The establishment media are swooning over Deval Patrick, former civil rights chief in the Clinton administration and now on the verge of being the first black governor of Massachusetts. The New York Times says, “Mr. Patrick’s greatest assets include his charismatic personality, inspiring speaking style and biography.” The Washington Post reports long-time non-voters in tears over his “message of optimism, his personal charisma and his uplifting personal story.” David Broder hails him as “New Star among the Democrats.”
But Deval Patrick’s personal story isn’t quite so uplifting to advocates of equality under the law. When he was named to be assistant attorney general for civil rights by President Clinton, after Lani Guinier’s nomination was withdrawn under fire, he came under the same sort of criticism. Clint Bolick, then with the Institute for Justice, called him “pro-quota” and a “stealth Guinier” who held the same views but lacked the same paper trail.
After Patrick took office, he seemed to confirm Bolick’s warnings. In 1995, Bolick called him “a master at using the threat of expensive litigation to extort concessions from municipalities and organizations.” (Alas, none of these op-eds and news articles from the 1990s seem to be online, but they can be found in Nexis.) He testified in 1995 oversight hearings that Patrick was “shedding any pretense of impartial law enforcement in favor of unbridled ideological activism” at the Justice Department.
Bolick wasn’t alone in his criticisms. “Deval Patrick has committed the Clinton administration to a vision of racial preference that fulfills the most extravagant fantasies of a conservative attack ad,” wrote Jeffrey Rosen in a 1994 New Republic article. “Rather than honestly confronting the costs of affirmative action, Patrick has blithely endorsed the most extreme form of racialism.” Nat Hentoff denounced one of Patrick’s most famous cases, when he sided with the Piscataway, N.J., school board’s decision to fire a white teacher in the name of “diversity.”
These days, Patrick endorses the standard tired litany of big-government liberalism: more tax money for middle-class housing, more tax money for low-income housing, more tax money for schools, more tax money for jobs and education for ex-cons, more tax money for alternative energy. Oh, and property tax relief. But his record suggests a propensity for more authoritarian policies to ensure that his moral vision prevails.
As for the title, a tip of the hat to Marion L. Starkey, author of the acclaimed book, The Devil in Massachusetts, about Massachusetts leaders who would go to extraordinary means to root out the merest allegations of sin.
