This interview was conducted by the editorial board of The New York Times, which will announce its Democratic primary endorsement on Jan. 19.

Is Deval Patrick simply too far behind the pack? The former Massachusetts governor, who joined the Democratic primary field only in mid-November, swatted back any such worry as he made the case for his candidacy before the Times editorial board [Related: What Is an Editorial Board?] on Dec. 12. Mr. Patrick argued that the path to the nomination was still wide open, especially for a contender with his particular experience in business and government.

Time will tell. Mr. Patrick, only the country’s second black elected governor, spoke about race in America today, trying to reduce the cost of public education and what the nation can learn from “PatrickCare.” Less fleshed out were his foreign policy views, and he struggled to address some of the more contentious episodes of his governorship.

Here is a transcript, with annotations in blue, of the 80-minute discussion, which was filmed for a special episode of “The Weekly,” The Times’s TV show on FX and Hulu. The transcript is unedited. [Related: Learn more about “The Choice”, or meet the editorial board members]

Kathleen Kingsbury: Many of us know quite a bit about you, so we’re just going to jump into questions if that’s O.K. Michelle is going to kick us off.

Ms. Kingsbury served as a deputy managing editor and deputy editorial page editor of The Boston Globe covering Deval Patrick’s gubernatorial administration in Massachusetts. Other members of the board have also covered Mr. Patrick as reporters and editors at The Globe.

Michelle Cottle: Starting out, we want to go basic because at this point, pretty much everyone at this table is polling about the same in this race. We’re down at zero. So what is that made you look at the field and go, “I really need to jump in”?

Mr. Patrick entered the race late, on Nov. 14. He has consistently polled at around 0 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight.

I was looking more at the country than at the field. I thought, I have felt for some while, deep gratitude for my own American journey, coming from poverty to … I’ve had the range of life and leadership experiences that I’ve had, and I have been concerned about the accessibility of that dream for fewer and fewer people in more and more places. And I think it was true, you know, when I first left the South Side of Chicago at 14 in 1970, and I think it is a deeper concern and ought to be for all of us, because I think the American dream is defining and worth fighting for.

Mr. Patrick was raised by a single mother on the South Side of Chicago and left when he got a scholarship to Milton Academy, a prep school in Milton, Mass.

And that’s the reason that I looked hard at getting in a little bit more than a year ago. Some of you may know this, but we were two or three weeks from an announcement. We had a whole rollout plan and everything, and my wife was diagnosed with uterine cancer. That’s the sort of thing that just brings your feet back to earth. We paid attention to her and to that. I was just saying outside that when we celebrated 35 years of marriage in May, she was cancer free. She’s doing great, she’s fired up. I continued to watch the field as it was evolving, and I have a lot of friends in the field and I’ve been talking to them throughout their campaigns. But it’s still true, and I say it as humbly as a candidate can, there isn’t anyone with the range of life and leadership experiences that I have had in the field with the problem solving experiences I have had in government, in the private sector, here in the United States and overseas.

In late 2018, Mr. Patrick announced that he would not enter the presidential race and disclosed that his wife had been diagnosed with Stage 1 uterine cancer. He said she had undergone surgery and had a good prognosis.

I think I’ve learned from that. That to get change that lasts, you have to be willing to bring other people in. Not to make the agenda any less ambitious, but to get solutions that are the success points and bragging points for a whole lot of people. You have to make space for people, including folks who may not agree with you. This is a moment where we can’t miss, beyond replacing the incumbent president, the willingness of people to invest in their own aspirations in our government, I think is right on the edge.

MC: Now, you talked to President Obama back ——

Mr. Patrick and Barack Obama have long had a close relationship. Mr. Patrick consulted Mr. Obama the day before he jumped into the 2020 race but said the substance of their conversation was confidential.

I did.

MC: Did he say anything that tipped you over, convinced you this needed to happen?

That’s a nice try. No, I’m not going to talk about the substance or too much of the substance of our conversations because that’s why we get to keep having these conversations.

I will say this, though. I talked to him a lot before I was ready to go the last time, and really just a little when I had made a decision to get in, so close to the time I was ready to announce. He was very balanced and he talks to everybody. He talks to all of the candidates, you probably know.

President Obama has not endorsed a Democrat in the primary race, staying notably mum on his former vice president, Joe Biden. He has said that Democrats should not focus so much on the “tactical disagreements” among the candidates, and should “chill out about the candidates, but gin up about the prospect of rallying behind” the nominee.

Jesse Wegman: So what do you think you’re missing from the current group of candidates?

Well, some of what I said, I think that we are a very divided country. We were divided, in my opinion, before President Trump was elected. I think the one truth he spoke in 2016 is that conventional or establishment politics wasn’t working very well for most people. I think that’s the same truth that Senator Sanders spoke. I think it’s the same truth that Barack Obama spoke a decade and a half before. And I think it is still true.

So to the extent that we — and I very much believe we need to ask people to re-engage in their own civic and political future — that we in a democracy get the government we deserve. And we didn’t have to actually deliver on the stuff we’re talking about. A lot of the policy choices, particularly in reforms that other candidates have talked about, we’ve done in Massachusetts. So I think it was some — a little of the sense of practical experience that I felt was missing and still do.

Watch a special endorsement episode of “The Weekly” FX Hulu

This video excerpt has been edited by “The Weekly.”

KK: Why do you think President Obama was unable to heal those divisions if he was talking about it when he was running?

Well, I think there are a lot of reasons. I think frankly he healed more division than we give him credit for. Do you remember … correct me on this, I think I’m right in remembering, that Leader McConnell made his comment about the No. 1 objective being making Obama a one-term president before the inauguration. I think I’m right about that.

In an interview with National Journal in October 2010, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

JW: I think that’s right.

Now remember what was happening then, right? We were in the midst of a financial crisis. The bottom was falling out of the global economy. And that’s [Mr. McConnell’s] answer at a time of national crisis. And it made me think it might be that the other side appreciated the significance of this moment better than we did. Because the moment we were celebrating, a lot of folks were celebrating, was that United States had elected its first African-American president. I think what Leader McConnell recognized is that we had just elected a bridge builder, and that for them to drive their agenda, they needed to make sure that bridge was burned as early as possible.

MC: Now, I’ve heard you a couple of times sort the primary field into two categories: One, those who are too divisive, and two, those who aren’t providing enough inspiration, or at one point I think you said were providing nostalgia. So unpack that a little bit for me. To Jesse’s point with the lack of inspiration, do you think they’re not presenting enough big ideas? Or is this more a style, a question of passionate tone?

