...This brings to mind a scene I witnessed in Lynn last August, then-candidate Deval Patrick meeting informally with a group of local girls - about the same ages as Patrick's own daughters - at the social-service agency Girls Inc. In the course of the conversation, Patrick told a story I'd never heard him tell before, and haven't heard since.One of the governor's girls wanted to go see 50 Cent in Manchester, N.H., and daddy, could you please get tickets and drive me and my friends up? He could, but while the daughter figured he'd go do whatever it is old people do for two hours before returning to pick her up, it seems Dad was acquainted with the show's promoter, and watched Fiddy perform from the wings.
I've got a tape of what Deval said somewhere, and I'll try to give you precise quotes in a future post. But the gist of it was, he was appalled at the misogyny of the music and the performance, repulsed by the coarseness of it, angered by the way he felt this demeaned and degraded women and the thought of its impact on young girls and boys.
It was eloquent. It was moving. It was sincere. There was no disagreement from the girl. Staffers. They seemed thrilled that a politician was actually addressing something real in their lives with courage and candor. It was Deval Patrick, potential leader, at his best...
[W]ouldn't it be something - a galvanizing moment for the victimized communities, a courageous repudiation of decay-enabling political correctness, a turning point in the public image of the new administration - if the only African-American governor in America took to the pulpit this week and made it crystal clear what standards of behavior - from parental accountability to cooperation with authorities - he expects from those communities?
Obviously, I'm far more cynical than Keller, because I don't expect Gov. Patrick to say a damn thing this time around. Honestly, what can he say?
It's impossible to imagine Patrick today making the same sort of hard-hitting critique of urban culture he made last year. Patrick surely knows what happened to Bill Cosby when he tore into the self-destructive culture of the black underclass in 2004: Cosby was given the Clarence Thomas/Shelby Steele treatment, accused of "blaming the victim" and of pandering to white conservatives.
Criticizing the urban underclass is a political taboo in this country. This has been the case for years: remember when the far left tried to brand the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan a racist bigot when he criticized fatherlessness in the black community?
Patrick may have shown courage in his anti-50 Cent remarks last year, but it's hard to envision him showing that same courage once again. The last thing Patrick wants is to be attacked by the far left for allegedly beating up on society's outcasts--something that will indeed happen if he again criticizes urban dysfunction.
Patrick isn't stupid. Right now, the only support he has is on the far left. He is not going to alienate them by attacking urban dysfunction, because according to progressive philosophy, that's "mean-spirited."
Patrick is not going to step into this breach. He won't change anyone's mind if he does: conservatives will fault him for not acknowledging the role of LBJ's Great Society in creating the crisis in the 'hood, and liberals will accuse him of not placing the blame where they feel it really belongs: on "lingering racism," "the right-wing war on the poor," "the consequences of Reaganomics," etc. Criticizing urban dysfunction will get Patrick nothing but trouble. And doesn't he already have enough of that?
UPDATE: More from the Herald and Globe.
