Friday, February 10, 2006

Hello, Deval? Sorry I missed your call.

Not much time for blogging recently. I pushed off so much stuff to do caucus work, that I have been scrambling to catch up. I'm running for DTC chair in my town and that has kept me busy too. There's a whole other story to that, but I'll save that for another time.

So as I do everyday, I left my house in the afternoon to pick up my son from school. We had errands to run so we didn't get back until late afternoon. When I walked through my door, I noticed I had a message, so I pushed the button and listened.

"Hello, Susan? This is Deval Patrick."

Uh....WHAT?

My first thought was that it was a robo-call, but he mentioned my name twice, so unless they've seriously improved the ability to personalize robo-calls, this was no robo-call.

He very kindly went on to thank me for my work in helping to organize our caucus here in Townsend and to let me know that due to late caucuses and more reports coming in, he had actually done better than the 2/3 originally reported by the Globe. He left his number and asked me to call him back, if I had a moment.

Sure, I have a moment. I called him back, but he had already left for the day, so I left him a message to congratulate him on his success at the caucuses and to thank him for his call and to let him know that we're working hard out here in Townsend for his campaign, and we will continue to do that.

If anyone needs more proof of the difference between the campaigns, I think this pretty much says it all. It's not even the phone call. For all I know, the campaign just took a random sampling of town organizers to call -- I doubt that, but it's possible. The point is that Deval Patrick understands and appreciates who is doing a lot of the work in this campaign.

Tom Reilly on the other hand, is working hard to avoid getting too close to us unwashed masses of dedicated activists. Blue Mass Group has a great post about that and how it can come back to bite a candidate in the ass later. Just who does Reilly think is going to do this work should the unthinkable happen and he gets the nomination?

All I know is that if you want a candidate with no message, but has a large bank account and has only a passing interest in being governor, then Tom Reilly's your guy. I'm sure it's easy to work on this campaign, because they aren't doing anything.

I am tired of a system that puts up candidates, not based on their vision, or their committment, or their passion, but by their bank account and their number in the potential statewide candidate's queue. I want a candidate who wants THIS job.

Deval Patrick is that candidate. He needs us, and we need him and I will work my tail off to see that he's elected.