Their first paragraph says it all
In choosing a governor to run the state, voters look for executive experience, wise issue positions, and the intangible quality of leadership. It is a rare thing when a candidate has all three. We believe Massachusetts Democrats and independent voters have such a person in Deval Patrick. The Globe strongly endorses his candidacy in the gubernatorial primary Sept. 19.
The Globe’s endorsement of Patrick is about as strong as it could be. This paragraph in particular struck me:
Often, the character of a political campaign provides a lens into how a candidate would govern. One may call on longtime political alliances. One may spend a lot of money on television ads. Patrick has chosen to build a broad citizen organization, fueled by his inspiring presence, perhaps, but also benefiting from the advice and participation of thousands who are joining the political process in earnest for the first time. The organization may help propel him to victory in the election. More important, because of the base it provides to speak directly to the voters and mobilize support for change, it can help him govern.
Exactly. Exactly! Because of the way Patrick has built his campaign, his victory would be incredibly meaningful, and would represent an extraordinary opportunity to break through the Big Dig Culture. Neither Gabrieli nor Reilly is exactly part of the club on Beacon Hill either. But, as we said in our own endorsement of Patrick’s candidacy, “it’s the ‘How,’ not the ‘What’ of the Patrick campaign, however, that most makes it stand out among the current gubernatorial campaigns.” Patrick can only win if his grassroots effort means as much as he and his campaign staff think it does. If that happens, he walks into office with – I know it’s a tired cliche, but it’s apt, so I’ll use it anyway – a people-powered mandate that represents the chance for change that folks of all political stripes ’round these parts are looking for.
Hoss also noted the Globe’s endorsement, focusing on the tax and economic development issues. Read his take too.
Congratulations to Deval Patrick and his campaign on this well-earned boost.
slightly acrid … pungent … a hint of vinegar …
<
p>
Oh, I know – sour grapes!
<
p>
😉
I guess I could have said…did you really expect any other out come? Did you?
After reading some of their reporting this political season I was expecting to see a Gabrielli endorsement.
but me too. 😛
<
p>
Question for the hivemind: who writes these things? Is it colloborative? I don’t think I’ve ever paid that much attention, sad to say.
I went for a hike at one of your local state parks. Would have swung by, but was afraid you would send me out canvassing. 😛 Dont worry, I will be back to my campaign duties tomorrow.
We were out canvassing from morning until the afternoon.
<
p>
Well, I guess we can forgive you for hiking — especially if you were out wooing your new gal. It was a gorgeous day.
<
p>
Now get yer ass back to work, mister! LOL See ya this morning? 🙂
They could easily have chosen someone different, or written the endorsement in a variety of different ways. This is a solid victory for Patrick for all the reasons specified by David. Most important, it underlines a critical argument: Patrick is the best positioned candidate to stand up to the leadership of the legislature — which at the moment has produced an ossified, unresponsive, system that has given us laughable results like the CA/Tastrophe.
That’s nice. 🙂
I think it will help blunt the attacks of “too liberal,” “tax and spend,” and the one that gets me craziest, “Republicans would prefer to run against Deval Patrick.”
<
p>
If Republicans really think Deval would be the best candidate for them to run against, that’s because THEY DON’T GET IT. They don’t get the zeitgeist of this election, they don’t get the power of the grassroots, they don’t understand the importance of intangibles like speaking style and charisma in making a good leader. And they definitely don’t get how angry moderates & independents have become over the national political landscape, and how that’s likely to affect local races. If Patrick wins a week from Tuesday, all those factors will clearly be important.
<
p>
It astonishes me that some here are sneering at the passion of Patrick’s supporters. This is a primary, people! Why would you NOT want thousands of passionate supporters who will not only go out and vote themselves, but get others out to vote as well?
<
p>
Repeat after me: Deval Patrick is not Howard Dean. The candidacy of Deval Patrick will not fall to the same problems as the candidacy of Howard Dean (which is what the implication seems to be when people make snide remarks about Patrick fans). Here’s why:
<
p>
– Dean’s ’04 campaign never got that the Internet and volunteer organizers wasn’t enough, and that he also needed a strong conventional media strategy. Patrick’s does.
<
p>
– Dean didn’t seem to get that how he appeared on TV mattered (although it’s a lesson he seems to have learned well in his current DNC role). Patrick clearly does.
