http://www.telegram.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051002/NEWS/510020620&SearchID=73222453283406Oct 2, 2005
Gov. candidate Patrick going against the grain
By John J. Monahan TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
jmonahan@telegram.com
As personal endorsements go, the one former President Bill Clinton gave Deval Patrick 11 years ago when introducing him as the chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division was about as potent as they come. “He’s been chosen because he has distinguished himself as a lawyer whose wise counsel, keen negotiating skills and mastery at litigation are held in the highest esteem. He’s fought successfully against discrimination his entire life, both professionally and personally. He understands the law is a tool to help real people with real problems,” Mr. Clinton said.
Two years later, the president’s confidence in him was being tested in the heat of one of the biggest federal investigations of the decade. More than 200 churches had been burned, most of them in black congregations in the South, threatening to resurrect old racial tensions and undermine decades of positive change. Mr. Patrick maintained the country had made “extraordinary progress” during his lifetime, but that beyond the intensive criminal investigations and prosecutions, leadership and open discussions about the problems were needed to prevent backsliding among a new generation of youth implicated in many of the church burnings. “We are not going to become the country we have dedicated ourselves to become unless we bear down and express in tangible ways and symbolic ways our determination to go the rest of the distance,” he told the Washington press corps.
When pressed about what it said to him that growing numbers of young people were responsible for the fires, his answer was brief and to the point: “That adults have to work harder.” Upon leaving the post that had him overseeing 250 lawyers in the division and responsible for fighting discrimination in housing, lending and jobs, as well as defending the rights of the disabled and aged, he entered the world of corporate law, working for Texaco and Coca-Cola. He also entered the political world, chairing Democrat Scott Harshbarger’s campaign for governor in 1998. At the end of last year he decided to stop commuting from his home in Milton to Atlanta and traveling around the world for Coca-Cola. He made the decision to run for governor of Massachusetts. The candidate, 49, says he likes to play squash, garden and read. His real joy, he added, is his family — his wife, Dianne, and two daughters, ages, 19 and 16, who he says are growing up quickly. He said they have “a kindness about them” that he cherishes.
He said he understands that some view his challenge to Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly for the Democratic nomination as “cutting the line” because Mr. Reilly has toiled for years in the state’s party ranks, winning two statewide elections and weathering two terms as attorney general as he approached a chance to seek the corner office. “The hardest part is dealing with a political establishment who say to me things like ‘your politics are my politics. You are the better candidate. You would be the better governor, but are you electable?’ ” Mr. Patrick said of what some see as an insurgent candidacy. “There’s a part of me that wants to say, ‘You know, you are the reason Democrats keep losing,’ ” he said during a lengthy interview at his Charlestown campaign headquarters. “What worries me is while Democrats have perfected the conversation that we have mostly with each other about how to get elected, everyone else wants to know why we should elect a Democrat. What difference does it make?” Mr. Patrick asked. “If you are out there trying to turn yourself into this abstraction about what you think somebody else wants, I think it is why the electorate has become impatient with Democrats, who don’t seem to be able to make up their mind what they stand for. … We have to find our voice again, not a spokesperson. …We have to be the ones with the ideas,” he said.
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