A Goldilocks Candidate?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/15/opinion/deval-patrick-2020.html

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It’s been a rough couple of weeks for the confidence of Democratic voters. Joe Biden continues to look unsteady on the campaign trail. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren look much better, but they also haven’t shown much interest in appealing to voters beyond their base, which has left a substantial number of Democrats anxious about their ability to beat President Trump next year.

This anxiety has lured Deval Patrick — the two-term former Massachusetts governor and longtime friend of Barack Obama — to enter the race. Patrick is getting a very late start and acknowledged he is a long shot. But he does have a plausible path, as I lay out on the new episode of “The Argument” podcast.

He has the classic advantages of a governor, who can speak in broad terms, rather than the minutiae that senators often fall into. (Sanders and Warren, to their credit, are also good at speaking thematically.) Patrick is casting himself as a sunny progressive who wants to work with others, which is an image that appeals to a large number of Democratic voters.

One of his big challenges — in addition to various criticisms of his record — is speaking to the frustration that so many Americans feel. Obama portrayed himself as a sunny progressive as well, but he also ran as an anti-establishment candidate willing to take on corporate excess. His success depended on having opposed the Iraq War, unlike his rivals.

[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]

Adam Jentleson, a former aide to Senator Harry Reid, argued yesterday that Patrick’s (and Pete Buttigieg’s) “recasting of candidate Obama as a Third Way, unity candidate is revisionist history.” Obama, Jentleson added, “ran as an outsider attacking a broken and corrupt system.” If you want to refresh your memory, the progressive activist Waleed Shahid posted a two-minute clip of Obama giving a good populist riff in Pennsylvania in 2008.

There’s a larger point here: Political analysis often presents an overly simplistic picture of the nation’s ideological spectrum. A large share of Americans think of themselves as moderates — and are also fed up with the state of the country. The other sunny moderates in the 2020 race have failed to connect so far partly because they have not spoken to this anger.

But there is still room for someone to do so, whether it’s Patrick, Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar or someone else. There is also room for Warren or Sanders to reach out to self-identified moderates more than they have so far. They don’t need to abandon their populist approach to do so.

For more …

I’ve previously tried to remind people of the populism of both Obama’s and Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns.

In a 2016 podcast, Patrick told his life story to David Axelrod.

Perry Bacon Jr., FiveThirtyEight: “The real opening for Patrick is essentially to replace Pete Buttigieg as the candidate for voters who want a charismatic, optimistic, left-but-not-that-left candidate. Patrick, I think, is betting that there’s a Goldilocks opportunity for him — ‘Buttigieg but older,’ or ‘Biden but younger’ — a candidate who is viewed as safe on both policy and electability grounds by Democratic establishment types and voters who just want a somewhat generic Democrat who they are confident will win the general election.”

Darren Sands of BuzzFeed News, in 2015: “A true progressive who oversaw a major transportation consolidation project, helped implement the state’s health care insurance system, and signed into law criminal justice changes popular in the Democratic Party, Patrick was widely considered capable of winning a third term.”

Michael Levenson of The Boston Globe reviewed both Patrick's accomplishments as governor and his missteps, including “the costly new drapes in his office, the upgrading of his official car to a Cadillac [and] his phone call to vouch for a controversial subprime mortgage lender.” Patrick also faces criticism for his handling of a rape case involving his brother-in-law, as Joe DiFazio of The Patriot Ledger has explained, and his history working for Texaco, Coca-Cola and Bain Capital, as The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman writes.

Edward-Isaac Dovere, The Atlantic: “That Patrick seems poised to jump into the race at the last minute is the clearest sign yet of how much anxiety there is among Obama’s inner circle about Biden’s campaign … Patrick may be the only current politician whose skills Obama truly respects … What’s puzzling and frustrating to many of his would-be supporters is why Patrick is only getting into the race now.”

Hannah Brown, Vox: “There is a historic precedent for a late entrant in the primaries going on to become the nominee — Bill Clinton declared his candidacy for president in October 1991. But that was nearly 30 years ago, and Clinton still declared a month earlier than Patrick.”

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