Ex-Gov. Deval Patrick launches presidential bid highlighting his South Side Chicago roots

WASHINGTON — Jumping in late, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick kicked off a Democratic presidential bid Thursday, throwing a spotlight on growing up poor on Chicago’s South Side.

Patrick, the first African-American Massachusetts governor, leaned on his biography as he launched a 2020 race some of his rivals have been running for almost a year. He filed papers to get on the New Hampshire ballot on Thursday, a day before the deadline.

On Thursday morning, Patrick, 63, focused on his hardscrabble South Side roots in his announcement video.

“I used to be governor of Massachusetts, but that’s not where I started,” Patrick said.

“I grew up on the South Side of Chicago. I lived there with my grandparents, my mother and sister in our grandparents’ two-bedroom tenement, some of that time on welfare. I went to big, broken, overcrowded public schools.

“Still, my grandmother used to tell us we were not poor, just broke, because broke, she said, is temporary. Through the love and support of family, great teachers, adults in the neighborhood and in church, I learned to look up, not down, to hope for the best and work for it.”

Patrick a year ago rejected a 2020 bid because his wife, Diane, now cancer-free, was diagnosed with uterine cancer. He has only weeks before the Feb. 3 kick-off presidential vote in Iowa followed by the Feb. 10 New Hampshire balloting and later in February, Nevada and South Carolina.

His entry comes as ex-Vice President Joe Biden leads in many polls but is seen by some influential Democrat donors and activists as slowly imploding. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren are the other frontrunners as South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is surging.

Patrick is betting on doing well in neighboring New Hampshire, within the Boston television market. But Warren and Sanders share that regional turf. If Patrick comes out of New Hampshire with a weak showing, it will be hard to recoup in the delegate-rich March primaries.

PATRICK’S CHICAGO STORY

I interviewed Patrick in 2011 about his South Side youth. As I wrote then, his family was so poor he was born in an apartment on 79th and Calumet on July 31, 1956. He was swaddled and placed in a turkey pan and placed in an oven — the door left open — to keep him warm, he told me.

More from that 2011 column: His mother, Emily, was forced to move in with her parents in a flat at 54th and Wabash after his father, known as Pat, a sax player, left the family for New York when Patrick was 5. Patrick’s grandfather was a janitor at the old South Shore Bank, at 71st and Jeffrey.

He worshiped at the Cosmopolitan Community Church at 53rd and Wabash. He attended the Mary C. Terrell School at the Robert Taylor Homes through sixth grade, then the DuSable Upper Grade Center — where his life changed.

At DuSable UGC, a teacher, Darla Weissenberg, saw his promise and led him to a scholarship for Milton Academy outside of Boston, the same prep school Gov. J.B. Pritzker attended. After undergraduate and law school degrees from Harvard, Patrick remained in Massachusetts.

In 2015, ex-Mayor Rahm Emanuel tapped Patrick to serve as a senior adviser to the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force, created in the wake of the furor over a white police officer’s October 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald.

OBAMA FOUNDATION BOARD

Patrick just cut ties to Bain & Company, where he was a partner, and CBS News, where he was a contributor. A friend of former President Barack Obama, Patrick will quit by the end of the year the Obama Presidential Foundation board. Foundation CEO David Simas was Patrick’s deputy chief of staff for several years when he was governor.

Patrick was in Chicago for the Obama Foundation Summit last month. Obama was back in Chicago on Monday for a dinner at Gibson’s Italia in the West Loop with some foundation staffers and board members. Though Obama was there, Patrick did not attend the Tuesday foundation board meeting at the 300 E. Randolph offices of board chair Marty Nesbitt.

Patrick told Obama about his White House bid Wednesday, the Boston Globe first reported. Obama is remaining neutral in the primary.

Patrick was elected to the first of two terms in 2006. He used a ”Together We Can” slogan with the themes of his aspirational campaign echoed in Obama’s 2008 bid — not surprising since they both used David Axelrod and David Plouffe, key players in Obama’s first White House run. Plouffe is also on the Obama Foundation board.

Sydney Asbury, who was Patrick’s 2010 campaign manager, told the Chicago Sun-Times Patrick “has the potential to be aspirational without being offensive to corporate America. He is a unifier and that has been a message in his 2006 and 2010 gubernatorial campaigns and will likely be a message you hear in the presidential campaign.”

Asbury added, “I only wish he had jumped into this race twelve months ago. Much of the magic of the Deval Patrick campaign was how he built a strong grassroots organization, and I fear there is not enough time to do this in this race.”