Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Comments

  1. But in those days, my kid could barely walk and took two naps a day.  I could set the little guy down in the living room with a few toys and read the papers critically and write a blog post about it.

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    p>Now, he’s two and a half, and he won’t shut up, and he won’t slow down.  

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    p>I’ll see if I can post a response to Mr. Phillips some time tomorrow.

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    p>After I take the kid to the Museum of Science.

  2. “Decidely mixed” is an odd headline considering that the text of the article says that Mr. Patrick succeeded in defeating the vote on gay marriage and failed at all else.  

        • So the expected headline would have been “Patrick didn’t hire illegal aliens like Romney did”.

      • A lousy football team with a 1 and 14 season is lousy, not “decidedly mixed”.  Expectations are irrelevant.

        • There’s more than just the defeat of the anti-gay amendment.

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          p>Moving Tocco out of the chairmanship of the Umass Board of Trustees is substantial victory for the Democratic view of public universities.  Most of our students go to public universities, and Tocco wanted to downgrade every campus except for Amherst, letting them wither.  Taking the agenda away from Tocco means that the government will be better able to improve education for the students who go to UMass Boston, UMass Lowell, etc.  

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          p>Better public education for more people will give us more people who can make greater contributions to our state and its economy over the coming decades.

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          p>I don’t think the article mentioned the Cape Wind project, but the Governor has made strides on that, and on other issues related to reduced our state’s carbon footprint.

  3. a double loss for people endorsing the left.  They did not impeach after retaking Congress and Deval started off with a five day extravaganza ball and was just outsourcing high tech bio jobs to China.

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    p>No I’m not impressed at all.

  4. so I suspect this wasn’t his intention, but I thought the effect of the article was actually to raise the heat on the legislature.  The box with the story outlined the long list of initiatives proposed by the Governor, and most of them are noted to be stalled by the lege.  The impression is that the Governor and his office are doing their jobs, but the lege isn’t holding up its end.

  5. The main thread of the article seems to be “Deval has lots of ideas that aren’t being implemented,” without commenting on the quality of said ideas.  Deval also gets credit for being governor during the SSM amendment debate, when he basically came to the press conferences and let Sal and Terry do most of the work.  Then some inside-baseball stuff about fundraising and staffing, and the nonsense about the Cadillac and drapes.

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    p>I’d imagine any evaluation of Deval would actually mention why his vetoes are overriden at a Romney-eque pace, and the fact that his casino push is overshadowing anything else he’s doing.  I think it was nice of Frank not to look too closely at these facets.

  6. the article was a yawn.  Diane did not have to be mentioned in the context of the article.  It was what I anticipate from journalists today — nothing new, nothing illuminating, no depth, no value.

  7. I hate to use a bad analogy but we are 100 meters into a 400 meter race. Gov Patrick spoke of meaningful long term goals which will take time to implement. He started by presenting a budget without a structural deficit and no one time funding gimmicks.  He hasn’t wavered (that I can see) from any of his goals and his term will be best judged near it’s conclusion.

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    p>That being said I do think it is appropriate to review this past year but it should be done in the context of that 400 meter race…

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    p>  

      • That’s a race I’ve had some experience with and it is rare for a complete come-from-behind victory, it’s a sprint even though it feels like a distance race and one cannot afford to be left too far behind.  Incredible come-from-behind finishes happen rarely in life with a few notable and heroic exceptions like Seabiscuit or Steve Prefontaine, but politicians?  Not likely.

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        p>It was not so much the running in the wrong direction but the fits and starts and criss-crossing with long erratic pauses that have made year 1 of this Administration one of my greatest disappointments.  Maybe a review of Prefontaine’s speech (link above) could provide some illumination to the Governor and his advisors?  Prefontaine wrote that being, “consistant” was the key component to success.  Spelling error aside, he was right.

        • I see the fiscal conditions of town and cities due to health insurance, energy, retirement, pension and failing infrastructure more like runaway rabid rabbits with no turtle with wisdom and chutzpah in the corner office plodding along to bring about substantive, sustainable change.

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          p>The advent of the casino issue has been a golden invitation to lobbyists and corporations to take another bite of society and lessen government for/by the people.  The industry offers no educational, social, technological or progressive future.  It offers entertainment, some jobs, environmental and social problems and most ominously, dependence by our government on the meager revenues.  It offers enormous profits to the corporate owners (how many are MA or US citizens paying taxes here?) and destruction of communities and families.

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          p>Let’s face it, due to his own actions the Governor is seriously hamstrung.

  8. Left unmentioned is that Patrick was the first governor since 1990 to have one party controlling both the executive and legislative branches.  One could understand a Romney or Weld having a tough hoe of it their first year with any proposals facing tough sledding in the legislature, but the expectations were that Patrick, with any sense of political skill, should have been far more productive this first year if he could have learned to play nice with the House and Senate.

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    p>Think the 400 meter analogy is not appropriate at all to the dynamics of a 4-year term, given midterm elections et al.  Year One of an administration should be the busiest; I’d say Patrick flubbed this year, to put it charitably.

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    p>Methinks DP won’t be finishing out his term, although his stumping for Obama may kill whatever chances he would have in a potential Clinton administration (those folks have long, nasty memories).

  9. Patrick’s had some victories but many important proposal of his are not moving fast through the legislature.

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    p>These paragraphs stood out to me, though:

    Patrick and his staff express confidence now about their prospects in 2008, contrasting with the first few months of his term – which were marked by negative news stories that snuffed any honeymoon period he could have hoped for.

    He generated headlines for upgrading his official car to a Cadillac, refurbishing his State House office with expensive furnishings, and placing a call to a national banking institution on behalf of a controversial subprime lender that he once was closely connected to.     At the same time, his wife, Diane, struggled with depression. He refers to that period as “the darkest of days.”

    (Emphasis mine)

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    p>The choice of words “He generated headlines” is one of the ways the media pretends it has no conscious choice about what it emphasizes.
    The Globe, the Herald, the network affiliates all select what they report.  Often times, they forget to tell their audience where information comes from, information that would help people put the matter in context and understand it better.   During the 2006 campaign, the Globe and Herald were given oppo information about Patrick, a story that could have likely changed the dynamic of the campaign.  The Globe started opening up about where it got this info, after some Globe readers pushed for more info.  And in the primary, the Globe ran some news articles from the Killer Coke guy, but it took Joan Vennocchi’s column to explain why that info was showing up in the paper.  In these two situations, news consumers would have been served to know how their news showed up in the newsrooms–but that “how?” question got answered only after pressure from non-journalists like BMGers and an opinion columnist.

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    p>For this Frank Phillips’ article, it doesn’t look like he’s recycling any oppo mailed to him anonymously.  But when Phillips puts this info:

    At times prickly and thin-skinned, Patrick can bristle at the media when it is aggressive and he expresses frustration when confronting an unwieldy political system that he can’t control. Shortly after his election, he lectured a gathering of newspaper publishers that the media’s cynicism blinded it to the significance of his election.

    later in the story after the mention of the trivial Cadillac/drapes headlines, Frank Phillips helps to hide the implication that when Governor-elect Patrick told the media “you’re too cynical,” some editors, publishers, and reporters might have had their egos bruised, and emphasized trivial negative headlines as a way to get back at him.  Not because those headlines really were news.

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