by Joseph E. Thompson
I don’t want a ten-room house in Richmond or anywhere else in the Berkshires. In fact, I can’t understand why anyone would. The very idea of driving two or three hours each way to spend a weekend strikes me as just dumb. On the other hand, if someone offered me a ten-room house on my own harbor island with my own boat or helicopter, I certainly wouldn’t turn him down. So what’s the kerfuffle about Deval Patrick’s vacation home in Richmond?
It started when the Boston Globe, with active assistance from the Reilly campaign, apparently thinking ten rooms was too modest to serve its transparent purpose, increased its size to twenty-four rooms. (Even Jesus was humble enough to stick to loaves and fishes.) The Globe retracted, of course, but it took six weeks and a lot of interim damage before they did. Being of limited intelligence, I couldn’t figure it out. (The Globe's retraction did nothing do slow down Reilly: he's taken to calling Patrick's summer house "the Taj Deval.")
Kerry Healey retreats to her lavish estate in Beverly Farms; Chris Gabrieli, when not ensconced in his Louisburg Square Mansion, relaxes on his own comfortable spread in Beverly Farms. Even Tom Reilly, the self-touted commonest of common men, owns a quiet, tasteful little home in Wellfleet. Perhaps the splashing from private beaches and the purr of Mercedes from gated driveways are sounds too subtle to reach our plebeian ears, but beyond the aforementioned grueling commute, why should Mr. Patrick’s vacation home be the only one worthy of comment?
I think it is because Mr. Patrick is different from other wealthy candidates in ways that Reilly and the Globe do not want to talk about. Patrick came by his resources honestly;he got where he is playing by the rules he not make. He did not inherit his money. He did not marry it. He worked for it. His seat at Milton Academy was not a legacy conferred upon him by a father whose father donated a bronze-plated skating rink so his progeny could flourish. Harvard owed neither Patrick nor his forebears, but it admitted him, and he acquitted himself well enough to go on to Harvard Law and to fulfill the American dream of making enough money to be able to afford to give a bit back. Yet, he is singled out for doing neither more nor less than we would do and hope our children would do after us.
So why is Patrick’s wealth being raised as a potential liability, while Gabrieli’s is seen as an asset? How is it that Patrick’s vacation home is a topic but not Healey’s? Is there an elephant in the room that has escaped me? Is it possible that his having gone to Harvard permanently excludes him from the Suffolk–Boston College club that has ruled State House bars for a century? Is Patrick’s money just too new? Does it make him, alone among the four well-heeled candidates seeking the governor's office, unable to connect with "people like us?"
The fact is that this vacation home thing is a non-issue consistently raised by an opponent and a newspaper with nothing else to talk about. It does not appear to have much gotten much traction accept among those Reilly supporters who think it will catch their guy before his candidacy finally and mercifully hits the pavement.
But Tom Reilly cannot leave the issue alone, any more than he can stop Swift-boating Patrick by charging that his efforts to reform Ameriquest amount to condoning their past behavior. Reilly can only go (falsely) negative in this race because his only basis for running is entitlement. Otherwise, all he has is old-boy credentials and his firm belief that those and his modest Watertown apartment, entitle him to the governorship. His only other substantive issue positions, aside from his tax-cutting mantra, have been lifted almost verbatim from his opponents. In league with his allies at the Globe, he seems to have made the calculation that the only road to victory in September is to exploit the feelings of some voters that one man’s success is another’s diminution.
But, like Patrick, I think better of the voters than Mr. Reilly does. I suspect that the reason Mr. Patrick’s message is resonating across the state is because the citizens of Massachusetts are smarter than Reilly thinks they are. They want to leave the old tired politics of the past and embrace the hope of the future.
Clearly, that hope doesn’t reside in who’s got how much, or who would prefer the Berkshires to Beverly Farms or the Cape. (Frankly, I'd pick Winthrop for the commute.) It doesn’t hinge upon who has been around the longest or how much scotch he can hoist with the old boys. Hope, by any practical measure relies on our capacity to understand our problems and to come together to solve them. It’s time for the old boys to do what old boys do: sit in their beach chairs and wait for the tide to come in. Perhaps Reilly should winterize Wellfleet.
