Hope is not a strategy
The Great Beacon Hill Foodfight has now reached the Big Apple’s fishwrap paper of record. Big news in the New York Times is that Governor Patrick has lost steam, and that this may portend what an Obama presidency would be like. Discussing his loss on resort casinos, the Governor noted in an interview:
“I don’t accept that we can’t get anything done because we lose one issue. Come on. People around here act like the only thing that happened last year was picking these drapes and buying a car. There’s a whole lot more.”
Mr. Patrick noted the incresae in state spending on education (ho-hum), housing (did I miss something?) and 300,000 residents with health insurance under the health care reform act (done by his predecessor — yes, you should applaud and blame him for much of that). He did forget to mention some pension reform. Still, kind of small beans, no?
What is amazing to the outside observer is that the Governor has completely forgotten the “Together” in his campaign mantra “Together We Can.” Is it really smart to take out the baton on the Speaker for not moving his agenda, when moving the agenda depends on the Speaker? Odd, naive, self-inflated and -inflating political strategy. Again, from the Times:
“Even the speaker doesn’t want to be in the position of saying no to everything the governor brings forward,” Mr. Patrick said. “Even he appreciates that there are consequences to his members that come from that.”
Oh, yeah, and just plain dumb.
Curious tie-in to the umpteenth Globe hand-wringer on the fate of the Dem presidential hopefuls as they try to grapple between the politics of hope and the presumption of dynasty, this time from the pen of Brian Mooney. As the politics of hope take a back seat to a sense of despair on Beacon Hill, at the national level Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee is pushing for a strategy to settle the superdelegate count well in advance of the August party convention. He notes that he cannot accept the “strategy” of many other Dem party elders, who are simply hoping that things will go well. I found his dictum that “Hope is not a strategy” compelling — and not just regarding the Democratic primaries…