11.22

Profiles from the Democratic Primary:

Deval Patrick

Deval Patrick was long considered to have a serious chance to be the first black president, long before Barack Obama had emerged onto the national scene.

Their life stories contain some fascinating parallels: Patrick grew up on the South Side of Chicago, rising from poverty on his way to Harvard, a governorship, and eventually the boardroom of a major private investment firm.

He’s a formidable political talent, a figure flush with the valuable currency of authenticity.

What remains to be seen from his campaign coterie is what path they envision to the nomination. With Senators Harris and Booker already vying for support from the Black community, it's not entirely clear how Patrick will distinguish himself in already crowded Democratic field.

Patrick succeeded Mitt Romney as governor of Massachusetts and implemented many parts of Romney’s healthcare agenda (which Romney was forced to disown during the 2012 election). Ironically, Patrick has continued on to Bain Capital, a specializer in leveraged buyouts that Obama’s campaign was able to brilliantly exploit on their way to decisive victory in 2012. Patrick’s ties to the healthcare, pharmaceutical, and financial worlds are already raising eyebrows. But Patrick’s role at Bain was one of ‘Social Impact’ investing, a pivot to an emphasis on a so-called ‘double bottom line’ that reaches to provide a profit without denigrating the environment or cutting corners on workers’ rights. It seems to coincide nicely with the Business Roundtable’s pronouncement earlier this year that corporations need to consider a broader responsibility to our society, not just to their shareholders.

As the campaign progresses, we’ll have to see how adroitly Patrick can manage to straddle the dissonance here, as he attempts to straddle the broader distance between the Bernie/Warren and Biden/Buttigieg divide.

Ya-ke

November 22nd, 2019