- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 March 2010 19.01 GMT
Think Scott Brown's victory in liberal Massachusetts – for Ted Kennedy's seat, no less – has become an overworked metaphor to describe Barack Obama's political plight? You haven't seen anything yet.
This November, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick will stand for re-election. The national media have long treated Patrick as Obama's political doppelgänger: they share Chicago roots, they both rely on political consultant David Axelrod (as well as some Axelrod-tested talking points) and they are both African-American.
And Patrick is in big trouble.
But though a Patrick victory would be a surprise, the pundits will err if they see his defeat as any sort of referendum on Obama. The fact is that Patrick's political problems are of his own making, and they date back to the earliest days of his administration in 2007.
After running a netroots-driven hope-and-change campaign in 2006, Patrick got off to a rough start, helping himself to a taxpayer-funded Cadillac Escalade and spending more than $10,000 in public money on new drapes for his office. Chagrined, he refunded most of it. But he has continued to stumble from one misadventure to another.
Patrick made controversial high-level appointments that proved disastrous. He pushed an ill-advised, ultimately unsuccessful plan to build three gambling casinos. He agreed to a 25% increase in the sales tax, defying a long history of voter-led tax revolts in the state. Worst of all in the insular world of Massachusetts politics, he has alienated Democratic insiders and the powerful public-employee unions, leading to a sense that he'll be largely on his own during the difficult campaign ahead.
My friend Jon Keller, a prominent political analyst, wrote a scorched-earth blogpost this past weekend in which he essentially bade the governor goodbye and good riddance. Keller said the election will be "about getting rid of a failed politician whose freshness date, dismayingly, seems in hindsight to have begun expiring as he left the stage on election night."
Certainly the polls offer no solace to Patrick and his supporters. The most recent, by Suffolk University, showed him narrowly leading his two most plausible opponents, Republican Charles Baker, a health-insurance executive, and state treasurer Tim Cahill, who was elected as a Democrat but is running for governor as an independent. With Patrick's support at just 33%, pollster David Paleologos told Jessica Van Sack of the Boston Herald, "This race is really between Charlie Baker and Tim Cahill. Whoever emerges between the Baker-Cahill race is likely to be the winner."
Then, too, Massachusetts has a long history of electing Republican governors to keep an eye on the Democratic legislature, from Bill Weld, who won in 1990, through Mitt Romney, who was succeeded by Patrick. Baker, a well-regarded top aide to Weld, would seem to fit that mould rather nicely.
Yet the storyline may prove to be not quite so simple. For one thing, Patrick, despite his missteps, has managed to score some notable victories, including tough ethics reform, taxpayer-friendly changes to the public-employee pension system (although not enough), reorganisation of the state's wretched transportation bureaucracy and an education-reform law that emphasises standards and accountability.
Patrick's efforts to combat carbon emissions led a former California environmental official to say that Patrick "is trying to make California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger look like a carbon girlie man". Moreover, Patrick, a formidable campaigner, has maintained his nice-guy persona, with no hint of personal scandal. That matters in a state whose last three house speakers have run afoul of the authorities, and in which a state senator was caught by a surveillance camera stuffing cash down her bra.
As for the opposition, most observers see Tim Cahill as little more than a spoiler. It's Charlie Baker who probably has the best shot of defeating Patrick. And, thus far, the idea of Baker is proving more compelling than the reality. Liberal on social issues (he supports same-sex marriage, and his running mate, state senator Richard Tisei, is gay) and conservative on taxes and spending, Baker would appear to be the very model of an electable Massachusetts Republican.
Yet he got peevish last week when Boston Globe columnist Brian McGrory asked him about the Big Dig, the leaking $22bn Boston tunnel system that Baker helped oversee during the 1990s. Then, too, the rise of Scott Brown – more conservative and more populist than a typical Massachusetts Republican – seems to have thrown Baker off his stride. Recently Baker went so far as to duck a question on whether human activity contributes to global warming, thus managing to come off as less straightforward than Romney – no mean feat.
All this may seem like deep inside baseball, of little interest outside Massachusetts. The point is that whether Patrick loses his re-election bid, as expected, or manages an improbable comeback, it will have nothing to do with Barack Obama.
Despite their surface similarities, Patrick's and Obama's life experiences are dramatically different. Patrick grew up poor in a black section of Chicago. Obama's existence, by contrast, was rootless and marked by his struggle for a racial identity.
One important characteristic defines them both, however. Each was elected promising not just to enact a specific set of proposals but to change the very way business is conducted. Each has found it much harder than he'd expected to fulfill that promise.
If Deval Patrick loses this autumn, it will tell us little about what Massachusetts voters think about Obama. But if he wins, it may provide Obama with something of a road map he can study – and possibly follow to his own re-election victory in 2012.