With just four weeks until the election, Republican Charles D. Baker has pulled even with Governor Deval Patrick in a gubernatorial race shaped by anti-incumbent sentiment and unusually high excitement among Republican voters, according to a new Boston Globe poll.
The poll results also suggest that independent Timothy P. Cahill is pulling voters equally from Baker and Patrick, raising questions about the conventional political thinking that his candidacy is undercutting Baker’s chance to defeat the governor in the Nov. 2 election.
In the Globe poll, taken last week, Patrick, a Democrat, won support from 35 percent of likely voters, compared with 34 percent for Baker, a statistical tie given the poll’s margin of error. Cahill, the state treasurer who left the Democratic Party last year, continued to lag far behind with 11 percent. Green-Rainbow candidate Jill Stein got 4 percent, and 14 percent said they remain undecided.
WTF Massachusetts? Why is this race even close? We are number one in jobs creation, number one in schools, number one in green economy and certainly number one in GLB(and soon T) rights! What more can/do you expect Governor Patrick to do? Walk across Boston Harbor? Wake up! Get involved! Donate!
from the rally in Boston's historic South End last weekend, with James Taylor warming the crowd up for the good Governor.
As Governor Patrick was wrapping up his speech and building towards a crescendo- "And I continue to support the right of everyone to be able to marry the person they love!" to thunderous applause. Thank you kind Sir!
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Deval Patrick (born July 31, 1956) is the 71st Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. A member of the Democratic Party, Patrick served as United States Assistant Attorney General under President Bill Clinton. He is the first African American to hold the office of Massachusetts governor.
Patrick was born on the South Side of Chicago, where his family resided in a two-bedroom apartment in Robert Taylor Homes housing projects. Patrick had a strained relationship with his father and was raised by his mother, who traces her roots to American slaves in the American South.
While Patrick was in middle school, one of his teachers referred him to A Better Chance, a national non-profit organization for identifying, recruiting and developing leaders among academically gifted students of African American descent, which enabled him to attend Milton Academy. Patrick graduated from Milton Academy in 1974 and from Harvard College in 1978. He then spent a year working with the UN in Africa. In 1979, Patrick returned to the US and enrolled at Harvard Law School. While in law school, Patrick was elected president of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, where he first worked defending poor families in Middlesex County, MA.
He and his wife, Diane Patrick, a lawyer specializing in labor and employment law, married in 1984. They have lived in Milton, MA since 1989 and have two daughters, Sarah and Katherine. In July 2008, Katherine publicly announced that she is a lesbian, and mentioned that her father did not know this while he was fighting against a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would have banned same-sex marriage. In a joint interview Patrick expressed support for his daughter and said he was proud of her.
In 1994, Clinton nominated Patrick Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, subsequently confirmed by the United States Senate. As the head of the Civil Rights Division, Patrick worked on issues including racial profiling, police misconduct, fair lending enforcement, human trafficking, prosecution of hate crimes, abortion clinic violence and discrimination based on gender and disability. He led what was (before 9-11) the largest federal criminal investigation in history as co-chair of the Task Force investigating the arsons of synagogues and Black churches in the South in the mid 1990's. He had a key role as an adviser to post-apartheid South Africa during this time and helped draft that country's civil rights laws.
In 2005, Patrick announced his candidacy for Governor of Massachusetts. He was at first seen as a dark horse candidate, facing veteran Massachusetts campaigners Thomas "Tom" Reilly and Chris Gabrielli in the Democratic primary. Patrick secured the nomination in the September 2006 primary, winning 49% of the vote in a three-way race and carrying every county in the state. Governor Patrick was the first gubernatorial candidate in the country to win office while actively campaigning in support of civil marriage rights.
Breaking with the tradition of being inaugurated in the House Chamber of the Massachusetts State House, Deval Patrick and Tim Murray took the oath of office, and Patrick delivered his inaugural address, outdoors on the West Portico of the State House facing Boston Common. This allowed a larger part of the public to witness and take part first hand in the event, and was intended to signal more open, transparent, and accessible government. The governor-elect was facing the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, just across Beacon Street, a memorial to the first black regiment in the U.S. Civil War. He took his oath of office on the Mendi Bible, which was given to then-Congressman John Quincy Adams by the freed American slaves from the ship La Amistad in honor of his heritage.
