From the book Listen Liberal by Thomas Frank:
Patrick’s oft-told life story follows the classic Democratic trajectory. A young man with loads of intelligence but no money, Patrick was lifted from nowheresville by an academic scholarship to a fancy prep school. A few years after that, he got into Harvard and, in exactly the manner of the Clinton and Obama stories, the doors to a previously unknown world swung open for him. He climbed effortlessly through the meritocracy.
Law school was also Harvard and, after working for the NAACP for a number of years, Patrick went to Washington and ran the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, an important job. In 1994, he won a $54 million settlement in a memorable discrimination suit against Denny’s restaurants—among other things, the chain had once refused service to black members of the president’s Secret Service unit—and shortly afterward Patrick took up a case that had to do with the subprime real estate lender Long Beach Mortgage. The charge this time was discriminatory lending; eventually Patrick settled this case, too, although for a less impressive sum. In the Aughts, Deval Patrick became a corporate lawyer, and before long he took the customary next step for Democrats of a certain kind: he went to work for the very corporate outfit he had once sued, taking a seat in 2004 on the board of the parent company of the subprime lender that was now calling itself Ameriquest.
Yes: Ameriquest. In 2004, the company was the country’s largest subprime lender and, we now know, a pioneer in the kinds of practices that, after being adopted by many others, came close to destroying the world’s financial system. For Ameriquest insiders, packaging up “stated-income” loans and sending them down the Wall Street pipeline was a highly profitable business—an “innovative” business, even; for everyone else on the planet, it was like chugging arsenic. Bankers profited and the world paid—the world is still paying. Any politician associated with this sleazy outfit should have had his career terminated immediately and unconditionally.
Patrick dodged that particular bullet, however. He was elected governor of Massachusetts in November of 2006, the year before the first tremors of the coming economic earthquake would be felt. The controversies arising from his service on Ameriquest’s board were easily contained.
As governor, Patrick became a kind of missionary for the innovation cult. “The Massachusetts economy is an innovation economy,” he liked to declare, and he made similar comments countless times, slightly varying the order of the optimistic keywords: “Innovation is a centerpiece of the Massachusetts economy,” et cetera. The governor opened “innovation schools,” a species of ramped-up charter school. He signed the “Social Innovation Compact,” which had something to do with meeting “the private sector’s need for skilled entry-level professional talent.” In a 2009 speech called “The Innovation Economy,” Patrick elaborated the political theory of innovation in greater detail, telling an audience of corporate types in Silicon Valley about Massachusetts’s “high concentration of brainpower” and “world-class” universities, and how “we in government are actively partnering with the private sector and the universities, to strengthen our innovation industries.”
What did all of this inno-talk mean? Much of the time, it was pure applesauce—standard-issue platitudes to be rolled out every time some pharmaceutical company opened an office building somewhere in the state. On other occasions, Patrick’s favorite buzzword came with a gigantic price tag, like the billion dollars in subsidies and tax breaks that the governor authorized in 2008 to encourage pharmaceutical and biotech companies to do business in Massachusetts. Lesser achievements included the million dollars Patrick spent “to provide assistance, mentoring and advice to startups and innovation companies” and the other million-and-a-half spent to support startups at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.
On still other occasions, favoring inno has meant bulldozing the people in its path—for instance, the taxi drivers whose livelihoods are being usurped by ridesharing apps like Uber. When these workers staged a variety of protests in the Boston area, Patrick intervened decisively on the side of the distant software company; apparently convenience for the people who ride in taxis was more important than good pay for people who drive those taxis. It probably didn’t hurt that Uber had hired a former Patrick aide as a lobbyist, but the real point was, of course, innovation: Uber was the future, the taxi drivers were the past, and the path for Massachusetts was obvious. No surprise, then, that the first recipient of the Deval Patrick Commonwealth Innovation Award was none other than Deval Patrick.
The prize was bestowed on him in 2014 by MassChallenge’s Harthorne, joined by the CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, who showed up in order to add some entrepreneurial gravitas to the moment. “I wanted to be here to thank the governor for his leadership, his vision around innovation, around technology, and creating that innovative spirit here in Massachusetts,” Kalanick said on that solemn occasion. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, was also on hand to salute Massachusetts for an “explosion of startups.” “We need more entrepreneurs because they create jobs, they solve every known problem,” he intoned. That was a bold claim to make for any social cohort, but John Harthorne went even further: “MassChallenge is an attempt to remind us and refocus as a community and a society on creating value,” he declared. “We designed it to help entrepreneurs win because entrepreneurs are the value creators of society.”
This was not a political event, strictly speaking, but that last comment was most definitely a political statement, as blunt a justification of class hierarchy as anything I’ve heard this side of the Tea Party movement. Three months after the prize ceremony, the Democrat Deval Patrick’s second term as governor came to an end. A short while later, he won an even bigger prize: a job as a managing director of Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Mitt Romney—and that had been so powerfully denounced by Democrats during the 2012 election. Patrick spoke about the job like it was just another startup: “It was a happy and timely coincidence I was interested in building a business that Bain was also interested in building,” he told the Wall Street Journal. Romney reportedly phoned him with congratulations.
Know who you are fukkin' with.
I wouldn’t know. I’m not a republican.