tried to enter just my last name and town, as I did yesterday, and was blocked from going any further.

It still needs some work. It looks as though the system won’t accept “St.” as an abbreviation for “Street,” but will accept “St” (without the period). But this is a huge improvement over yesterday.

Given that folks at the Patrick campaign seem to get it, why do some people continue to defend this breach of privacy? Despite the challenge I issued yesterday, no one has been able to show me a Web site that offers quite the smorgasbord of information that DevalPatrick.com was making available to people. And yet.

The usually sensible Amused but Informed Observer writes to Media Nation wanting to know how Patrick’s Web site is (or, now, was) “any different from the street lists that have been sold in town clerk’s offices since the beginning of time.” Answer: Because you have to walk into the city or town clerk’s office and either buy a directory — or use it there — for just that one community. No easy, technology-enhanced fishing expeditions, in other words.

Amused and several others compare what the Patrick site was doing to what’s available at online registries of deeds. OK, I’ll bite. Here is the site for the Southern Essex District Registry of Deeds, serving the heart of Media Nation. It serves 33 cities and towns, which means that you can’t do one-stop shopping for all of the state’s 351 communities, as you could with the Patrick site. And yes, I was able to look up some mortgage information about someone I know. But it’s not very user-friendly, and you have to be very specific about what you’re trying to find.

Finally, Tom Keane was among those who pointed out that DevalPatrick.com was hardly alone in (accidentally) offering a reverse phonebook. Yes, of course. I love reverse phonebooks; here’s the one I generally use. Unlike commercial services, though, DevalPatrick.com presumably had access to unlisted phone numbers, since it was based on state records.

My bottom line is this: Before it was fixed, the Patrick site was violating people’s privacy. And if you could somehow cobble together similar examples from government sites, commercial services and the like, it doesn’t matter, because the Patrick folks were violating your privacy on a partisan political site, paid for with campaign contributions. It was wrong, and I’m glad it’s been fixed.

Of course, if Patrick’s people want anyone other than their sycophants to take the site seriously as a tool of governance, they’re going to have to get that big “Contribute” button off. Not likely, eh?