Deval Patrick elected governor of Massachusetts
Massachusetts Democrat gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick has, as expected, won a landslide victory.
The soon to be governor ends a 16-year run of increasingly conservative but decreasingly effective Republican governors. He becomes the first African-American governor of Massachusetts.
I’m not surprised that he won, especially considering the opponents, but what I absolutely cannot fathom is the enthusiasm that surrounds him. His speeches sound like a compilation of Oprah Winfrey shows. His wife, a lawyer like him, is ideally positioned to take full advantage of Massachusetts’s corrupt ways. His professional accomplishments are better suited for an annual family newsletter than a gubernatorial candidacy.
Yet, I don’t think he’ll be nearly as bad Howie Carr and other right-wing opinionators think. For one thing, you have to be really bad to be as bad Michael Dukakis. For another, it seems to me that the legislature is the branch that in effect runs the state, and it that remains true, we already know how bad things are. Maybe it will change with a Democratic governor. We’ll see.
One thing I never expected to see is Massachusetts move to the left of my native Sweden, but now it has, with soon-to-be-Governor Patrick’s victory here and the center-right coalition’s victory in Sweden two months ago. Kind of weird, but I didn’t leave the Old Country for political reasons so it doesn’t particularly bother me.
The race for governor was so lopsided the Boston Globe called it for Patrick before a single vote had been reported:
