Democrat Deval L. Patrick made history last month by becoming the first African-American governor of Massachusetts. In the national news media, his victory was covered as an inspiring story of racial progress, and rightly so. Patrick’s win marked a turning point in the history of a state that had never fully overcome the legacy of antiblack prejudice from the years of the Boston school-busing wars.
But another, less-noted, dimension of Patrick’s victory has national significance as well. In one of the meanest political seasons in recent memory, he ran a campaign that transformed a politics of rage into a politics of reconciliation. What made his achievement all the more remarkable was that he managed to do so in liberal Massachusetts, the fiery heart of Bush-hating America.
Two years ago, when Patrick began his campaign, few of the state’s liberal activists were focusing on the task of taking back the governorship that had been in Republican hands for the past sixteen years. Instead, virtually all their energy and passion was consumed by rage at George W. Bush and the triumvirate of Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rove. The anger was palpable and visible. Anti-Bush bumper stickers proclaimed “A Village in Texas Is Missing Its Idiot.” Home-made lawn signs carried a defiant message: “George Bush Is Not My President.”
Fury was compounded by frustration. Angry as activists were at President Bush, they were also mad at John Kerry for failing to respond immediately to the Swift Boat veterans. In their eyes, the lesson of 2004 seemed clear: in the age of Karl Rove, it is electoral suicide to stay regally above the fray. The way to win is to fight-and if that means hitting low and hard, so be it. For activists yearning to get back into presidential politics and to start slugging, the hardest part was waiting three more years for the next presidential campaign to rev up in 2007.
As Patrick began his search for support, he went first to these activists. He did two things: he offered them an outlet for their pent-up anger by giving them a campaign to jump into right away; but, at the same time, he tried to calm their anger. His mission, he insisted, wasn’t to out-Rove Rove, but to put Rovian politics behind the party. From the outset, he made it clear that he was running to bring people together rather than drive them apart. He appealed to the better angels in the activists’ nature, and, to their credit, the better angels responded. They began to march under the slogan “Together We Can.”
It’s one thing to come up with a sunny slogan at the beginning of a long campaign. It’s another thing to stick to it until the end. That’s just what Patrick did.
He was a very long shot in the Democratic primary-facing Thomas Reilly, a popular, sitting attorney general who played up his reputation as a fighter. Few thought that Patrick, a political newcomer and an African American, could beat the feisty Reilly, especially with a theme urging voters to seek common ground rather than to go to war. But fortune sometimes smiles on long shots. Unaccountably for so practiced a politician, Reilly made mistakes, fell behind in the polls, and was never able to catch up.
In the general election, Patrick faced another kind of challenge. Kerry Healey, his Republican opponent and Mitt Romney’s lieutenant governor, lagged in the final weeks of the campaign. In desperation, she launched a vicious television ad, accusing Patrick of being soft on crime, and, more precisely, on a particularly reviled kind of criminal-rapists.
Some of the campaign professionals in Patrick’s camp had also served in the Kerry campaign. Fearing a repeat of the Swift Boat debacle, they strenuously argued for a sharp and immediate response. Patrick refused. In the face of an attack that subtly tried to play on racial fears, he stuck to his message of unity and his strategy of conciliation. Indeed, in the midst of the storm, he was eerily serene. In debate and on the campaign trail, he embodied civility in his rhetoric and his demeanor. He made an art of disagreeing without being disagreeable. He even found occasion to praise the Romney administration for its success in promoting community housing policies.
At the same time, no one could accuse Patrick of giving ground on his own strongly held views. He took orthodox liberal positions on social issues and never wavered from even the most controversial proposals, such as granting drivers’ licenses and in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants.
Patrick won by twenty points, running up huge margins in liberal college towns and comfortable leads in the affluent Boston suburbs. More notably, he also easily carried many of the state’s smaller cities, including traditional blue-collar strongholds where Republicans have run well since the 1990s.
In today’s postelection moment of bipartisan comity, it’s easy to forget how risky-even a little wacky-Patrick’s strategy was in late 2004. At the time, Democrats in blue states were urged to be as truculent and intimidating as their Republican opponents, sowing division and slinging mud with the best of them. Patrick decided to run against the conventional wisdom and, with his commanding victory, proved that Democrats could win another way.