In defending his late entry to the race, Mr. Patrick said the rest of the field was either too focused on nostalgia or big ideas and “neither of those, it seems to me, seizes the moment to pull the nation together.”

Well, you know, I’m really not interested in being appended on the other candidates. I can talk about my campaign.

MC: It’s why you got in, to some degree.

It’s not all of why I got in. I was thinking about getting in before the others got in. So don’t forget what I said earlier. And I still think frankly the path I thought was there, when we resolved in November to go ahead, is wider than I thought it was. We’ve had candidates spend a lot of time and a lot of money in the early states, and it’s not settled. And the polls tell part of the picture, but they don’t really tell yet. To me, they say more about name recognition. I got work to do in that respect. There’s no doubt about it. But a sense that we are engaged and energized when you’re out on the ground, not yet.

KK: Do you mind if I … Can we turn to your vision, if you don’t mind?

Mm-hmm.

KK: We’ve had the advantage of seeing most of the other candidates on a debate stage at this point. Can we just run through what seemed to be the biggest talking points in the campaign?

You’re going to ask me to raise my hand?

KK: Exactly.

No.

KK: No, but could you give us the one- to two-sentence answer for what seemed to be the issues that are getting traction? Do you support “Medicare for all”?

Medicare for all is a slogan we’ve been using for a whole bunch of different things. What I support is a public option. Whether that public option is Medicare or not, I’m totally open to that. But the point is to get health care to everybody that is affordable. I don’t support eliminating the private insurance industry, and it’s not because I have any particular fondness for the private insurance industry. It’s just I think you get a creative tension in having private insurance having to figure out how to compete with a lower-cost alternative that is publicly paid for, and you get some innovation on the Medicare side, where CMS is going to have to think about how to make its offerings, its quality, comparable and as broad as the private insurance industry. And that’s a good thing.

Mr. Patrick served on the board of American Well Corporation, a telemedicine company, as well as the pharmaceutical firm Global Blood Therapeutics. Read The Wall Street Journal’s examination of his ties to the health care industry here.

We as citizens, I think, are hungry for innovation in public policy in the same way we see it in the private sector. But if you want successful innovation, the environment has to tolerate failure. But politics punishes failure. So we get less innovation than we’d like. On health care, I know you said one or two sentences, but just can I say a word more?

KK: It’s okay. Please. I’ve got a long list.

I got time. I got time. So in Massachusetts, we had a broad coalition of policymakers, providers, patient advocates, interfaith leaders, all kinds of folks who came together to invent health care reform and then stuck together because we kept learning things. Governor Romney signed the bill. It took effect the day I took office. We should call it PatrickCare, by the way, not RomneyCare. And we got to 98.5 percent insured in short order.

RomneyCare is the name given to Gov. Mitt Romney’s health care reform laws passed in Massachusetts in 2006. It was used as a model for the Affordable Care Act, and it is believed that about 97.2 percent of people in the state are insured because of the law. Mr. Patrick oversaw its implementation and signed legislation that aimed to keep its costs in check.

But I signed, I don’t know, three, four, maybe five major health care reform bills after the first one. Why? Because we kept learning things and we kept trying to improve on the strength of what we learned. And that’s what it’s going to have to be like at the federal.

Mr. Patrick signed major health care reform bills that capped annual growth in health care costs to the state’s gross domestic product and imposed surcharges on insurers and providers to fund the costs of reform. He also expanded mandatory coverage of addiction treatment and signed a bill limiting protests near abortion clinics.

KK: Would you push for a wealth tax?

Senator Sanders, Senator Warren and Mr. Steyer have been vocal proponents of a wealth tax. Mayor Buttigieg said he is open to the idea; Senator Klobuchar calls it unrealistic.

Well, my answer is that’s not the answer from my perspective, mostly because I don’t think wealth is the issue. It’s greed. I do think we need massive simplification of the individual or the personal income tax system. We ought to treat all income as income. We have to just make it a lot simpler. On the corporate side, even the business communities didn’t want the rates to go that low. So I think those rates probably need to go up by as much as four or five points.

In late December, Mr. Patrick said he opposes a wealth tax because it has been tried in other places and proved unsuccessful.

But the work isn’t finished unless you eliminate the loopholes, because most of those were in place around arguments that the rate before then was too high. So that work is unfinished. What is attractive to me about thinking about the frame of a wealth tax, is to think about it as a one-time assessment against things like bringing the deficit down, eliminating student debt.

As a practical matter on an ongoing basis, I’m not quite sure it works. But you know what? You have to acknowledge the frustration and resentment that a lot of people feel about where we are and how we got here. And that’s to my point about greed.

When I was growing up on the South Side of Chicago on welfare, nobody gave us the message we were to resent rich people. It was about, “Here’s the stuff you have to do to get to be that.” The things you had to do and the rules you had to abide by to be that have all been compromised in my time. There’s a whole lot we can do around that. And that’s what our opportunity agenda is about. You’ll hear more about that. It’s about investing in education, in innovation, which is a strategy, a movement, a representation of how the economy, the knowledge based economy is becoming and how we can own it as a nation instead of being afraid of it, and infrastructure, which is the unglamorous work that government does that enables all the rest.

KK: How do you feel about free college tuition?

I think that public colleges and universities should be much, much more affordable. By the way, from my experience in Massachusetts, that has to do with the public coming out of public college and university. We tried to get to a 50/50 contribution in exchange for freezes. We didn’t get much further than that, and I think it slipped back in the years since. But one of the things I’m interested in is this notion of national service, what General McChrystal has been working on and has proposed, and that I’ve co-chaired with him for a whole lot of other reasons. But alongside that, I love the idea of having a year or two of tuition relief in exchange for your time contributing to the common good.

Along with Gen. Stanley McChrystal and four others, Mr. Patrick is a co-chair of the campaign Serve America Together, which calls for federal legislation creating a universal national service program.

KK: If you were a member of the House of Representatives, would you vote for impeachment this week?

The House of Representatives voted on Mr. Trump’s impeachment on Dec. 18, two days after Mr. Patrick’s interview with the board.

Of course. Have you seen the record?

---

KK: I have. Do you support the Green New Deal?

The Times editorial board called on the House to impeach Mr. Trump in a Dec. 14 editorial, “Impeach.”

