I told you so.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who just announced his 2020 Democratic candidacy for president Thursday morning, is already up against a wall defending his record working for the much-maligned Democratic target Bain Capital.
“Yes, I [worked] at the place that was demonized in the 2012 presidential election,” he said this week in an interview on MSNBC. “I didn’t buy into [the attacks on Bain] then, and I still don’t.”
We should note here that Patrick was not just a casual observer in 2012, watching quietly from the sidelines as the Obama reelection campaign made attacks on Bain a central theme of the presidential race. Patrick served at the time as a co-chair of the campaign, as he reminded his MSNBC interviewer.
“There is a place for private equity in the private economy,” Patrick said this week. “There is a place for business in our lives, but it is also true that capitalism generally has a lot to answer for.”
To be fair to the freshly minted 2020 Democratic candidate, he is consistent on this Bain issue, despite having worked for the presidential campaign that painted the firm as an institution founded by Satan himself. In 2012, when the Obama White House first launched its effort to bury then-GOP nominee Mitt Romney, Patrick appeared visibly discomforted by the Bain strategy, as Politico reported then.
In any case, I told you this would happen. I told you Patrick’s most immediate stumbling block in the Democratic primary would be the fact that he worked for the firm that the Democratic Party worked hard to demonize in 2012. Amazingly, judging by his response this week to questions about working for the supposed enemy, it does not look like Patrick came prepared to defend himself from these entirely predictable criticisms of his professional history.
“I love that the party has moved to the left,” Patrick said during the MSNBC interview, referring to the interviewer’s questions about his Bain record.
He added, “I love that we are the party of the woke. I believe that we also have to be the party of the still-waking, and I have always conducted my personal life and my business life and my life as a civil rights lawyer, my life as an advocate … that way.”
Good luck using those lines on actual primary voters.
