Politics & Power Quote by Deval Patrick

Deval Patrick’s line lands as a quiet indictment of a political culture that prizes cleverness over legitimacy. “Drained” is the tell: common sense isn’t merely absent, it’s been extracted, deliberately, by a system that rewards performance and punishes plain talk. He’s not romanticizing some lost golden age; he’s describing an incentive structure where the smartest move is often the most cynical one, and where policy becomes secondary to positioning.

The pairing of “tactics and games” is doing heavy work. Tactics aren’t inherently bad; they’re the tools of governance. By yoking them to games, Patrick suggests a shift from strategy in service of outcomes to maneuvering in service of winning. The subtext is that politics has become legible mainly to insiders: consultants, donors, operatives, the people fluent in the rules. Everyone else is treated as audience rather than participant.

Then comes the warning disguised as empathy: “good people check out and give up.” That phrase flatters the disengaged even as it indicts the system that alienates them. It’s also an argument about democratic capacity. When decent, capable citizens disengage, the remaining field tilts toward the relentless and the extreme, the actors who don’t mind the game because they’re built for it. Patrick, a reform-minded Democrat with an Obama-era belief in civic renewal, is gesturing at the larger crisis of trust: polarization and procedural hardball don’t just stall legislation; they corrode the social contract that makes governing possible in the first place.