Archive for the ‘Deval Patrick’ Category
Corporate Responsibility: More Than Just a Hobby
October 18, 2008Can businesses enhance their commitment to social responsibility during difficult economic times? That was one of the questions posed today at the Massachusetts Summit on Progressive Business held at the Harvard Club.
The consensus of this gathering was that these troubled times create the exact moment for business leaders to make good on their social commitments.
The president of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Josh Broger, speaking at a morning panel, raised an interesting point. He cited the Massachusetts General Laws section on shareholder responsibility. Embedded within the statute was clear language permitting shareholders to factor in community and regional concerns to their corporate duty to seek profits. “You have permission … to be socially responsible,” he said.
He was joined on the panel by the president of the Communispace Corporation, Diane Hessan. She said that the bulk of employees, who are members of the Millennial Generation, are demanding some corporate responsibility at their places of employment. Interestingly, this message directly gibes with what I heard from pollster John Zogby about younger Americans.
Governor Deval Patrick, on a day when he focused on the economy, appeared before the gathering at a lunch. In my view, both the summit and Patrick’s appearance before it make a lot of sense. If there is any good to come out of a poor business climate perhaps it is the shared sense of commitment and responsibility that I heard from members of the business community today. In some ways, the Harvard Club parley reminded me of the Vault I have heard so much about from the days of old, where Boston’s CEOs acted as public citizens with the best interest of the future our city in mind. In that case, it will be up to the new generation of leaders, such as Jeffrey Bussgang of Flybridge Capital Partners, and Jim Boyle of the Sustainability Round Table, to help forge it.
Farewell to Charles E. Doyle
October 17, 2008
Occasionally this blog tells the story of the great personalities who comprise the fabric of the city, the ones who you won’t necessarily read about in the daily newspapers. One of those people died this week, Charlie Doyle of Brighton.
If I were forced to reduce Doyle’s life to headlines, which is always difficult, I’d describe him as the leader — the innovator really — of a vibrantly progressive ward committee in Brighton, Ward 21, a long-time city politico, having run the City of Boston’s Cable Office under a number of city mayors, a political visionary and a Bostonian’s Bostonian.
But I can’t really boil Doyle down to that, because he was much, much more. His story begins amid the simmering liberalism of the late 1950s and early 1960s — before it turned into the cauldron of the latter part of that decade. He graduated from the now-defunct St. Columbkille High School of Brighton and travelled down Commonwealth Avenue to attend Boston University. There he electrified fellow students with his encyclopedic knowledge of politics and history. Then he went even farther afield for a graduate program at Columbia University in New York City. New York, at that time, was a place of swirling intellectual and political foment. Charlie and I talked about that period in his life when I visited with him at the Cable Office in the mid-1990s. It helped power a intellectual engine, but he came back to Brighton to make a difference.
When he came back, Charlie put into practice his knowledge of the burgeoning field of political science. At a time when most ward committee work was limited to distributing political signs, Doyle was turning it into a science. He gathered detailed voter data, compiled demographic information, and kept the best data bases in the city.
My grandparents lived in Brighton for much of my life, and I thought I knew the neighborhood. That was until I called Doyle for a story. In painstaking — and delicious — detail, he broke down the differences between the liberal, but sometimes transient, Ward 21, and the more socially-conservative, Ward 22.
He was a skilled photographer. His work, which was on display at his wake, could serve as a pictorial history of Boston with vintage photos of Kevin White, Larry Bird and others. He was ahead of the curve on a trend that has become very popular today, bicycle riding. I remember on him tooling around his bike at Nantasket Beach in Hull. He remained a political junkie until the end, relishing WGBH’s Friday night line up of political shows, beginning with Greater Boston.
But, most of all, Doyle was the quiet creator of a political dynasty in Brighton. He took the two basketball-loving sons of his sister Mary under his wing and imparted to them everything he ever knew about politics. It was his gift. He bestowed it on the dogged and lovable Kevin Honan, who has become as reliable and earnest a representative as that neighborhood has ever had. And he delivered it to the charismatic, witty and talented Brian Honan, who served Brighton as a city councillor and then was running a rigorous campaign for district attorney, when he died suddenly and tragically at the age of 39 in 2002.