Well, there’s another slogan that captures a lot of things. I can tell you in Massachusetts, we joined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative began in 2009 and is a cap-and-trade system applying to carbon dioxide emissions from power plans generating 25 megawatts of electricity and more. It includes nine states in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.

KK: RGGI [pronounced “Reggie”].

We use those, which is, you probably know, regional cap and trade system. We use those proceeds to invest in energy efficiency. We’re number one in energy efficiency. We closed the last two coal power plants. We created a statewide and then with regional variations, a resilience and recovery plan invested behind that. And we stimulated a clean tech sector with an emphasis on solar, but alongside wind and efficiency, which was one of the sectors whose jobs helped lift us out of recession. Sorry, again?

KK: You could never really build the wind industry in Massachusetts in the ——

Developers have been interested in harnessing the wind off Massachusetts’s coast for years, but many projects have stalled, in part because of concerns about impacts on the fishing industry and opposition from the Kennedy and Koch families.

No, it’s happened. We couldn’t get one in ——

KK: The water.

Right, on Cape Cod. The funny thing about wind in Massachusetts is that all the folks down on the Cape think wind turbines in the Berkshires is a great idea. And in the Berkshires, they think it’s a great idea back down the Cape. We did build the, the first of all, the national wind blade testing facility in Charlestown. We built the port infrastructure in New Bedford to service the offshore wind industry. And that’s why the two projects south of the Vineyard now are being approved, because there’s a mechanism behind that to support the construction.

A wind project near Martha’s Vineyard will include up to 100 turbines, 15 miles south of the island.

KK: We’re going to have a lot of follow-up questions about this. I just want to kind of get through the list. Do you support decriminalizing the border?

Crossing the border unauthorized is a crime, but the law prohibiting it typically isn’t enforced and violators are deported under civil procedures. Senator Warren, Mr. Buttigieg and Mr. Steyer have voiced support for decriminalizing border crossings, largely because of a push by Julián Castro, who dropped out of the Democratic race on Jan. 2.

No. Should we say more about immigration? Because there’s a lot more to it than that.

KK: We’re going to get to it, I promise.

Do you all have a script? Is that what this is?

MC: We have questions.

KK: We have questions.

Are they consensus questions that you guys all ——

The editorial board spent the weeks leading up to endorsement interviews reviewing the candidates’ platforms and histories to prepare tailored questions for each.

Brent Staples: You don’t get to ask that.

I don’t get to ask that?

KK: You can tell us about Obama, and we’ll tell you all about it.

Got to turn off the cameras, though. [LAUGHTER]

KK: Would you push for reparations?

Senator Booker introduced legislation calling on the federal government to form a commission studying reparations. A number of other candidates, including Senator Sanders, Senator Warren and Senator Klobuchar, have signed on.

Look, reparations don’t mean a thing without reconciliation in my view. That’s another one, by the way, where people mean a lot of different things by the use of a single term. We have a lot of unfinished business in this country, and I don’t think it’s going to get resolved by just writing a check. When I say just, I don’t mean to diminish the continuing economic hardships that have their roots in slavery and a lot of other bad decisions that we’ve made over time. But we need to understand that history. We need to confront that history so that it isn’t just about an economic shift. It’s really about justice.

When the government changed in South Africa, of course they had the benefit of having a saint for president. But nobody was more entitled to their rage than black South Africans. And the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was about making a history of fact about what happened, having folks who were the perpetrators on the record talking about that and engaging and acknowledging that, I think was enormously important.

Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s president in 1994. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to investigate human rights violations perpetrated during apartheid and its findings were presented to President Mandela in 1998.

We don’t and have not done that in this country. I heard Governor Haley say just the other day that the — she referred to how Dylann Roof had hijacked the Confederate flag, which was otherwise a symbol of service and sacrifice. No. No, it’s not. It’s a symbol of division and hate and intimidation and it has been flown that way in many, many places to make people like me afraid.

In an interview with Glenn Beck released in December, Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor, said the meaning of the Confederate flag had been “hijacked” by Dylann Roof, who killed nine people in a shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015.

And so, that’s an example of what I’m talking about. We need to face the — I don’t want to seem to be pandering, but the work you did in 1619, that’s huge, huge. And it was honest.

The 1619 Project is an initiative from The New York Times Magazine started in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery, which places slavery and the contributions of African-Americans at the center of the country’s historical narrative.

The Globe did a series about being black in Boston recently, unbelievably powerful.

The Spotlight Team at The Boston Globe ran a series investigating racism in Boston and exploring whether Boston remains, as it is perceived, a place unwelcoming to black people.

Watch a special endorsement episode of “The Weekly” FX Hulu

This video excerpt has been edited by “The Weekly.”

Mara Gay: What should government’s role in the reconciliation process be?

Some of it is leadership. Put the policies to one side. You may be getting at the policies. I’m not saying ignore the policies, but we have to start with what Lani Guinier used to talk about as “the conversation.” Convenings around where people can say the stuff and hear the stuff that we need to understand about our history, what it really is, what happened at the end of Reconstruction for Reconstruction to end, what the deal was. Then the concerted effort to retell the South’s story and do that in a way that doesn’t make the folks who ——

Lani Guinier was an N.A.A.C.P. attorney who gave a 1993 speech called “Seeking a Conversation on Race.”

BS: They lost the war, but they won the peace.

Well, but that doesn’t make the folks in the South feel like they are stupid or not as well-informed because they don’t understand that part of our history. I think there is a ——

BS: But they were raised — it’s just interesting that we’re starting with Reconstruction. Because even during the 2016 campaign, we saw, for example, Trump supporters in South Carolina. Some huge portion of them were pretty much stuck in the Civil War period and believed a lot of the ideology that came out of the backlash after Reconstruction. But I think that template fits the Obama period. Obama was elected ——

Mr. Trump won 54.9 percent of the vote in South Carolina. Many commentators, including The Times’s Charlie Warzel, have noted that Mr. Trump and his supporters frequently allude to the Civil War to mobilize their base.

Meaning the backlash?

BS: Yes. Obama, it was identical post-Reconstruction. Obama comes in, Mitch says, “We want him out. One-term president.” During his time in office, the number of hate groups exploded in this country. You get this whole movement, which Trump was part of. Hillary [Clinton] called it the racist birther movement, which brings us to our current president. Our current president ran for office in the most racist campaign in my lifetime, with the exception of George Wallace.

George Wallace ran for president in 1968, putting race at the center of his campaign. In 1962, he was elected governor of Alabama and famously said: “Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever.”