<
p>
– Dean didn’t have enough “big market” experience for a national campaign. The entire state of Vermont doesn’t have many more people than the city of Boston (and I don’t mean the Boston metro area, I mean within the city limits). As governor, he could rely largely on face-to-face retail politics. There’s no need to rely largely on major media in Vermont. In fact, there’s little experience dealing with major media. I believe Patrick, as a high-level appointee working in Washington as well as a corporate executive, understands the media better than Dean did two years ago.
<
p>
Massachusetts is still small enough that when you’re running a state-wide campaign over a period of months, you can also (but not exclusively) engage in retail politics and have that help you. Heck, I’m prying myself away from my keyboard tomorrow and doing some volunteer work for the Patrick campaign, and my level of support for the guy stems from seeing him in person several months ago at a small local forum. He’s a great candidate – as the Globe said, the complete package.
<
p>
I disagree. While the content of the editorial argues against these characterizations, the very fact of it helps confirm them, at least for many independents, moderates, and conservatives.
<
p>
And while I believe Deval is electable, I don’t think he is as electable as Chris Gabrieli, and the polls back this up. Speaking of sneering, some Deval supporters paint this view as some kind of cynical moral failing. It might be, if it were the only reason to support a candidate; but it’s not, it’s just an important added bonus.
<
p>
Republicans’ preference for Deval is real and justified. I half expect the Herald to endorse Deval just to make their eventual endorsement of Healey easier.
Part of the reason that he polls well right now is that he’s been flooding the airwaves and hasn’t had any significant ads against him. He’s still mostly a blank slate for a lot of voters and that’s not going to continue in the general election. (He’s not a blank slate in BMG land, but the normal voter does not really know who Gabrieli is outside of maybe seeing his name four years ago and the TV ads.)
<
p>
Whereas Patrick has weathered the biggest attacks that can be placed on him, I don’t think Gabrieli’s had to answer for subjects such as wanting to start over the universal health care process and let the working poor go without coverage for an additional amount of time, not dealing with the problems of the massive property tax increases that communities have recently had, or the ethical problems that his venture capital ventures have had.
<
p>
Even though Gabrieli’s supposed to connect more with moderates, I don’t know how well rising property taxes and uninsured workers poll with them and I don’t know how that will help differentiate him from Healey in a general election where she will obviously run as a moderate. I think there’s a real threat of a Bore/Gush 2000 election result where the voters can’t tell the difference between the two candidates and that doesn’t work in the Democrats’ favor.
<
p>
As a person with some startup business experience, I believe that venture capitalists do have an ethical duty to their investments that go beyond simply providing capital. You either take responsibility for the good and the bad involved in your investment or you should just label yourself as a disconnected investor, like many stockholders. Since Gabrieli has been advertising himself as a job-maker, he’s going to have to deal with the consequences just as Patrick has had to explain his role with the ethics of the companies that he’s worked with.
<
p>
And for Healey’s wealth, nobody’s claiming that she bought her way onto the ballot or had to use insider connections to get on the ballot. If you don’t think insider State Goverment connections won’t be an attack ad in October, you’re mistaken. It’s all about “balancing the insiders in the State House” and “taxes” and Gabrieli doesn’t have much against either except for his “if revenues go beyond x point, we will commit 40% towards the blah blah blah and this is an affordable solution that may or may not move us torwards the goal of…zzzzzzz” That’s not a good general election answer.
<
p>
Until Gabrieli adequately answers these questions, I think he’s got a target on his back that will be exploited in a general election and will lower his poll numbers. I think Patrick has been challenged regarding his tax stances and corporate issues more thoroughly in a way that will allow him to weather attack ads more solidly. I’m not saying that Gabrieli really isn’t the most practical candidate for the General Election (though as a Patrick supporter, I obviously have my bias), but I think Gabrieli still needs to prove that he can take a licking and keep on ticking before his poll numbers mean as much.
Too many distortions here:
<
p>
<
p>
Nobody has said anything about starting the process over. Chris is the only candidate who has said the employer levy for uninsureds may have to be raised for large companies, and that the Connector may have to reconsider it’s definitions of affordability and employer-sponsored plans. As a state business leader, he has the credibility to speak directly to the business community on these issues without scaring them from the table, which will be necessary if the law is to work at all.
