Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: Political Leaders Should Spend Their Time on Issues of Common Interest — Not Campaign Fundraising
This session from the National Citizen Leadership Conference features American Promise President Jeff Clements in conversation with Deval Patrick, who has served as Governor of Massachusetts, U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, and leader with businesses including Texaco, Coca-Cola & Bain Capital. During their conversation, Governor Patrick shared insights from his remarkable American journey and his philosophy of generational responsibility: As Americans, “we all have a stake in each other’s dreams.”
Big money’s influence on government includes a tax on elected officials’ time: The fundraising game starts early for political candidates, and once they take office it consumes a growing amount of their time — more than half of most days, according to one study.
During the 2021 National Citizen Leadership Conference, Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick spoke with American Promise President Jeff Clements about his journey from childhood on the South Side of Chicago to Harvard University, the NAACP, an appointment as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in President Clinton’s administration, and two terms as Massachusetts governor. More recently, Gov. Patrick founded the Impact Investing Fund at Bain Capital, ran for U.S. president, and recently joined the cross-partisan American Promise National Advisory Council.
Gov. Patrick pointed to the values and lessons he learned as a child that continue to drive and inspire his actions today. They include the belief that we should act to benefit our neighbors as well as ourselves, and to work for a better future for those who follow us.
“We have to learn to talk to and listen to people who don’t share the same point of view or whom we don’t think share the same point of view,” he said. “And we may actually surprise ourselves with just how much in common we have. We may have different strategies for solving that problem, but we begin to see that we see the same problems and that they are worth our collective attention.”
As Jeff said in introducing him, “In so many ways, Governor Patrick is not a typical politician. He brings his full life experience and lessons to inspire Americans. He speaks honestly of the pain and division, the racism and heartbreak and frustration in American politics, in life. And the way all of us together, could walk through this to the immense opportunity, freedom and possibility of the American promise.”
Here are some highlighted comments from Governor Patrick about his life, vision, compassion, leadership and service.
On his childhood on the South Side of Chicago:
Two lessons that have stuck with me: One was that the adults were trying to get across to us that membership in a community is understanding the stake you have in each other, that you have some agency in your neighbor’s dreams and struggles as well as your own. And also that we were supposed to do what we can in our time to leave things better for those who come behind us — this notion of generational responsibility and those life lessons have been markers for me, milestones for me, and reminders in that zigzagging career you described.
In my household, we followed a set of old-fashioned middle-class values that said if you work hard and play by the rules, you can do better. And as you climb, it’s your responsibility to lift.
On his acceptance to Harvard:
I’d always wanted to go to college, and no one in my family had ever been. I applied to five schools. And when the letter came that I was admitted to the one I really wanted to go to, I called home and my grandmother answered the phone and I said, “Gram, I’m going to college next year; I’m going to Harvard.” And she was beside herself, just excited, carrying on and all the rest of it.
And then she paused and then she said, “Now, where is that anyway?” And I remember being devastated, “How can you not know that?” And it was years before I appreciated that she appreciated that moment actually much more profoundly than I did, because what she was excited about was not the prestige, it was the chance, it was the opportunity. That was the thing that mattered.
On standing firm in his political beliefs:
I ran the way I did and governed, or tried to, the way I did because as a citizen I have been hungry for a politics of conviction. And by that I mean a politics that’s grounded in a set of values. I’m not talking about a rigidity that says I as an elected official, or I, whatever party I am, have a corner on all the best ideas; it’s just not real life. But you choose the things you want to emphasize in a very limited amount of time that you have in a term or two. And you go hard at those because they’re things you think are meaningful, and they are meaningful in part because it’s where you are, but in part because you’ve been listening to other people tell you that they are.
And when I say “other people,” I’m not just talking about experts and other politically active people. I’m talking about the folks who rarely participate or have never participated, who aren’t in every figurative smoke-filled room and all that, the folks who have felt like government was this abstract thing out there, it was them instead of us, right? You and me, all of us. And I believe it ought to reflect the best of who we are, and the best of what we hope for.
There is a kind of an economic insecurity or uncertainty, the isolation, despair as measured by addiction rates or suicide rates, a sense that those issues are issues at election time, if at all, and they disappear in between election time. A whole lot of people in every corner of America are feeling that way right now. Those feelings and those circumstances are what Black Americans have been feeling for generations. And to me, there’s a tremendous opportunity for that shared reality and shared sensibility to be its bridge — its own bridge — to bring us back to a sense that we have some stake in each other, that we belong to each other, that national community is actually possible. And that there are some things we need to do together in order to make that real.
On the Citizens United ruling:
As a lawyer, I have great respect for the Constitution and for the role of the Supreme Court in interpreting the Constitution and being the final word. But the notion that self-described “originalists” would find in the Constitution that corporations were people entitled to the same speech rights that you and I, as individuals, have is nowhere to be found in constitutional history or the record or, frankly, even in constitutional jurisprudence.
On the impact of money in politics on Americans:
There are some studies, and this has been confirmed by friends of mine in Congress, that up to 60% of a Congressperson’s time is spent raising money for the next campaign — meaning that time is not devoted to doing the business of the people who live in the district. There’s something wrong with that. People on Capitol Hill are really, really busy, but when you think about the number of pieces of legislative action that the American people have broad consensus on and want to happen, and don’t [happen], surely the fact that their time is limited by the amount of money that has to be raised is [a factor].
I hate the amount of money in politics. I think it is distorting. I think it is corrupting. I realize that’s a pretty sensitive word to use, but when I heard one former member of Congress say that you can only get a meeting with him if you had been a contributor to his campaign, or a contributor above a certain amount of money, there’s something just broken about that.
On working together across the political spectrum:
We have to learn to talk to and listen to people who don’t share the same point of view or whom we don’t think share the same point of view. And we may actually surprise ourselves just how much in common we have. We may have different strategies for solving that problem, but we begin to see that we see the same problems and that they are worth our collective attention.