And wakes up every day trying to figure out how to divide us further.

BS: Yeah, and he did that. But candidates — I haven’t followed you very closely, but candidates in this period appear to me to be — they want to somehow elide that and walk by that and talk about social division. Forty-three percent of the population will accept almost anything Trump does.

On Dec. 12, 41.9 percent of the country approved of Mr. Trump’s performance, according to FiveThirtyEight.

And in fact, his racist campaign, two days before elected, I wrote a column saying that what his campaign showed was racism had a broad constituency in the United States. So how do you walk by that? How do you campaign without, without addressing that directly?

Mr. Staples’s editorial observer, “The Election That Obliterated Euphemisms,” argued that Mr. Trump’s campaign showed the broad support that persists in the country for politicians openly espousing racist and otherwise bigoted views.

First of all, I’m not walking by that. What I’m trying to say or what I should have said … as a friend of mine puts it, I am convinced, as he is, that all the racists voted for Trump. I am not convinced that all the people who voted for Trump are racist.

BS: No one who does this for a living as I do thinks that either. But people either embrace that or it did not matter to them. That’s the whole — A lot of people didn’t hear it. A lot of people embraced it. That rhetoric has a broad constituency. What do you do about that? Can you say to white people as you’re campaigning that racism is a problem? Most candidates, you only hear the word racism when the audience is black.

That hasn’t been my experience. Look, I started out as a civil rights lawyer for the Legal Defense Fund. I was the head of the civil rights division. I did civil rights when I was —

BS: My wife interviewed you many times when you were in that job.

Mr. Staples’s wife, the Rev. Julie Johnson Staples, was formerly a reporter for The New York Times, Time magazine and ABC News.

Thank you. I hope it went O.K. These issues are important to me personally. I live this life.

BS: Well, how do you talk about that?

It’s just that way, just that way. I remember being here, I don’t know, in New York probably two or three months ago. No, much more than that, six months ago in jeans and a blazer and a casual shirt and a cap in a shop walking distance from here. There were folks who came in and got waited on, and I have a backpack, same one I came in today with. And folks who walked in and got waited on by the staff walked right past me, and I could never get any attention. Even when I kept saying, “Excuse me.”

Don’t tell me racism is over. I understand that. I understand that. And I also understand that part of our healing, and it’s what I was trying to say earlier, is about convening around those issues but not — Look, there are a whole lot of people who feel that the conversation is over because you are right and righteous. To get solutions, frankly to make it possible for people to have the conversation. You have to make it possible for them to say their piece, too.

I’ve lived my whole life straddling these two worlds, or a lot of it. I remember when I left the South Side of Chicago when I was 14. I’d been in big, broken, overcrowded public schools until then. Everybody in the classroom looked just like me and was just like me. Everything was broken. I went off to Milton Academy, and everybody wasn’t.

In some ways, it felt like the price of — you know, you’re straddling these two worlds. They were interested at Milton in my life on the South Side of Chicago, but only so much. And they were interested back home, my friends and my life at Milton, but only so much. And you’re straddling these two worlds as if the price of admission to the one is rejecting the other. I had to decide who I was and be that all the time, because that was the only way for me to be able to live and move in more than one world. I think in some ways, that has been America’s struggle all along. It’s the struggle of candidates. It’s not something I’m unfamiliar with. It’s not something I have hidden from.

I ran in Massachusetts. I was told by lots of folks, not just because I was late, but because there aren’t very many — the portion of African-American voters is not very high. They’re not going to elect a black governor. I had 1 percent name recognition, 2 percent on the days when we were bragging. But I went and built bridges. And in those conversations, there were people who didn’t agree with me and didn’t like me. I didn’t get every vote. I won by 21 points, but that’s not every vote.

Mr. Patrick was seen as an unlikely candidate when he started his gubernatorial campaign in 2006, facing a businessman, Chris Gabrieli, and Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly in the Democratic primary. Mr. Patrick built strong margins in Boston and its surrounding liberal areas like Cambridge and Northampton.

But I also made clear that I understand the job, once you have it, is to serve those who vote for you and those who don’t, and the ones who just sit it out as well. So, the job or the opportunity as a leader is to bring in people who not just agree with you, people who don’t want to hear you, too, and get ——

People who don’t want to hear you, too, and get folks to turn to each other instead of on each other. We’ve had very much the opposite right now, and by the way, I have a record of doing that and some results I’m pretty proud of.

KK: So, can we actually turn, we have a couple of strategy questions that we’ll move through quickly and then we do want to talk to your record.

I don’t want to seem like I was yelling at you, but this is serious stuff.

BS: Bernie was in that seat.

Yeah. That’s right.

BS: It’s just a thought.

MC: In order to build those bridges, when you get in this light, there are logistical challenges. You may not be on the Michigan primary ballot, you’re not going to be in the debates.

Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers determined in late December that Mr. Patrick had not qualified to appear on the state’s primary ballot.

Have you seen the debates?

MC: I’ve seen too many of the debates. So, what is your path? I mean, where do you see this going? How do you plan to do this?

First of all, don’t suggest I’m not going to be on the Michigan ballot. We’re going to be on it.

MC: You’re going to fight that one?

We’re going to be on every ballot, and you’re right, we will probably not be in the December debates although I was a little snide there because as a format for communicating with voters, it’s less than satisfying.

So, we’re going to have another means. A parallel means to communicate with people. The rules will change to communicate on debate night. The rules will change in January. We will qualify. You’ll see us mainly introducing ourselves person by person, groups of voters and digital engagement and you’ll see that rolling out soon alongside the policy stuff, but we are later. We’re not late.

MC: Some of these candidates have been living in Iowa.

Well, that may be and they haven’t locked it down, have they?

MC: Not yet.

I think voters are just starting to pay attention. My reception in Iowa was very warm and as it has been in each of the early states. We’re going to compete and compete hard and we’re going to deal with the skepticism that I have faced in every campaign, every other stage of my life. There is nothing I’ve done where somebody [hasn’t] said, “You can’t do that. That’s not for you. It’s not your turn. It’s not your time.” I’m used to that, but I think what I’m asking of voters and maybe I’ll respectfully ask it of you, take a chance on your own aspirations. I read this paper every single day, every day. I know what you care about.

