Both appeal to conservatives by stressing that government isn’t a panacea.
• Patrick speaking to NPR in 2005: “There is a much more negative, much more hurtful vision of government that has been spreading. Not the vision that government can do everything for everyone — nobody believes that — but the vision that government is bad, rather than government is us.”
• Obama addressing the Democratic National Convention in 2004: “The people I meet in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks, they don’t expect government to solve all their problems.”
Both insist that disagreement shouldn’t preclude cooperation.
• Patrick addressing a church audience in Springfield in 2006: “In politics, we need to get past this point where the view is, ‘Unless we agree on everything, we can’t work together on anything.’ ”
• Obama addressing supporters in Nashua, New Hampshire, prior to that state’s primary, quoted by the St. Petersburg Times: “You don’t have to agree on everything to agree on some things.”
Both temper their tendencies toward political messianism with winning self-deprecation.
• Patrick in an October 2006 candidates’ debate: “I don’t have all the answers. No candidate does.”
• Obama in a September 2005 message to readers of dailykos.com. “Let me end by saying I don’t pretend to have all the answers to the challenges we face.”
The man behind the curtain
Maybe liberals and progressives should find these convergences reassuring. After all, Patrick used his message to win a competitive Democratic primary, and then a general election; he was the first Democrat elected governor in 16 years, and the first African-American governor in the state's history. Similarly, Obama is seeking to win a Democratic primary, to return the presidency to Democratic hands, and to break an even bigger racial barrier. If the same message works, why not use it?
For that matter, why worry about where it came from? Axelrod probably matters more than he admits. (Here’s John Edwards after Iowa in 2004: “I came here a year ago with a belief that we could change this country, with a belief that the politics of what was possible — the politics of hope — could overcome the politics of cynicism. . . . [T]onight we started a movement to change this country that will sweep across America.”) But that just means he might be the long-awaited Democratic answer to Karl Rove.
Still, there’s that authenticity problem. Obama’s message is undeniably powerful. But that power diminishes a bit when you realize it isn’t his alone. Whether, after this realization becomes widespread, it will still pack enough political punch to get him to the White House is an open question.