Show your cards, Deval Patrick

Another impressive article by Joe Fitzgerald --


Show your cards, Deval Patrick
By Joe Fitzgerald

Just months before election day, Deval Patrick has been dealt a winning hand by Bobby DeLeo, though it remains to be seen whether he’s secure enough to play it.

DeLeo, totally rejecting the notion of compromise, went for the jugular, making it known he’d accept nothing but full acquiescence to his self-serving agenda of casinos and slots, thereby assuring a steady flow of gambling’s blood money into the district he represents.

There was nothing subtle about it. If he was just a local pol, doing the bidding of those who kept him in office, perhaps he could justify such petulant intransigence. But as speaker of the House of Representatives, he ostensibly serves us all.

At least that’s the theory.

The reality, however, is that nothing matters more to him than self-preservation, which doesn’t make him any different from the rest of the rogues who masquerade as public servants on Beacon Hill.

So now Patrick, desperate to be seen as a different breed of cat, finds himself locking horns with DeLeo, who deludes himself into believing he occupies the high ground.

Make no mistake, Patrick has often abandoned the high ground, too, as he foolishly did in OK’ing a phantom $175,000 position for Marian Walsh, the shameless senator who was forced to forgo it by a tsunami of public outrage.

But that was 15 months ago. Enough time has elapsed for him to repackage himself as a statesman.

The statesman, someone once noted, thinks about the next generation while the politician thinks only of the next election.

When viewed in a context broader than DeLeo’s personal ambitions, gambling cannot be justified as a solution to the commonwealth’s fiscal woes, and that’s especially true of slots, which mercilessly exploit addictions.

Yes, jobs are important, but so are marriages, careers, reputations and families, all of which gambling has been known to ravage.

Yes, union workers vote, but so do members of households torn asunder when salaries are swallowed up by betting losses.

DeLeo has given Patrick an opportunity to remind us all that one of government’s historic missions is to “promote the general welfare,” making it unconscionable for the commonwealth to be licking its chops in anticipation of profiting from the misery of its citizens.

So don’t just act like a leader, governor.

Here’s your chance to be one.