I know you see this nation as a place that is supposed to commit to freedom, the ingredients of which are equality, opportunity and fair play. I know you have those aspirations for this country. There isn’t anybody else in the race who has worked on those issues for his entire career in private and in the public sector and when it comes to policy, if that’s what you want to focus on, the policies we drove in Massachusetts were not perfect. We didn’t get everything right, but they were all about restoring the steps that it takes to lift yourself onto a path of economic mobility and have your shot at the American dream because it’s worth fighting for. So, that’s the point I make to voters. I’m not asking them to take a chance on me. They have the power. You have the power.

MC: You’re going to try something more unconventional than the route through. Obviously some of your competitors such as Bloomberg have just basically written off certain early states. I mean, are you looking to build grass-roots movements in particular places? Do you see your chances better at some places more than others?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, another late entry candidate, announced that he would not campaign in the first four primary states and would instead spend more than $100 million on ads, an unusual electoral strategy — especially for a race so focused on wealth inequality.

So, we have to respect the schedule, but I think the idea of saying that you’re going to ignore states is disrespectful. It’s the unseen and unheard way you feel growing up on the South Side of Chicago, frankly, where the issues are issues if at all at the time of elections and they vanish again. So, as I said, I think I may have said, we have state directors in every state. We’re building the organizations. As a practical matter, you probably see me spending more of my time proportionately in New Hampshire and South Carolina; the caucuses are different.

If New Hampshire is intimate, Iowa is granular, you know what I mean? It’s just different, but I have been urged by activists in Iowa to sort of turn it over to them and they will build it. That’s not what we’re going to do. We’ll do some hybrid of that, but that’s a very encouraging and frankly affirming thing to hear.

Iowa and New Hampshire are highly influential as the first two states to vote in the primaries. The primary electorate in both states is much whiter than the Democratic Party overall. In June, a board member, Michelle Cottle, wrote an Editorial Observer essay calling for the end of a system starting with the Iowa caucus, which she called undemocratic.

Aisha Harris: Can I quickly piggyback off that? Do you have a sense of a specific voting demographic, whether it’s young, older, poor, whatever that you are focused on that you feel like you really need to reach in order to help get yourself in the polls?

You won’t like this answer, but it’s everybody everywhere.

AH: Well, let me rephrase that. Is there a group that you think will be the most difficult for you to tackle?

No. I don’t. I mean, look, I’m not taking anyone or any vote for granted. I think the worst thing you could possibly do is to presume you get an edge in South Carolina because the black vote is so important because people sense, when you presume that, that’s sort of ——

In South Carolina, close to 30 percent of the population is black. Mr. Biden has held the lead there.

BS: Very pragmatic, too.

Well, they’re also pragmatic, but they are going to take their lead. I would caution people to take their lead from what other people tell them the outcome’s going to be.

on FiveThirtyEight, Perry Bacon Jr. argues that while the black electorate is not a monolith, black voters tend to be more pragmatic in their voting choices and want to support the candidate with the best chance of defeating Mr. Trump.

James Dao: Do you have any thoughts on why Cory Booker and Kamala Harris are not doing that well in South Carolina, according to polls, and Joe Biden is?

I’m skeptical of polls at this stage. When I’m there, many of the people I am meeting have met them as well and so far it’s been going well. I’m not going to get every vote, but I’m just, I’m skeptical of polls. I’m fond of both Senator Booker and Senator Harris. They’re friends of mine. We are in touch, in the case of Senator Booker a lot, and I think they bring a lot to public life and I think they’ve brought a lot to the race, but I don’t have an answer for you there.

KK: I want to turn to your record if that’s okay. As governor, you chose to cut the Department of Children and Families to the bone during the downturn. That launched D.C.F. into tailspin, and we saw several horrific cases of children who were under D.C.F.’s watch, but who were killed or neglected in really terrible ways. Do you have any regrets about that decision? Would you have done it differently in any way, especially around, for instance, the firing of Olga Roche?

While governor, Mr. Patrick cut funds across state government, including local aid, to fill a $329 million budgetary shortfall. The Department of Children and Families made headlines in 2013 when a child in its care disappeared. In 2014, three children under the age of 5 died, all either under the agency’s care or identified by the authorities as being possibly in danger. The three deaths involved a 4-week-old infant from Grafton, a 2-week-old infant from Fitchburg and a 5-year-old from Fitchburg.

Well, listen, first of all it’s not exactly true that we cut it to the bone. We cut everything because ——

KK: You chose to cut it over some programs that others would argue were less vital then D.C.F.

Yeah, that’s what others whose line item that isn’t would argue, then that’s how it is. It was a terrible circumstance trying to deal with the bottom falling out of the budget, and those outcomes were terrible. Interestingly, I think I’m right that there have been as many losses in the current administration with funding and the person we turn to, to reform as when I was there, but it’s a completely different conversation.

Gov. Charlie Baker, who took office in 2015, increased D.C.F.’s funding by $180 million over four years.

Today’s still the tragedy. The firing of the head is something I came to at the end because — does everyone know what you’re talking about? Should I say a little bit more about the case — because there was one particularly horrific case where a child was, as a part of the plan, was supposed to be checked on regularly and the social worker who was responsible for that lied about it, said that she was checking when she wasn’t and told her supervisor that she was lying about it and the supervisor lied about it to the supervisor’s supervisor. Then the child was lost and when we learned that, we fired the social worker and the supervisor and we reprimanded the supervisor’s supervisor and yet people wanted the head of the agency’s head on a spike.

Jeremiah Oliver, a 5-year-old from Fitchburg, vanished while under the supervision of D.C.F.; his remains were ultimately found in a suitcase on the side of a highway. Mr. Patrick at first declined the resignation offers of the agency head, Olga Roche, but later said he recognized she had to step down as a public outcry mounted against her.

KK: I mean, that was a particularly terrible situation.

That was the worst ——

KK: It was. I would agree with you, but there were several cases that happened under Olga Roche’s watch that were unbelievable from the outside. I’m sympathetic to the idea that it’s almost impossible, in a situation that D.C.F. finds itself in, to protect every child. I take that point.

They’re horrible.

KK: But I guess I’m just curious, I’m looking for a little self reflection in terms of, was there anything that your administration could have done differently that would have perhaps prevented one of those cases?

It’s impossible to know, and I’m still tormented by that because as you acknowledged in your question, these are the hardest possible cases and the hardest possible situations on a good day. Social workers are some of the unsung heroes and the miracles they run on a daily basis never get covered and, when something goes sideways and it sometimes does, they get pilloried. I think some of the things we learned in the course of the review that the new head has helped us do was that there are tools that they could have had that might have helped, and I can only use the conditional words because you just don’t know for sure.

