A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [62]
Early in the primary race, there were attempts to embarrass us about a house we were building in western Massachusetts on land we had owned for many years. Aerial photographs of the construction appeared in the newspapers with exaggerated claims about the scope of the project and false charges that we had clear-cut a large swath of forested mountainside. One candidate called the house the “Taj Deval.” It was as if I had made some breach with the public—as if Ted Kennedy or Mitt Romney or John Kerry could own a nice home, but not Deval Patrick. I considered what the fuss said about the state of politics and the character of my opponents, and said so. Diane found herself suddenly embarrassed about a project we had dreamt about and worked toward for decades.
That controversy passed, but others followed. My Republican opponent wanted to portray me as “soft on crime” because, while at the Legal Defense Fund, I had helped a man convicted of murdering a policeman appeal his death sentence. She ran an attack ad that asked, “While lawyers have a right to defend admitted cop-killers, do we really want one as our governor?” (I assume she meant, do we want “such a lawyer as our governor,” not a cop-killer.) In another matter, I had urged Massachusetts to conduct a DNA test on a convicted rapist whose guilt seemed in doubt. So another attack ad cast me as a friend of sexual predators and played into racist fears about black men and white women: The camera followed a woman walking through a dark garage, then viewers heard an interview with me in which I described the prisoner, with whom I had exchanged letters, as “thoughtful.” The voiceover said, “Have you ever heard a woman compliment a rapist?” (For the record, the DNA test confirmed the man’s guilt.) I had a campaign staff and a cadre of energetic volunteers to help me with this nonsense, but it took its toll.
The most egregious ploy occurred three weeks before the general election, when the Boston Herald published a story about my brother-in-law; thirteen years earlier, he had pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting my sister. After serving a short jail sentence, the two reconciled and moved to Massachusetts with their children to be near us. They became deacons in their church, live a deeply religious life, work hard, bought and refurbished a home, and raised two wonderful children who are a constant presence in our lives. The article said that my brother-in-law had unlawfully failed to register with the state’s Sex Offender Registry Board, a fact that could have been published only if the Board had unlawfully disclosed that information to the newspaper. The claim was wrong regardless; as a court later confirmed, he did not have to register. But the article embarrassed my sister and brother-in-law publicly, exposed their children to information they had not known, and cost my brother-in-law his job and his family’s health benefits. For a time, it ruined their lives. As USA Today wrote about the episode, “How sick is this?”
I was often asked how I felt about these and other sordid political tactics and what impact they had on me. But I was never asked what impact they had on my wife. Political spouses are often forgotten. I worried about these ads politically, but Diane absorbed them personally. I knew the campaign was exacting a toll on her, but I did not appreciate how deeply. She was angry that my character had been called into question, that our privacy had been invaded unnecessarily, and that good people we loved had been damaged.
We were all under a lot of stress, and I assumed that this was typical in a campaign. But Diane’s frustrations came to a boil when she was on a business trip in California and she received word that the Boston Globe was going to publish a story alleging that years