In Patrick pitch, a Clinton echo
`Hope vs. fear' message evokes 1992 campaign
The election was close, fall weather was turning chilly, and the candidate framed the race in stark terms. ``This election is a race between hope and fear, between division and community, between responsibility and blame, between whether we have the courage to change, to stay young forever, or whether we stay with the comfort of the status quo."
Sounds a lot like Deval L. Patrick. But it was Bill Clinton in 1992.
Even Patrick appeared confused when the words were read back to him Friday.
``Did I say that, or did he say that?" he asked.
The Democratic gubernatorial nominee's rhetoric echoes the soapbox style of the former president, who comes to Boston to campaign for Patrick today . Just as Clinton did 14 years ago, Patrick portrays his candidacy as a movement for change, aiming at an electorate that polls suggest is ready for fresh leadership. Like Clinton, Patrick built his campaign narrative around an up-from-poverty life story. And, like Clinton, Patrick casts the campaign as a battle between the ``politics of hope and the politics of fear."
Patrick said that Clinton's 1992 message of hope versus fear resonated with him at the time, but that the idea had been part of his personal philosophy before he heard Clinton.
``These are not poll-tested phrases for the purposes of the campaign," he said. ``This is what I believe. It is what I have believed as a student of history, and as someone who has lived it. All through history, the march of human progress, when there has been progress, has been the triumph of hope over fear."
But both men have also shown the argument can be a great political device, used by other politicians over the years.
``It's a brilliant rhetorical strategy that plays to a universal, common humanity but also subtly indicts," said Timothy Patrick McCarthy , who teaches political communication at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. It implies, he said, that ``the present and the recent past were bad because Republicans made it so."
Patrick's campaign has drawn another comparison from pundits, who see a parallel between him and US Senator Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat, who is a close friend and ally. Obama headlined a Patrick fund-raiser in June and is set to come for another on Friday . Patrick is one of a half-dozen African-American politicians running for statewide office this fall, following Obama's election in 2004.
Patrick, who headed the civil rights division of the US Justice Department in the mid-1990s, is the latest of the Clinton progeny to become a candidate. Rahm Emanuel , a White House adviser to Clinton from 1993 to 1998, was elected to Congress from Illinois. Erskine Bowles, Clinton's former chief of staff, lost US Senate races in North Carolina in 2002 and 2004. Robert B. Reich, the former treasury secretary, lost a Democratic gubernatorial primary in Massachusetts four years ago.
Patrick said he has never used a speech coach -- though some write him a suggestion once in a while. He writes his speeches himself, he said, ``because I care about the words. . . . I want them to feel authentic." Campaign advisers have provided advice, but most of the text, he says, is his own.
Like Clinton, Patrick draws heavily on his biography. Both men were raised in households where money was tight: Clinton grew up in rural Hope, Ark.; Patrick came from the South Side of Chicago. Just as Clinton used his personal story to breathe life into a central theme of his campaign, concluding his 1992 Democratic National Convention speech with the line, ``I still believe in a place called Hope," Patrick exhorts his supporters to follow his grandmother's advice: ``Hope for the best, and work for it."
``I think, in a sense, you are defined by the path you travel," said David Axelrod , a media consultant working for Patrick who also played a minor role in Clinton's first presidential race. ``I think both of them have had extraordinary arcs in life, from very challenging beginnings to very successful careers, and I think that makes them both credible exponents for the politics of hope."
Both Clinton and Patrick position themselves as outsiders, especially when attacked. When an old crime in Patrick's family was reported in the Boston Herald, Patrick cast the episode as an example of dirty politics he wanted to clean up. When allegations about Clinton's draft evasion surfaced in the 1992 New Hampshire primary, Clinton urged voters to reject ``that kind of negative politics."
At Faneuil Hall last spring, Patrick told supporters it was ``time for a new way in politics" and promised leadership ``that takes the best ideas and the best people from all comers, no matter what their party, that is less focused on the left and the right and more focused on right and wrong."
That is not far from what Clinton told the delegates at the 1992 convention: ``The choice we offer is not conservative or liberal. In many ways, it's not even Republican or Democratic. It's different. It's new. And it will work. It will work because it is rooted in the vision and the values of the American people."
And though Patrick is to the left of Clinton on social issues -- unlike Clinton, he supports gay marriage and opposes the death penalty -- he echoes the former president's call to Democrats to turn away from traditional liberal, welfare-state thinking. ``There is not a program for every problem," Patrick likes to say, quoting Clinton directly.
The campaign of Patrick's Republican opponent, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, however, is emphasizing the differences between the two men's politics. Today, the campaign plans to distribute an Internet video that playfully contrasts Clinton's and Patrick's views on the death penalty, granting drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants, and taxes . The goal is to emphasize what the Healey campaign considers Patrick's left-of-center views.
Clinton and Patrick do have their differences. Clinton was wild about policy details. His former speechwriter, Michael Waldman , writes of Clinton's ``drive to explain it, explain it, explain it." By the 1992 presidential race, Clinton had already been governor of Arkansas for nearly 12 years, so he had a vast trove of experience to inform his speeches.
Patrick, by contrast, has tended to gloss over policy details during the general-election campaign. When reporters and the public press for more, he tends to give a slightly more detailed answer that he recycles from event to event
But Patrick is -- like Clinton -- a remarkably charismatic speaker.
``Clinton had the ability to make everyone in a roomful of 2,000 people feel that he was talking to them, and I think that Patrick does the same thing," said Arnold Zenker, a Boston-based speech coach who works mostly with business clients.
Patrick is reluctant to compare his political skills with Clinton's, but he says his ability to relate to people begins with his ability to listen -- something Clinton was famous for.
``We both learn a lot from listening, and we both listen from care," Patrick said. ``It turns out in his case, and I'm finding in my own experience as a candidate, that being an active listener is received as its own act of respect."
Lisa Wangsness can be reached at lwangsness@globe.com.
(Correction: Because of a reporting error, a Page One story Monday about the similarities between former president Bill Clinton and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Deval L. Patrick incorrectly described the position held by Robert B. Reich in the Clinton administration. He was the Labor secretary.) 