At the time of the deaths, Mr. Patrick partly faulted the police for failing to report information to the D.C.F. in a timely manner.

For example, being able to do more remotely on iPads, and it seems sort of quaint to say it now, but the reporting requirements that were all by hand and all had to be done back on the computer back in the office when the action was out on the street is something we might have anticipated and supplied, but didn’t and we learned about that as we went forward.

Governor Baker’s administration pursued a technological overhaul to modernize the agency.

So yeah, I’m sorry about it. I’m totally sorry about it and have been from the beginning. I’m still not sure why everyone was calling for the agency head’s dismissal, but that served the best interest of the children and ultimately we — I did ask for her resignation. By the way, she was the most experienced agency head I think we’d ever had. She’d actually been a social worker. She knew the job more intimately than many others, but it was one of those things where at some point the agency, the folks on the ground had lost confidence in her. I’m not sure all of that came from their experience with her or all of that came from the heat she was taking from the media, but either way they lost experience with her and we had to make a change.

KK: I wanted to ask you too about your decision to replace state troopers with flagmen. I’m sure you’re going to love this question. From my point of view, and I think for many others it was a slam dunk idea, but it cost you a lot of political capital to make it happen and nearly cost you a second term as governor.

In 2007, Mr. Patrick announced his plan to replace highly paid police officers with civilian flagmen at public construction sites. The move aimed to save billions of dollars that could be funneled toward transportation improvements but alienated the police unions that had supported his candidacy.

Really?

KK: I think. I don’t know, I was just a member of the editorial board. What can I say? So, what political lessons did you learn from that? And for The Globe, not The Herald.

The job — and I want to be clear — I’m not interested and was not interested then in having the job without doing it. The reason I left business for government is that the bad habit I’ve seen in business of this quarter-to-quarter, short-term focus, sometimes I think at the expense of the long-term interests of the enterprise is crept into the way we govern ourselves. We govern ourselves from election cycle to election cycle, news cycle to news cycle and not generation to generation. It is true nationally today as it was true in Massachusetts then that there were a few hard decisions we needed to make in our time to leave things better for those who came behind us. That notion of generational responsibility is not new. Everybody was taught that by their grandparents, and I think we have sort of seized up in this notion that if we can’t make decisions of conviction, that we are jeopardizing our re-election.

That’s not the point in my view. I mean, I think one of the greatest things about our system is that you can come and go in from private to public life when and if you feel you have something to contribute. I didn’t always want to be president. I didn’t grow up wanting to be governor. I feel I have something to contribute that needs contributing right now and that was in the nature of that decision. That’s not the only one that folks said, “Oh no, you’re done.”

We made a commitment to invest in the public schools no matter what and we invested at the highest level in the history of the Commonwealth at the time, even when the bottom was falling out of the economy. Thanks in part to the stimulus bill and when we were faced with the prospect of having to raise the sales tax to keep up with that obligation and as a part of the compromise with what Legislature wanted to do on other line items, we had three big reform bills pending that the Legislature wouldn’t act on. Do you remember any of this, or you left by then?

Mr. Patrick unveiled an ambitious education plan in 2013 calling for universal access to early education for children under 5, fully funded K-12 education, extended school days in high-need areas and more affordable college. He proposed raising income taxes by one percentage point to increase revenue.

KK: You’re actually anticipating my next question.

We had three big reform bills. The transportation reform, ethics reform and pension reform, which they were all hard, and they didn’t want to do them. Flaggers was in the transportation bill, as I recall.

Mr. Patrick’s ethics reform bill responded to a string of political scandals by, among other provisions, banning gifts of any value to lawmakers and increasing the penalty for bribery. Mr. Patrick’s transportation bill — which prompted a protracted battle with state lawmakers — upgraded the state’s transportation system by providing financing for long-term projects including an expanded commuter rail to the South Coast. Mr. Patrick also overhauled the state’s pension system.

KK: Yeah. My question, my next question was going to be: You said earlier you tried to build bridges, you certainly did some of that in Massachusetts, but actually some of the biggest challenges you had came from the all-Democrat Legislature and I’m curious how that informs how you would handle Mitch McConnell’s Senate, for instance? Sorry, finish your thought.

Mr. Patrick faced immense pushback from Democratic state legislators, particularly over his attempts to veto transportation measures. Something many of the candidates struggled to address, in conversations with the editorial board, was their intended approach to working with an obstructionist McConnell-led Senate.

The other thought, and then I’ll come back to that, as it may need some context for some of you here. So I said I would end it. So, the legislature wanted to raise the sales tax. I have these three reform bills pending and I said, “Look, if you give me the reform bills in the form I’ve asked for them, I will do the sales tax.”

Everybody on my team said, “You can’t do that. You won’t get re-elected,” and we did it anyway and the first ad we did in the re-election was about raising taxes, which the consultant nearly quit over, but I said, “Look, this is about investing in schools. If you’re in the second grade, you don’t get to sit out the second grade until the recession is over. Right now is your time. Right now.” What is generational responsibility if not making those decisions right now that make things better for those who come behind you. Just like before folks said, “Well, he’s not going to win,” and we did.

Mr. Patrick’s 2010 re-election was a hard-won victory, with pundits predicting he would win by a slim margin. His approval rating had suffered a sharp decline, particularly given his frequent clashes with the Legislature. In his victory speech, he said he was committed to healing the partisan divide and ensuring he was not just “the governor of the Democrats.” Read The Times’s account here.

I think that there is an appetite for politics, it’s not just about leadership, frankly. It’s not just about accumulating political capital, but spending it when you have to. The Legislature in Massachusetts, as you said, is overwhelmingly Democratic. The dynamic at home is less Democratic-Republican than insider-outsider, right? Yeah and it’s a pretty tight, inward-looking political dynamic. I was an unwelcome entrant when I started the campaign, and for 16 years before the legislative leadership had Republican governors and as one of them described it to me, when the governor would submit his or her budget, they’d take the budget and say, “Thank you very much,” and toss it into the fireplace. It was bumpy, but I will say the Legislature gave me 95 percent of what I asked for.

Rarely when I asked for it. Rarely in the form I asked for it and that was the lesson that I used to, I remember the first couple of bills we had every comma in the place we wanted it to be. Then we get all wound up when the commas were all rearranged, and there were other ways of accomplishing. We got the goal, which was not the bill, but what the bill was trying to do, right?

