February 26, 2007
Decorators-in-Chief Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:10 PM EST There is a heated controversy unfolding up here in snowy Massachusetts regarding the personal expenditures of Governor Deval Patrick. Inaugurated last month, Patrick is the first Democratic governor of this state since Michael Dukakis. He is only the second African-American governor ever elected in the United States. He was elected after running an insurgent, liberal primary bid against two better-known candidates and then dispatching the extremely well financed incumbent lieutenant governor in the general election. Patrick is apparently just as prone to amateur mistakes as other new executives. It seems that he has been spending an awful lot of money on private perks, like $12,000 drapes for his office and a $72,000-a-year private secretary for his wife, who is a partner at Boston’s biggest law firm. In the midst of a media firestorm, Patrick backed off of these expenses, agreeing to cover the cost of drapes himself and paying, out of pocket, for the difference in price between his new Cadillac and the previous governor’s car, a Crown Victoria. He also apologized for his poor judgment, although obviously without enthusiasm. The media’s furor has not totally subsided, though, as yesterday’s edition of the Boston Herald bore a caustic editorial from the conservative firebrand Howie Carr, titled “Draped in Controversy, Is It Curtains for Deval?” As one would expect, Patrick is not the first newly elected politician to stumble over such expenditures as these. When Bill Clinton was elected President, he and the First Lady planned a $400,000 renovation of the presidential quarters in the White House. To make matters worse, they hired an unknown decorator from Arkansas named Kaki Hockersmith to oversee the renovation. Given the decorator’s obscurity, newspapers remarked at the time, “the big price tag seems surprising.” Like so many questionable things they did in office, the Clintons got away with this. But the public wasn’t happy about it. The Clintons’ predecessors in the White House, the Bushes, were not terribly interested in redecorating, but the Reagans most certainly were. The fortieth First Family, however, approached the task of redecoration rather differently from the Clintons (and Patricks). They set up a private fund under the supervision of Nancy Reagan’s chief of staff, Peter McCoy, to pay for alterations to the presidential residence and raised nearly $400,000 for the project. During a one-month period in early 1981, 167 donors contributed $375,529 for the White House remodeling, which McCoy claimed “was designed to re-establish the dwelling, the edifice,” and would benefit future presidential couples as well as the Reagans. The Reagans’ approach was not without its own problems. The private fund, while allowing the Reagans to refurbish their living quarters without using taxpayer money, also provided a convenient way for wealthy Americans to give indirect personal gifts to the President. While McCoy asserted that the project was intended to benefit the White House, and not just the Reagans, it was clear who the fund’s most immediate beneficiaries would be. Furthermore, the names of McCoy’s 167 donors were not made public, which led to complaints about a lack of transparency. If political executives want to redecorate their living and work spaces, they obviously have to negotiate a tricky set of public interests in order to do so. Reading over the Deval Patrick affair, I have to wonder why more leaders can’t, in this regard, be a little more like George H. W. and Barbara Bush—and leave the decorating to the next guy.
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