AmeriQuestions

Frank Phillips wrote a perfectly good piece in the Globe the other day, pointing out that as Deval Patrick's campaign steps up its attempts to portray Charlie Baker as an insurance-industry corporate hack, one could legitimately say, in the sandbox of politics, that Baker is rubber and Patrick is glue, and if one's a hack then the other's a bigger one.

It's true; Patrick is essentially a corporate boardroom guy, and it's more than fair to portray him that way. You'll recall that I suggested that Tim Cahill portray both Baker and Patrick as out-of-touch rich corporate hacks. 

Plus, Patrick was on the board of AmeriQuest, easily pilloried as a scummy exploiter of the common people -- and made a gross error in judgment, early in his administration, by placing a call to a CitiBank exec at the behest of AmeriQuest.

All fair game. But, likely not very effective because once a guy's been governor for a while people pretty much aren't interested in rehashing his prior history, unless there's some new revelation about it. Yeah, we all knew he was a corporate boardroom hack four years ago; what's that got to do with whether to re-elected him?

The Baker campaign -- and others, like Red Mass Group -- want to push this into the campaign conversation; I don't think it's going to work. They can claim all they want that the Phillips article "raises new questions," but not any relevant ones that I can see. They can insinuate that somehow AmeriQuest's contribution to the Democratic Governors Association in 2006 was Patrick directing money to his own future campaign, but that's old soggy stuff. 

Again, I think all of this is legitimate criticism of Deval Patrick -- criticism that I've made myself at times. But less than two weeks to the election, it's pretty clear that voters know what they think of Patrick, for good or ill, and I don't see this stuff making any significant difference.