Deval Patrick Doesn't Stand a Chance

From Lambert Strether's Water Cooler yesterday:

• “Big-dollar donors helped Deval Patrick lay groundwork for presidential campaign” [Open Secrets]. “Patrick’s Reason to Believe PAC, launched in 2018, brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars from just a handful of wealthy donors. It then spent a large chunk of that cash on campaign consulting and polling to prepare Patrick for a presidential run. As a hybrid PAC, Patrick’s group was able to accept unlimited contributions. And it did. Just six donors accounted for $620,000, making up nearly 85 percent of its total.” • Reason to believe.

• “Ex-Massachusetts Gov. Patrick announces Dem presidential bid” [Associated Press]. “Patrick was asked on CBS if he supports the ‘Medicare for All’ health care plan, which is pushed by Sanders and would replace job-based and individual private health insurance with a government-run plan that guarantees coverage for all with no premiums or deductibles and only minimal copays for certain services. ‘No, not in the terms we’ve been talking about,’ Patrick said. ‘I do support a public option, and if Medicare is that public option, I think it’s a great idea.'” • [Cheers erupt in the donor class]. I do support bicycles, and if fish are those bicycles, I think it’s a great idea.” 

• “Why Deval Patrick Is Making A Late Bid For The Democratic Nomination” [FiveThirtyEight]. “I think 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 both safe on policy and safe on electability grounds by Democratic establishment types and voters who just want a somewhat generic Democratic candidate that they are confident will win the general election. After all, in his rise in Massachusetts politics, Patrick was not that reliant on black support — the Bay State has a fairly small black population (9 percent). Instead, he won a competitive 2006 Democratic primary for governor by emerging as preferred candidate among the state’s white, educated, activist class. • Weird that the Massachusetts political establishment didn’t coalesce around a single candidate. Also, Patrick won’t get any Sanders voters, so if he gets any traction, Sanders will rise relative to the other candidates from whom Patrick does take votes. 

• “Deval Patrick, Foreclosure Mogul” [HuffPo]. Quite a lead: “When Deval Patrick’s daughter was growing up in the 1980s, her kindergarten teacher gave her an assignment: Go home and describe the four seasons to your mom and dad. So she did: ‘First you drive up and the doorman takes your car.’ For the daughter of a Boston power lawyer, the Four Seasons Hotel seemed as sensible a homework topic as the basics on winter, spring, summer and fall.” • Worth reading in full

Deval Patrick's announcement that he is seeking the nomination of the Democratic Party for POTUS is more evidence of panic (or brain death, take your pick) in the master class. Patrick, a Harvard alum, corporate attorney, former governor of Massachusetts, Bain Capital bigwig, is a B-grade Obama.

Someone should tell the oligarchs that Obama is no longer the heartthrob of the Democratic masses. Obama's second term delivered the Trumpocalypse. Hillary gets left holding the bag, but Obama is just as much to blame.

I know what they're thinking. With some luck, Patrick could coalesce the neoliberal vote -- swallow Buttigieg, Booker, Klobuchar and Harris, while euthanizing Biden -- at the same time taking a significant bite out of Warren's base. This is something Mike Bloomberg can't do.

But it's all a rich man's fantasy. The real marvel of the Democratic primary field to date is the tandem of Warren and Sanders, weighing in at somewhere around 40% in opinion polls. That's a solid 40%. And it's what terrifies the oligarchs because absent some sort of Hail Mary miracle it's only going to grow. If it grows any more we're looking at a majority.

Basically at this point the best the oligarchs can hope for is a brokered convention that delivers a neoliberal nominee with solid progressive bona fides (who would that be? Sherrod Brown?) as a compromise.