A contest of hope vs. tax cuts

IT WILL BE a race between an immovable mantra and a tangible force.

Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey is saying to read her lips, no new taxes. Deval Patrick will try to convince voters he can be trusted how to spend taxes. Running for the incumbent Republican Party that has held the governor's office in Massachusetts for 16 years, Healey most likely will stick to her mantra until polls persuade her otherwise.

The biggest opening question is how far Patrick hopes to carry the rhetoric of hope. At his convention speech in June, he said:

``What's missing from politics-as-usual is hope."

``What's missing is a reason to hope."

``Hope for the best and work for it."

``Hope is a tangible force."

Patrick is hardly the first Democrat to attempt to channel the tangible force. It worked for his former boss, Bill Clinton, when he said in his 1992 acceptance speech for the party's nomination for president: ``My fellow Americans, I end tonight where it all began for me. I still believe in a place called Hope."

It did not work for 2004 vice presidential candidate John Edwards, who punctuated the homestretch of his nomination acceptance speech with five rapid-fire examples of struggling people. He talked of a night-shift mother, a worker who cannot get anywhere, people who cannot afford medicines, college-bound youth, and families with soldiers in Iraq. He ended each example by telling supporters to fan out across the nation to tell those people, ``Hope is on the way." He is still hoping, most obviously for the 2008 nomination for president.

And of course, Illinois Senator Barack Obama has turned hope into a million-dollar personal cottage industry, with his most recent book being, ``The Audacity of Hope." In his 2004 address at the Democratic national convention, Obama said, ``I'm not talking about blind optimism here." He talked about the hope of ``slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs" and ``immigrants setting out for distant shores . . . " He said such hope is ``the bedrock of this nation; the belief in things not seen."

Not to be sarcastic, but Obama could say that with a belief in things he could see, since he gained office in an easy race. Patrick now faces Healey, who has no problems declaring that her playbook is an open book. There is no reason for her not to be transparent since it worked for four terms worth of predecessors. In her endorsement acceptance speech, she issued a backhanded compliment by praising the ``candor from a committed liberal like Deval Patrick."

She said Patrick ``is up front about his big spending plans for this state and his intention to oppose tax cuts. He wants to `grow' state government. He forthrightly tells us that, no, he will not rule out additional tax hikes. And to the big-government-loving audiences Deval Patrick is used to addressing, that pledge is actually a big crowd pleaser."

The question for Patrick is whether his tangible force can please a crowd much bigger than the one that voted in the primaries. Given the success of the immovable mantra, that will really take a belief in things not seen.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.