I can’t say that Charlie was the same after that. But who would be.
There was something awful about seeing many of the same faces at the funeral home on Chestnut Hill Avenue yesterday. Amidst the pain, people were talking about one of Charlie’s great final achievements. Back in 2005 and 2006 a former Clinton Administration official, little known in the Boston area, started making the rounds trying to meet people and build up a grass roots political organization. He was, of course, Deval Patrick. Most insiders met Patrick with indifference at best.
Doyle was different. He welcomed Patrick to a ward committee meeting. There he grilled the would-be governor. Why was he any different than any of the other great progressive candidates, whose candidacies failed after great fanfare? Patrick convinced many in the ward that he was different. He took 14/18 delegates at the caucuses that year.
With Doyle’s departure, like the death of Boston-chronicler Alan Lupo a couple weeks ago, the city is a poorer place, one more in danger of losing its character and characters.
What’s Happening with Treasurer Tim Cahill
July 18, 2008Local news reports are filled with speculation about the aggressive stance Tim Cahill has taken towards Governor Patrick’s budget. PolitickerMA weighs in with a story:
“Putting aside whether Patrick’s plan is reckless or not, the fiery exchange between Murray and Cahill (the Globe’s Casey Ross called Murray’s remarks ‘unusually heated’) has not gone unnoticed by political analysts who believe both pols are eyeing the governor’s mansion. In particular, Cahill’s injecting himself into the budget discussion, they say, is a way to stay politically relevant.”
Reporter Jeremy Jacobs, who’s rapidly catching the eye of Bay State politicos, also quotes me in the dispatch. ” ‘Tim Cahill appears to be using his position as the Commonwealth’s chief financial officer to raise his political profile,’ said Seth Gitell, political analyst and author of Gitell.com. ‘Consistently underestimated, Cahill has shown himself to be a strong statewide office holder.’ Gitell said Cahill is in a unique position to capitalize politically on the struggling economy. ‘[Cahill’s] oversight of the budget — a top priority during difficult fiscal times — creates an opportunity for him to make headlines. This could pay dividends if either Governor Patrick eventually joins a Barack Obama administration or if the governor’s poll numbers plummet.'”
Interestingly, back in 2002, I was one of the few writers to write about the race for treasurer let alone take Cahill seriously. “Tim Cahill has raised the most money in the race. He also has the most radical ideas for changing the role of treasurer: ‘We should have these Harvard and Yale people telling us how to invest our money? The treasurer’s job is to have that responsibility and make those decisions.’ ”
Bald Is Beautiful
February 12, 2008Governor Deval Patrick has a history of taking brave stands for progress and civil rights. He headed up the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice in the Clinton Administration. He became the first ever African-American governor in Massachusetts. Now, according to Matt Viser in today’s Boston Globe he earns his place in Massachusetts history as the first ever Massachusetts chief executive to shave his head. Hats off to him.
Patrick’s move follows in the footsteps of a former state senator from Watertown and 2002 gubernatorial candidate, Warren Tolman. Tolman was a pioneer for bald politicians — and even journalists — in the Commonwealth. The catchy slogan of one of his publicly-financed advertisements was “bald is beautiful.”Hopefully 2008 will be a new era for the bald in Massachusetts. Back in 2002, Gersh Kuntzman, then a web columnist for Newsweek, did a piece on Tolman that captured the anti-bald spirit of the era. Kuntzman wrote: “The victim this time was former Massachusetts state senator Warren Tolman, a proud bald man, who lost the Democratic primary for governor last week. The loss was particularly bitter for the bald because Tolman had intentionally used his lack of hair to get on the radar screen in the race, running ads that showed him rubbing his shiny pate while standing in a barbershop surrounded by equally hairless men.”
I caught up with Tolman to find out what he thought of the governor’s bold bald move. “Welcome to the club,” Tolman said Patrick. “Up to this point I always said Deval Patrick was a handsome guy, now more impressively he’s a handsome bald guy.” He described his own bald ploy as taking “what in politics what is often perceived as a negative and make it a positive.”
Of course, I’ve got a stake in this battle as well and thank the governor for his courageous leadership.