[Cross-posted at Truth & Progress] Candidate Deval Patrick surveyed a sea of grey and black suits at 9.00 this morning at a command center for the New York establishment: the Cambridge Room of the Harvard Club. He began with humility.
“I thought the polls in Massachusetts were good news until I sat down to breakfast with Eliot Spitzer and he told me about his 50-point lead,” he said.
The room exploded with laughter and applause. It was smooth sailing from there. Spitzer, who preceded Patrick to the podium, nodded with approval, laughed, and punctuated Patrick’s points with vigorous applause. If there had been a pitcher of Kool Aid at the speaker’s table, he would have guzzled it.
First, Patrick described his campaign. Massachusetts politics, he said in perhaps the understatement of the year, is close-knit — and he was an outsider. Therefore, he said, “We went to work on the ground building a grass-roots organization. Every single precinct: we laid claim to it.” The approach, he said, has born fruit. “Since the primary, all kinds of people who never returned my phone calls call me back. But it’s when the cleaning staff tell you they will vote for you that it is really exciting,” he said. (Indeed, the doorman at the Harvard Club, normally the essence of professional reserve, wrung the hand of your devoted New York City correspondent on my way out, and told me he was sorry he didn’t live in Massachusetts, because he wanted to vote for Patrick).
Second, Patrick spoke about his high-risk decision to stay positive in the face of Healey’s desperate, scurrilous attacks on his family, the children of his campaign staff, and anyone else, so far as I can tell, that she can think of. “Folks have thrown everything at us except the kitchen sink — and I am expecting the kitchen sink any day now,” he said. “The Republican Governor’s Association made the largest media buy they have ever made in the whole country here in Massachusetts,” he added.
Blogger who overslept a bit, and hard-working Patrick staffers who did not. L to R: Bob Neer of BMG, Lonsdale Koester (4 hours sleep), Randi Wiggins (3 hours 45 minutes sleep), Doug Chavez (4 hours sleep), Raquelle Ngirkuteling (up at 5 AM).
Nonetheless, Patrick said, “I refused to break faith with the people to whom we had promised a different kind of campaign: one premised on building up instead of tearing down. We hit back, but we did it factually, pointedly, and with dignity. At least in Massachusetts, people don’t want to be governed by fear.”
Finally, the the candidate emphasized the importance of a constructive vision in his overall campaign approach, stressed the responsibility we all have to work for progressive change, and intimated that if he wins in 11 days, he may stay for a while.
“People are looking for something more than just a critique of what’s wrong with the people in power. They want a vision, and practical details, of what we can become,” he said.
“If people don’t take a daily responsibility for their own civic future, then others will make the decisions for them,” he added.
His program, he said, echoing JFK, “Might not be something we can deliver in the first 100 days. Maybe not even in our first term or two,” but it is something we have to start.
Many thanks to Lori Ehrlich of the blog Truth & Progress for alterting me to this event and cross-posting her write-up of it here (not to mention beating me to the punch with her fine work by about four hours). I have cross-posted right back at her. I also stole one of her pictures for the QuickTime slideshow above. Forza blogosphere!
