It’s no secret that I’m still a pretty big supporter of Governor Deval Patrick. For one, most of the things cited by dissatisfied voters, even to this day, are the stupidest, trivial things that when looked at factually, actually aren’t scandals. I speak of the silly drapes/Caddy malarkey. More about how silly those are a at a later date. But as someone who follows policy making pretty carefully, I have to say, there is a great deal which has been accomplished with Patrick, far more than people realize.
A lot of this has been on the boring issue of actually governing. For instance, putting people in charge of departments who care about delivering the services of said department - like, the DEP has people in it now that want to protect the environment. And so on. But the other leg of governing policy is about reforming the system which creates such cynics in our voters every time they open the newspaper.
We need a lot of reform in MA. You can blame the all-Democrat legislature if you want, and they bear a large share of the blame, but we can also look at past Republican governors - many of whom were perfectly fine with allowing friends to feather their own nests in our current system. The legislature also, for better or worse, took a lot of power away from the executive in those years, creating a whole cadre of quasi-independent agencies and places where old pols and their friends go to pad their pensions.
This past year, Governor Patrick has had a harder time getting this session’s legislature on board with his agenda, what with the removal (for good reasons) of Speaker DiMasi, who was at least in large part a partner on many issues, and the electing of DeLeo as Speaker. Patrick took on three areas of reform last spring, and when it was evident that the legislature was dragging its feet or watering the changes down too far, Patrick dug in his heels on multiple occasions. While the resultant pension, transportation, and ethics reform were not perfect, they were much stronger than we had expected, given the legislature’s poor record of policing itself (and not wanting to give power back to the executive).
Oh, we got the usual squeaking from the lege about how the Governor was being unfair and not working with them, yadda yadda, but the Gov played hardball. (How I wish President Obama would take a page out of that book!) And the Commonwealth benefited.
The Governor is now looking to take on another nest of vipers, the Probation department.
Governor Deval Patrick, in his new budget this week, will seek to wrest control of one of the fastest-growing but most secretive state agencies, taking direct charge of the probation officers who supervise criminals when they serve their sentences outside a prison cell.
Patrick’s proposal would largely remove the Probation Department from the court system, where, critics say, it has become a backwater of patronage jobs and bloated budgets, operating mostly independent of other public safety agencies.
See a BMGer’s take here. Outraged Lib also talks about it here. (All links via BMG.)
I honestly don’t know much personally about the Probation Department and its foibles. But if we can save money, be more efficient, and cut out a lot of the patronage crap, I’m all for it. You could argue that Patrick is doing this because it’s an election year, but I don’t think that tells the whole story. This Gov has consistently tried, with a good deal of success, to reform the system during his tenure. All this while dealing with downward spiraling revenues of this recession, delivering pretty responsible budgets, saving our quasi-indies from their own bad debt situations, managing to keep Chapter 70 and local aid uncut, and promising to preserve said local funding next year.
Anyone who remembers the disaster Mitt Romney was after the smaller, shorter recession in 2002 should be able to appreciate what not cutting the school money means to our local communities.
This Governor, with the help of the previously friendly legislature, put green jobs, and other high-skill industries like biotech, on the front burner when we were in good times. He began the Growth Districts initiative, which has obvious impacts right here in Lowell. Not only is he reform-minded, governing well in terms of delivering services, and balancing our precarious budget, but he has also put a long term vision in place to see us through past the recession and into better days. It’s all the little things that add up - such as his proactive work on creating a priority list of physical infrastructure replacement and repair needs, which made Mass a shoe-in for a lot of that stimulus money.
There are a lot of reasons that we’d be a lot worse off with a different Governor, and very little proof that either of the Republicans running to replace Patrick in 2010 would do any better. They won’t work any better than Patrick with the sometimes-reticent legislature; Patrick has proven he can both work with them, and, when necessary, push them hard. The Republican Governors in this state have been irresponsible, delayed important decisions to the future (such as rebuilding bridges), and in many ways, worsened the patronage problem. Certainly, a couple decades of these Republicans didn’t fix the corruption problem; we only saw it get worse under them. Some of them had a foot halfway out the door before their first term was up.
Thanks, but I’ll stick to what works, to give this Governor a second term to continue to fix the problems we have, to ensure a fair and even budget, to reduce corruption and to continue some of his innovative ideas on how to make government work better. My worry in this 2010 election is that not enough people know the great work and impressive headway this Governor has made in his first term. Has he made mistakes? Who doesn’t? Certainly, anyone who reads this blog knows how I feel about legalizing casinos. They could have been out in front of stories on several occasions when the media decided to make hay in order to sell papers, creating some sort of perception of Patrick as an elitist who is just like the rest of ‘em, when in honest reality, that is completely false.
You might think I’m some doe-eyed supporter who overlooks all the flaws because it’s more comfortable, but that just means you don’t know me very well. I really, honestly, in my heart of hearts can still support Governor Patrick for reelection, because I like what I’ve seen for three years, and I want to see more. So count me in for 2010.
