BOSTON — “Are we fired up? Ready to go?” a woman yelled inside a steamy room here on the edge of Boston.
“We are fired up!” the candidate roared back from the stage, arousing chants of “S?, se puede” from some of the 300 people who hooted and hollered and turned this bill-signing ceremony into a campaign rally.
This was not Barack Obama circa 2008. It was Gov. Deval L. Patrick this month. And if he sounded suspiciously like the president, it was not by accident.
Many of the top strategists in Obama’s political circle are helping to orchestrate Patrick’s reelection campaign, and they are looking to his contest for clues to what might work for the president in 2012.
Friends for two decades, Obama and Patrick ran as optimistic outsiders who would take on the old way of doing things. Their politics are so in sync that in 2008, Obama borrowed Patrick’s rhetoric to the point that Hillary Rodham Clinton, his opponent in the Democratic primary, accused him of plagiarism.
Full Story: Massachusetts Gov. Patrick’s reelection campaign a test case for Obama in 2012
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