Politics & Power Quote by Deval Patrick

Patrick’s line is a piece of aspirational branding that doubles as a gentle rebuke. By framing government as “what we are at our best,” he dodges the usual zero-sum fight over whether government is inherently good or bad and instead makes it a mirror: if the state looks broken, it’s because we’ve accepted something beneath our own standards. That move is politically shrewd. It flatters the public without pandering, casting civic competence as a shared identity rather than a partisan program.

The sequence matters: “Smart, efficient, pragmatic and compassionate” is a coalition in four adjectives. “Smart” speaks to technocratic credibility; “efficient” concedes the taxpayer’s suspicion that bureaucracy wastes time and money; “pragmatic” signals distance from ideological purity tests; “compassionate” prevents the first three from sliding into cold managerialism. He’s stitching together a permission structure for liberal governance in an era when “big government” had become an easy punchline. The subtext is: we can do ambitious things, but we’ll do them like adults.

Contextually, it fits Patrick’s post-Obama moment in Democratic politics, when candidates tried to reclaim government as a tool for problem-solving rather than a symbol of overreach. The rhetoric is clean and modern: no soaring abstractions, no culture-war bait, just a promise of competent care. It’s also a dare to voters: if you want better government, you have to demand better politics, not just smaller ones.