Looking Bad, Patrick! (I Know.)

What?  Another Democrat is getting into the 2020 presidential campaign?  But I just had one more Democratic candidate to assess!  You're killing me, Dems! 

Deval Patrick (above), the former governor of Massachusetts and a former Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Clinton administration, is getting into the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign for the same reason Michael Bloomberg is thinking of getting into it - he doesn't think Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders can beat Trump, he doesn't think Joe Biden can get the nomination, and he wants to get in to help avert a second Trump term that he believes would otherwise inevitable.  The only thing inevitable about Patrick as a candidate is his failure.  By all accounts, he was a decent governor, and Massachusetts fared well and got through the Great Recession under his leadership, but he's getting too late a start in the campaign, meaning he can't get the best people to work for his bid, and he's so centrist that he makes Steve Bullock look like a Bernie bro.  Most notably, he went to work for Bain Capital, the predatory Boston investment firm founded by his predecessor as governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, after he left the governorship.  Not good. 

Being a centrist is one thing, but being a centrist with ties to an investment firm like Bain Capital is a disqualifier for the Democratic presidential nomination these days.  Like Joe Biden, Patrick has come up from humble beginnings and he knows what it's like these days for struggling middle-class families.  But Biden, who partly grew up in Scranton when it was beginning its long decline, still relates to working-class families and is able to communicate with them, because he never forgot where he came from.  Patrick came from the South Side of Chicago, yet his involvement with Bain Capital, known for putting a lot of blue-collar Americans out of work, suggests that, when it comes to remembering where you came from, he's developed amnesia.

Right.  I'm glad I'm not involved in the Democratic Party these days.  But the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination campaign is still an entertaining sideshow.