But there were other ways of thinking about how to get there that had to be accommodated in order to get it done and so, I think what I learned was the importance of being real clear about the objectives and also a willingness to use sharp elbows, but without embarrassing people publicly. By the way, leader McConnell plays a completely different game, and I do think that there is work that I would be eager to do as a candidate and as a nominee and as president alongside candidates for the Senate because we do need a Senate that is willing to work with the White House.

KK: Yes. I want to open up the floor to others.

Lauren Kelley: Sure. I actually have another question from when you were governor. I was wondering if you could please speak to how it is that your brother-in-law was able to avoid registering on the sex offender registry in Massachusetts despite being convicted of rape?

Mr. Patrick’s brother-in-law, Bernard Sigh, was convicted of raping Mr. Patrick’s sister, Rhonda Sigh, in 1993, in California, where they were living. Mr. Sigh pleaded guilty to a charge of spousal rape, serving four months in a California prison and receiving five years of probation. The couple later moved to Massachusetts, where a hearing officer on the Sex Offenders Registry Board decided Mr. Sigh did not have to register as a sex offender. Officials at the board tried to overturn this decision and were unsuccessful. The hearing officer, Attilio Paglia, alleged that officials tried to overturn his decision improperly and filed suit, prompting Mr. Patrick to push out two officials who had tried to place his brother-in-law on the registry, including the board’s chairwoman.

Well, does everyone know this story? Some of you know this story.

Very painful story for our family. He was ruled by a hearing officer under the existing rules. They have since changed, [but] under the existing rules, as not having to register. It was an attempt to undermine that, which I learned about later. Not at the time, and there was no mechanism by the way for trying to undermine that lawfully anyhow and if what you’re getting at is the dismissal of the leader.

LK: I am.

Yes. The failure to update rules, the failure to some indication that there had been harassment of staff and accumulation of things and then learning about this attempt to interfere with a hearing officer against the law that I can’t tolerate.

Mr. Patrick has defended his decision to intervene by saying the head of the board had “threatened the integrity of the work of the agency.”

LK: Because this involved your sister and, again as you just said, I’m sure this is a very painful situation for your entire family, but isn’t that a reason you should have recused yourself from this situation?

The Times spoke with the former inspector general for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to clarify whether Mr. Patrick could have recused himself from the situation. He noted the law is complicated on this point. It seems that he could have used his discretion to recuse himself but was not required to.

I stayed as far away from this as long as I could ——

LK: But you were directly involved in the dismissal of ——

While all these other things were accumulating, and the dismissal is the governor’s decision and I asked for her and others resignation in there. By the way, I think people sometimes get this a little backward. She didn’t actually do anything that hurt him. It was the interference in the hearing officer’s decision, which she had no authority to do and the rules are the rules.

LK: Sure. I think that the bigger question in the public’s mind seems to be why you were directly involved there.

Because I’m the appointing individual. I had the appointing authority and the removal.

LK: And there was no mechanism for anyone else to make the call there?

No, and it wasn’t just that, as I said, they were accumulated [instances], she’d been reprimanded twice by our highest court, the agency had for not updating these rules that were required to be updated. Believe me, the political thing would’ve been to stay away from that. Just washed my hands of the whole thing. Then, of course, somebody would come along and say, “Well, wait a second. She was trying to influence a hearing officer’s decision outside of her authority and how come you looked the other way?” And my answer, I don’t like my answer to be because it was the political thing to do.

---

Jesse Wegman: I’m curious about, to stay with criminal justice for a moment. Your record with pardons and commutations in the state. You didn’t pardon or commute the sentences of that many people. How would you approach the job as president with the clemency power being one of the most unfettered powers that a president has?

Mr. Patrick granted four pardons and one commutation in 2013, the state’s first commutation in 17 years. Governor Baker also granted no pardons in his first three years in office, despite nearly 200 requests for executive clemency.

Yeah, the clemency power of a governor in Massachusetts is not unfettered. You have to get a clearance of the governor’s council, which is an independently elected body, and it’s not that easy to do. One of the things we looked at that I’m very intrigued by from the president’s perspective is commuting the sentences of people who have been convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. It’s hard to do that quite categorically, but I think there are groups ——

Petitions for clemency are first submitted to the Parole Board, which conducts an investigation and public hearing before making a recommendation to the governor. The Massachusetts Constitution stipulates that a grant of clemency relies on the advice and consent of the Governor’s Council, composed of eight individuals elected from districts and the lieutenant governor serving ex officio.

JW: President Obama tried to do that.

President Obama used clemency more than any other president since Harry Truman. He granted clemency to 1,927 people, including 1,715 commutations and 212 pardons, according to Pew Research analysis of Department of Justice statistics.

I know.

JW: Near the end of his term.

I know. I think he probably had started sooner because you have to do an individual assessment. I think it’s just wise to do an individual assessment, and one runs out of time, but getting to this sooner I think is a very intriguing opportunity that, alongside changing the schedules around which offenses qualify for which kinds of sentencing and smoothing out, ending three strikes and you’re out, and, in general, sentencing reform.

President Obama also received more clemency requests than any other American president on record, largely because of his administration’s Clemency Initiative, which invited qualified federal inmates to petition to have their sentences commuted.

You know who’s been leaders at the state level on this? Republican governors. They’ve been way out ahead of Democratic governors. When we first proposed a sentencing reform in Massachusetts, our Democratic leadership — to the question asked earlier — were incredibly uncomfortable because of — I would say Democrats are the first ones to believe Republican talking points and folks were really concerned about being viewed as so-called soft on crime.

Matt Bevin, former governor of Kentucky, drew widespread criticism for granting more than 600 pardons and sentence reductions before he left office in early December. Other governors who attracted ire with their pardons include Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Mike Huckabee of Arkansas. On the left, Jerry Brown of California also angered Mr. Trump by pardoning five immigrants set to be deported.

JW: And then would you give us some names of people that you might consider appointing to the Supreme Court?

No.

JW: Not even some names?

No.

KK: President Trump did.

Well, great. That’s good. He consulted the Federalist Society. I’d probably consult the American Constitutional Society.

The Federalist Society is an influential nationwide organization of conservative lawyers that has counted among its members Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil M. Gorsuch. The American Constitution Society was formed in 2001 as its progressive counterpart.

Mara Gay: Governor, when was the last time you rode public transportation?

