Mea Culpa of the week.

I want to first of all remind all those who think we at masspurgation.com have ever given, are currently giving, or intend at any point in the future to give Governor Patrick a free ride that we were among the first to decry his excessive cuddliness, and the only, so far as I know, to call Devalheads "slugsacks."

Despite acknowledging that he was the cutest candidate in the race, an uncontroversial observation, we never romanticized Patrick, unafraid to openly acknowledge his bullet-head and nasally voice, too, when they were only being whispered about in the salons of Back Bay.

As the campaign heated up we wondered aloud about "this gloating, cult-leaderish version of Deval Patrick," and called him "creepy." Nor did we conveniently ignore his passivity in the campaign as he stood on the sidelines during televised debates watching Mihos and Ross feed on Healey like gulls on a beached medusa.

We looked askance at the supercynical last-minute laying on of hands.

None of this kept us from endorsing him, nor should it have, nor do we regret having done so. Everything in politics is relative. You go to the State House with the gubernatorial candidate you've got.

As I said way back in August, "The question for Deval is, can he leverage his charisma to convince the legislature to make changes once in office?" We're starting to get the answer to that, aren't we?

In December, with the great hue and cry over his million-dollar inaugural fête, I observed (and here it is worth quoting myself at length):

I have a feeling we will be seeing a lot more of the impatient, pissy, and petulant Patrick that we got mere glimpses of during the campaign (usually whenever he wasn't being adequately adored). And his administration is sure to be less open than he has unwisely given some reason to expect. Deals don't go down in public. That's what we have back rooms for. And he's going to get grief for that, too.

My point in collecting these observations here is to show why I am neither surprised nor disappointed with Patrick at this point. Those who are either want to be or want too badly not to be.

Patrick's character was not hidden on the campaign trail. It was not out of character for him to spend a million dollars on his inaugural, nor was it inappropriate. Those on the left and right who decried his profligacy were, again, either supercynical or hypernaive. Neither camp deserves the attention they're getting right now.

Still, DeVille- and Drapegate were fair game, and though blown all out of proportion the coverage was partly payback for the fuzzy, feel-good populism Patrick ran on. Politics is full of such ironies, and we can appreciate them on one level—they should bring us all back down to earth.

After all, governance is not blowjobs-and-rainbows, it's bore-and-gore.

Will Governor Patrick continue to stumble from one "misstep" to the next, issuing his weekly mea culpa on schedule (maybe he should have a weekly fireside mea culpa on the radio)? Whenever there's anything like a state budget at stake, he can count on higher scrutiny, that's for sure. So I think we'll be hearing more mea culpas in the near future.

What Patrick's learning about Massachusetts' Democrats is the old "with friends like these" lesson. Unlike how Healey portrayed the party (not to mention that billion dollar surplus she claimed we had), Massachusetts is obviously not a state where party affiliation matters all that much when it comes to battles between the executive and legislature.