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.    

Political Blackout

A few political pundits have speculated on the inability of black candidates for statewide office to get nominated, never mind elected, so soon after the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency. Here are some examples: In Alabama, Representative Artur Davis was defeated in his bid for the governorship, while Kendrick Meek, the presumptive Democratic nominee in this year's U.S. Senate race in Florida, is running a campaign that isn't getting any attention. And, as of January, the U.S. Senate's only black member, Democrat Roland Burris, will no longer be in office.

Several guesses have been made to explain this reverse phenomenon, with the most obvious being that race is a factor. Maybe not. In Alabama, Artur Davis is not unelectable because he's black; he's unelectable because he's a Democrat, as Democratic gubernatorial nominee Ron Sparks is given no chance in this increasingly Republican state. Indeed, the fact that most blacks are Democrats in what might be a good Republican year is a very big factor everywhere. With Meek, it's a matter of media disinterest. The blood feud between independent and incumbent governor Charlie Crist and Republican Marco Rubio makes for far more salacious news copy than a nice guy like Meek, who's living up to his name as a candidate as a result. With the obsession over the Crist-Rubio contest, Meek can't even get arrested. Not even in Palm Beach. (That joke is aimed at Palm Beach, not at black people.)

And by the way, Florida has a gubernatorial election to pick a successor to Crist that's getting even less attention than the Meek campaign. I mean, can anyone name the major candidates for the governorship of Florida without looking it up on Google?

Actually, things may be looking up for Deval Patrick, the incumbent black governor of Massachusetts, as he prepares to seek a second term this year. When Scott Brown was elected the first Republican U.S. senator since 1972 in that state, Patrick looked like to be the Tea Party movement's next victim there. Now he's expected to win re-election in the fall.

One theory I've heard is that black voters don't normally get behind black candidates unless and until they're convinced they can win. That's why they supported Obama's presidential campaign after he won the caucuses in overwhelmingly white Iowa and why they likely wouldn't have supported Roland Burris in Illinois, tainted by his association with Rod Blagojevich, this year. It's not hard to agree with this theory. If Charles Barkley had made good on his desire to run for governor of Alabama this year, the political landscape down there would have been very different.

And Barkley is an independent.

As for Davis, he'll be glad in November that it's white Democratic gubernatorial nominee Ron Sparks, not himself, who falls flat on his face in November. And don't count out Meek in Florida just yet. He got himself on the primary ballot entirely with petitions, the first statewide candidate to do so in Florida's history. He obviously knows to run a marathon campaign. So did Obama.

Kirk Will Work

With the path in Massachusetts cleared for an interim U.S. Senator to be allowed to serve in the late Edward Kennedy's seat until a special election is held in January, Governor Deval Patrick chose Paul Kirk, a close Kennedy friend, for the post. Kirk is a respected party elder and a former Democratic National Committee chairman, serving from 1985 to 1989.

Speculation has begun on who might run in the special election, with the most obvious Democratic candidates - Joseph Kennedy II, Edward Markey, and Martin Meehan - having ruled themselves out. Also subject to speculation is Governor Patrick's decision to pass over Michael Dukakis, the last Democratic governor of Massachusetts before Patrick, as a possible appointee for the interim Senate appointment.

Dukakis was a public servant in the truest sense of the term, having gotten into politics to improve government and and make it work for ordinary people, and he accomplished much in his own governorship, but he still, twenty years and change after his bid for the Presidency, remains a punch line for his emotionless, charismatically challenged persona. Not to mention the fact that his impressive economic record - the Massachusetts Miracle - went up in smoke in the final two years of his governorship.

Serving out part of Ted Kennedy's term would have been a wonderful and honorable way for Dukakis to cap his political career, but it looks like he'll be remembered as fondly as he was at the end of his last job - which means, not fondly at all, if even remembered.

I may have reported this before, but Dukakis recently accepted the blame for George Walker Bush. If he had defeated the father in 1988, he reasoned, no one would have heard of the son.