<
p>
<
p>
Chris has proposed dedicating a portion of all revenue growth to increased local aid, and dramatically expanding the lottery-local aid stream by allowing casinos.
<
p>
<
p>
Healey says, “I’m for the rollback”; Chris says, “I’m for the rollback so much that I devised a plan to make it happen and get it through the Legislature; did you?”
<
p>
As for your claim that Chris’s investments have not been vetted, he’s been in two primary races and a general election, and it’s a week from this primary with nothing emerging yet that’s even begun to stick. Deval’s business career is every bit as vulnerable as Chris’s, if not moreso. Chris has stellar nonprofit successes to point to; Deval has a DoJ record which is dangerous ground in the general.
Anyone remember who the Globe endorsed in 2002? Wasn’t it Shannon O’Brien?
is what brought us john kerry.
<
p>
and shannon o’brien.
<
p>
and pre-powerpoint al gore.
If you haven’t noticed, the Globe’s reputation is not what it once was, just look at its sagging subscription rates. How many people will change their votes due to the Globe’s endorsement? I would hate to say “no one” because there are always one or two idiots out there, but it is clear as glass that the endorsement will count for next to nothing in the long run.
Endorsements like these are important at the end of a campaign because the truth is most people don’t pay attention to the end. To have Boston’s most reputable source identify Patrick as the real deal adds a lot of credibility to the doubt others have peddled.
at least about switching votes. What it might do, though, is (1) encourage some who weren’t going to bother to vote at all to instead show up and vote for DP; or (2) push undecideds towards DP. You never know. Anyway, it can’t hurt.
I don’t think editorial endorsements are nearly as important as the once were. But, given a choice, would you rather your candidate get the Globe’s endorsement, or not?
Have never been as important as they used to be, I’d submit. But they help. And especially when the candidate is relatively new, like Patrick.
Does a primary voter have the same likelihood of reading a daily newspaper as the general public? I’d guess probably a bit more.
<
p>
Is it possible that if you add regular readers of boston.com to the Globe’s circulation rate, their overall reach would be up a smidgeon and not down, or at the very least flat? (Hint: the Boston.com home page alone gets 290,000 unique visitors each day. The Boston Globe home page online gets 4.2 million page views a month. That’s according to their Web site, I just looked up the numbers. Is a unique visitor to the home page as dedicated a reader as a paid subscriber? Probably not. Are all those visitors reading the Globe endorsement? Definitely not. But do 172 million boston.com page views a month make up for losing 40,000 paper subscribers? Um, maybe.)
<
p>
As another poster here said, I don’t believe the issue is whether the endorsement will change large numbers of votes. I think the question is whether it’s an important piece of information for people who want to vote in the primary but are still undecided. It also can have an effect in helping some of Patrick’s softer support not peel off in the wake of negative attacks.
<
p>
Do you solely have disdain for people who might change their votes (or help make up their mind) based on something they read in the Globe? Or are you equally dismissive of people who change their minds, or are influenced by, seeing a 30-second TV ad? In your eyes, are people who have decided to back Gabrieli after seeing lots of Gabrieli TV ads that Gabrieli himself paid for more idiotic, less idiotic, or equally idiotic as someone who is partially swayed by what Globe editors have concluded?
<
p>
For that matter, why do people carry signs on Election Day? Do you think someone would be more idiotic, less idiotic, or equally idiotic for changing their vote based on seeing someone holding a sign, as they’d be for reading a lengthy analysis in a newspaper in favor of one particular candidate? If nobody changes their actions based on sign-holders, would you advise the candidates you back not to do any sign holding on primary day?
Several people we visited said that they read the article and of those had either changed from undecided to leaning Patrick or from another candidate to undecided based on this article. They volunteered that information I did not point it out. At least from the area I was working in it made some difference.
got the backing of mainstream media outlets.
Not to say that all Deval fans are delusional. Just that a lot are.
They’re endorsing Tom Reilly.
in the water. Likely all those toxins from Camp Edwards.
in the water. Like wind turbines.
may have even been stronger than BMGs – and I thought yours was pretty strong.
<
p>
I know most endorsements don’t matter, but the very fact that such an establishment paper gets it and would be so strong I think is meaningful. People really could be swayed, especially based on their reasoning.
<
p>
We’ll see what it means in a week, but I’m inclined to think it will make a very meaningful difference.
I understand that Gab’s wife will be endorsing him. I never saw that one coming either.