For Obama, Patrick, the figures matter most

In the heat of his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama echoed - without credit - words previously uttered by his friend Deval Patrick, the Democratic governor of Massachusetts. At the time, Obama was fending off charges from rival Hillary Rodham Clinton's camp that his candidacy was merely about words.

"Don't tell me words don't matter," Obama said in what proved to be an almost verbatim lift from an earlier Patrick riff.

" 'I have a dream' - just words? 'We hold these truths to be self evident' . . . just words? 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself.' Just words?"

Not that Patrick gave any sign of holding this against Obama, who's his friend, one-time fellow Chicagoan, and fellow client of political guru David Axelrod. Last year, the Bay State governor even suggested that the insistence of Republicans on obstructing the president's agenda was "almost at the level of sedition." Patrick later called this word choice "a rhetorical flourish."

Now, both Patrick and Obama have reached a point where the words matter less than the figures.

While Obama seeks to persuade through his pitch for a spending freeze, Patrick is drawing attention with harsh number-crunching of his own.

Details differ from one executive branch to another and from one state to the next. But as much as Democratic New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo confronts some of the same hard choices as Republican Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, he's also in the same boat as Patrick.

There are distinctions for sure, but together, the three don't sound all that far off, at least not as much as agents of the major parties would have you believe.

If you think any of these executives are exempt from showing a squeeze of public dollars, consider the recent actions of Patrick, purported Tax-achusetts liberal, on pensions. By all accounts, he's proposed an overhaul that includes increasing the retirement age for employees and capping the total amount of a pension payout. It also sounds like he's looking to stop double-dipping.

Provisions in his plan, Patrick declared Tuesday, "are absolutely necessary to reinforce to the public that state government continues to be focused on their business and not on personal gain."

They're talking about saving $5 billion over the next 30 years.

Patrick's actions on an upcoming budget also ring familiar. He's called for a 7 percent cut in aid to municipalities, although urging a hike in funds for schools and roads.

It marks an interesting bend in Patrick's story line as governor. He got off to a fiscally controversial start in 2007, drawing darts over a taxpayer-funded Cadillac Escalade and spending a reported $10,000 on new office drapes, later to be refunded. He also helped boost the sales tax by 25 percent. Patrick was re-elected anyway last year after touting hard choices.

Last week, Bloomberg News even quoted Axelrod as saying: "How the governor approached that race is a prototype in a way for us."

Maybe his top candidate will say next year: "Don't tell me numbers don't matter."