OPINION
Find more at www.enterprisenews.com
The Enterprise, THURSDAY, March 26, 2009
7
A GateHouse Media Company newspaper
CHAZY DOWALIBY
Editor
STEPHEN C. DAMISH
Managing Editor
MARILYN HANCOCK
City Editor
GARY FINKELSTEIN
Opinion Page Editor
RICHARD DANIELS
Publisher
OUR VIEW
“
For a very long time now we have been told that government is bad, that it exists only to serve the powerful and well-connected, that its job is not
important enough to be done by anyone competent, let alone committed, and that all of us are on our own. Today we join together in common cause to
lay that fallacy to rest, and to extend a great movement based on shared responsibility from the corner office to the corner of your block and back again.
”
DEVAL LAURDINE PATRICK
upon being sworn in as 71st governor of Massachusetts
Patrick must
playing
it straight
Governor,
stopstart
playing
us for
suckers
G
ov. Deval Patrick has lost sight of
the very message of voter
empowerment that swept him into
office 26 months ago and needs to
get back on track.
His recent actions have so damaged his
standing that even legitimate reform efforts look
like sleights of hand timed
to distract us from a serial
insensitivity to the
principles of those who
elected him.
We deserve better.
How do
do you
you feel
feel about
about
How
The state faces a $1.1
theperformance?
governor’s
his
billion budget deficit this
performance?
year and $3.5 billion in
WRITE:
Your Views,
anticipated spending cuts
The
Enterprise,
WRITE:
Your Views,
1324
Belmont
St., Unit 102,
The Patriot
Ledger,
to start the next fiscal
Brockton,
02301.
400 CrownMA
Colony
Drive,
year. The governor says
Quincy,
MA 02169
FAX:
508-427-4027
the situation is so dire
CALL: 781-340-3156
we need to pay more
E-MAIL:
E-MAIL: [email protected]
[email protected]
taxes and expect less in
services.
Pleaseinclude
includeyour
yourhome
home
Please
addressand
andphone
phonenumber
number
address
It is hard enough that
this message comes amid
record unemployment and foreclosure rates. It’s
harder still when it comes amid news the
governor is using taxpayers’ money to line the
pockets of friends and supporters.
Raises and do-nothing jobs may be a common
YOUR
VIEWS
O’MAHONEY ILLUSTRATION
way of doing business on
Beacon Hill but they’re
toxic assets in our book.
And they should be
toxic in the governor’s
book as well.
After all, he promised
not to play these games.
Patrick says he is focused on long-term
solutions and dismisses complaints about his
recent spending as “trivial”.
That’s wrong.
The governor’s approval rating has gone from
63 percent when he took office to a record low of
28 percent. His recent actions are mistakes that
threaten to rob him of the political capital he
needs to affect change. For as much as we want a
solid manager to guide us through this crisis, we
need an inspired leader as well.
And there’s nothing inspirational about feeling
like your pocket has been picked when you don’t
have a dime to spare.
The governor campaigned on hope and
inspiration and vowed to resist the trappings of
power that create walls between officials and
those they govern. That bubble popped less than a
month after he took office when he created a
$72,000-a-year job for the co-chairman of his
election campaign.
Early indications that he was out of touch with
voters who supported his grassroots campaign
might have been dismissed as the mistakes of a
neophyte settling into his first elected office. But
this pattern of tone-deaf politics is like a recurring
rash and it needs immediate
attention.
Whether it’s his own
inability to recognize why
it’s wrong or a problem with
those advising him, change
must come.
We cannot afford for the
governor to fail at our greatest
hour of need.
“We didn’t build up this grassroots just to win
an election,” Patrick said on Election Night in
2006. “We built up the grassroots to govern in a
whole new way, to make change real, and lasting,
and meaningful.”
It is imperative that he acknowledge the
damage his recent actions have done to that ideal
and commit to changes in both attitude and
conduct that shows he not only knows what it
means to be a governor but also what is required
to be a leader.
ADD YOUR VOICE
If you feel the governor has lost sight of his principles, let him know. You can find a link to his Web site at www.enterprisenews.com/opinions.
You can also reach him by mail. Write to: Massachusetts State House, Office of the Governor, Room 360, Boston 02133
DEVAL PATRICK AND THE DAMAGE DONE
Deval Patrick was elected governor 28 months ago with a campaign
theme of “Together we can.” Unfortunately, that has often come to mean
“together we can squander opportunities to improve life for the average
working family in the commonwealth.” The actions below chart the
most egregious examples of where actions betray words.
Stumble from the start
He traded in the governor’s customary Crown Victoria for a much
more expensive Cadillac DTS (at
nearly $1,200 per month for the lease),
earning him the nickname of “Cadillac Deval,” a sobriquet that was reinforced by his decision to give the gov-
ernor’s office a $27,000 makeover
that included $12,000 damask
drapes.
At about the same time, he created
the new position of chief of staff for
his wife, Diane, hiring Amy Gorin for
the $72,000-per-year job. Gorin quit
soon after, and a WBZ-TV poll
showed a 20-point decline in Patrick’s
favorability rating, a precipitous drop
from which he has never recovered.
Bad call
Six weeks into office, Patrick, who
served two years as a $360,000-a-year
director for the controversial holding
company of Ameriquest Mortgage,
called former U.S. Treasury Secretary
Robert E. Rubin, a top executive at
Citigroup, to vouch for Ameriquest,
prompting calls for an ethics investigation.
Wrong message
Patrick chose real estate developer
Jeffrey A. Simon (at an annual salary
of $150,000) to oversee the distribution of billions of dollars in federal
stimulus money. While Simon had extensive business experience, he also
was one of the poster boys for pension
reform since he had been collecting a
controversial enhanced state pension
($400,000 over 13 years) because he
claimed to have been “f ired” from his
last state job as redeveloper of Fort
Devens.
Another bad pick for government
service was new Transportation Secretary James A. Aloisi Jr., a controversial insider who worked on the Big
Dig. Aloisi was the type of person
Patrick promised would have no place
in his administration. Perhaps not surprisingly, it also turned out that
Aloisi’s sister has a no-work job in the
House of Representatives that pays
$60,000 a year.
What budget deficit?
Despite a monumental budget
deficit,
Patrick
recommended
$26,000 raises for sheriffs in two lowcrime areas. At a time when every
state penny is precious, Patrick wants
to open the coffers for Nantucket
Sheriff Richard Bretschneider and
Dukes Sheriff Michael McCormack
as a matter of “fairness’ to bring their
salaries in line with the other county
sheriffs — even though these two have
far less work.
But the last straw in Patrick’s “disconnect” from reality was giving a
$175,000 job to a political supporter,
state Sen. Marian Walsh — precisely
the type of featherbedding Patrick
promised he would never make. The job
had been vacant for 12 years. The resulting firestorm, which Patrick dismissed as “trivial,” finally caused
Walsh this week to ask for a reduction in
the annual salary to $120,000 — proving that neither she nor Patrick understand why people are so angry at their
political “leaders.”