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The Patrick campaign’s secret weapon-
By: Susan Ryan-Vollmar*/The Rainbow Times Columnist & Reporter
The Deval Patrick Campaign has deployed a secret weapon to collect votes and drum up enthusiasm among LGBT voters: the governor’s youngest daughter, Smith College junior Katherine Patrick. The petite 20-year-old, who’s sporting a close-cropped ’do these days, is volunteering for her father’s campaign this summer.
Patrick, who came out two years ago, is helping the campaign with its strategy to recruit 21,700 "organizers" who will pledge to talk with 50 of their friends about why they are supporting Patrick for re-election. "Having those person-to-person phone calls is so much more effective than doing robo calls because my friend is more likely to listen to me rather than have a volunteer reading from a script and saying three things why this guy is great," she says.
It’s a strategy that worked for Governor Patrick in 2006 and, of course, more famously, Barack Obama in his 2008 campaign for president. And it’s outlined in entertaining fashion in Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler’s book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives in which they recount how "a single plea to vote can change political behavior and spread from" person to person, including those who never even directly hear the pitch to get out and vote.
Patrick’s goal is to recruit 200 LGBT organizers for her father’s campaign. "I’m not concerned about meeting that goal in the least," she says. "I think we’ll shatter it on Pride."
As for why LGBT voters should support her father, she admits to being "a little biased." She then ticks off Governor Patrick’s rather formidable list of accomplishments: support for the Transgender Civil Rights bill (GOP nominee Charlie Baker and Independent candidate Tim Cahill have both derided the civil rights measure that would grant equal protections for transgender people in housing, employment, credit, public accommodations and hate crimes protections as "the bathroom bill"); signing the anti-bullying law (which will help protect students from bullying, and which LGBT students are a chief beneficiary); repealing the 1913 law (which means that out-of-state same-sex couples can now wed in Massachusetts, as Glee’s Jane Lynch and her wife Dr. Lara Embry recently did in Sunderland); and signing the MassHealth Equality bill (which grants equal Medicaid benefits to married same-sex couples).
*Susan Ryan-Vollmar is a media relations and communications consultant. MassEquality, which recently endorsed Deval Patrick for governor, is one of her clients.
MassEquality Endorses Governor Deval Patrick
"MassEquality is proud to support Deval Patrick for governor. He is the only candidate who supports the Transgender Civil Rights Bill, which would provide long-overdue employment, housing, education, credit, and hate crimes protections to some of the Commonwealth’s most vulnerable residents.
"Since taking office, Governor Patrick has also signed into law three major pieces of legislation that expand equality in Massachusetts. In May, he signed a measure that will protect students from bullying, with LGBT students widely seen as one of the chief beneficiaries of the law. And in July, 2008 he signed a bill repealing the discriminatory 1913 law, which prevented out-of-state lesbian and gay couples from marrying in Massachusetts. He also signed the MassHealth Equality bill, which grants equal Medicaid benefits to married same-sex couples.
"Governor Patrick was the first governor in the country to win office after campaigning in favor of marriage equality. After he won, he spent considerable political capital campaigning for the defeat of a discriminatory marriage amendment by meeting with key lawmakers, strategizing with State House leaders, and speaking publicly about the need to defeat the amendment.
"MassEquality is confident that Governor Patrick will continue his public support for equality for LGBT residents of Massachusetts. As the governor has stated many times, support for LGBT equality is good for all of us. And as he has shown repeatedly, he understands the need for equality on a personal, visceral level."
STATEMENT FROM GOVERNOR DEVAL PATRICK ON MASSEQUALITY ENDORSEMENT:
"I am proud to receive the endorsement of MassEquality and thank them for their service and exceptional advocacy on behalf of the LGBT community in Massachusetts. As we take time today to celebrate the tremendous progress we have made together, we look ahead to the work still to do in building a stronger Commonwealth for all."
From the Patrick 2010 Website-
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