The last time I was in New York, gosh, maybe a month ago. A month and a half. It’s hard to get up and downtown now in a car.

MG: That’s how most of us do.

And I mean in a car.

MG: That’s not how most of us do it in New York for that reason, among others. So, a panel this week found that the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority had failed to perform routine maintenance and also investment in long-term construction projects. Obviously as governor you do not hold sole responsibility or did not hold sole responsibility, excuse me, for that system, but how does that inform your thinking as president in terms of infrastructure? What would you do differently, and how would you get, for example, the largest transportation system in the country, the New York City Transit system, working again?

As Bostonians have grown increasingly incensed with their aging transport system, which has experienced several derailments recently, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has estimated it will take $10.1 billion and 13 years to modernize it, according to The Wall Street Journal. A safety review panel, commissioned by the transit agency, found “in essence, safety is not the priority at the T, but it must be,” the panel wrote in a report. “To meet the demands of the future, the agency must address its safety culture — it is critical to every aspect of the agency.”

Yeah. Thank you for the question because I think infrastructure investments are incredibly powerful animals and important both for what they do to create jobs in the short term, but the platform for personal ambition and private investment going forward. We did make historic levels of infrastructure investment, including in the T. We got a manufacturer of new red and orange line cars to come to Massachusetts to create a manufacturing facility or assembly facility in Western Mass., and they’re being rolled out. We put money, more money into maintenance and much more into other infrastructure. We tried twice, two major bills to raise revenue for infrastructure. The first time was to raise the gas tax, which hadn’t been raised in a long time and the thing I like about the gas tax or in the context of Massachusetts that you can’t use it for anything else except transportation.

Mr. Patrick’s proposed tax increases were larger than the ones actually passed by the Legislature — he originally wanted a 19-cent gas tax increase, and an income tax increase to 6.25 percent from 5.25 percent, which did not pass.

So, a legislature or governor is intended to shave off a little bit here for another project over there, and it went down in flames and we tried again. Oh, well yeah, I can, this is one of those you ought to see our legislature at work stories. How the sausage making actually ——

MG: I mean, I cover Albany. So ——

As the editorial board member covering New York politics, Ms. Gay has frequently weighed in on the bureaucratic and legislative challenges slowing efforts to fix New York’s broken transportation system.

Yeah. Well, O.K.

MG: I don’t have to have that much of an imagination, right?

So, we tried a second time and near the end of my time in office and talk about an instructive lesson. So, we had this, maybe two years before we stepped out, and I said to the Senate president and the speaker and I would have weekly or periodic meeting and I said, “We got to do this.”

We had serious problems on the T and elsewhere. I’ll come back to the source of the T’s failure to invest over time, but I said, “Look, tell me now what’s off the table,” because we have but so many levers. We know we need new revenue, and we [had] done the transportation reform, which created hundreds of millions of dollars of savings, which we could reinvest in transportation and it was being reinvested in transportation, but there was going to be no amount of reorganization that would get us a 21st-century T, for example.

And they said, “Bring us anything but a gas tax, because that went down, and we don’t want to have to deal with that again.” Because their members, many of their members, wanted to do it, and they didn’t want to have to deal with that. And they said, “Take the time, develop a statewide plan, get buy-in from business people, from regular citizens, transportation advocates, and so on, and then bring us that whole package.” So, that’s what we did, and we built a fabulous plan. The issue of regional equity was very important to me because what has tended to happen is that there is investment, if at all, in transportation in and around Boston and not so much in central or Western Massachusetts or down — a project called South Coast Rail — down to New Bedford and Fall River. It’d been promised for years, never delivered.

MC: Before then ——

MG: Sorry. Just on that point ——

Let me finish the story.

MG: O.K.

I stink at sound bites. I’m sorry.

MG: That’s O.K. I just want to make sure you get to what you would do to address infrastructure problems like the Gateway Project, for example.

One of the country’s most urgently needed infrastructure projects is the Gateway Project, which includes regional rail upgrades, the construction of a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River and the refurbishment of an existing tunnel that carries over 800,000 passenger trips daily between New York and New Jersey. The editorial board called for its financing in “Build the Donald J. Trump Tunnel.”

Yeah. So, anyway, well you’re not interested in the story. Anyway, we did the work, we built the support. The very first poll that came out was from The Herald, not a friendly newspaper normally, and it was a two or three or four points in favor of our plan. And then, The Globe came out with another poll, was even more in favor. And then, three or four guys representing the business community went in to see the speaker and said, “We want a gas tax, and we want it to be these many pennies. And it’ll do about a half of what needs to be done.” And that was the end of that.

A 2013 University of Massachusetts/Boston Herald poll found that 48 percent of voters approved of Mr. Patrick’s plan to raise taxes in order to support ambitious education reform efforts and transportation improvements.

And I lost it. Because I had done everything they’d said. The former Senate president said, “You know what? You need to keep the lid on this.” I said, “Why?” I said, “I did everything they told me to do,” and still. He said, “This is like when Dorothy was asked to bring the broom of the Wicked Witch.” He said, “They didn’t think you’d bring them the broom, and they don’t know what to do.” Well, what they did was a fraction of what we needed, and the reason there has been underinvestment over the years is because the cost of the Big Dig, and the excess cost, was put on the T.

According to a 2012 Boston Magazine article, “The M.B.T.A.’s debt comes from three sources — $1.85 billion from spending since the 2000 start of forward funding, $1.65 billion that was transferred to the M.B.T.A. under forward funding and was related to previous transit projects, and $1.7 billion in funding for projects mandated under a Big Dig-related agreement.”

That plan, by the way, was developed by the current governor, and they don’t have any room to invest anyhow. We need to invest in public infrastructure all over the country, all over the country, and it is a constraint on our economic growth and it’s a constraint on our shared prosperity.

And by infrastructure, I don’t just mean transportation infrastructure, although you are asking about Gateway. It’s broadband access, it’s updating our underground infrastructure, water, and sewer. It’s distributed generation of electricity, which is a security issue as well as a modernization issue, and there are ways to do this that can involve, not in every case, but can involve public-private partnerships. Something that is done to great advantage in other parts of the country where we’ve had a couple of bad experiences here, and we’re not comfortable with it, but a lot of it has to be public. And that involves new revenue. And where I think that new revenue comes from is, some of these points I was making about how we simplify the personal income tax code, how we eliminate and raise the rates on the corporate tax side as well.

Analysts and lawmakers argue that the 2001 terrorist attacks indicated the vulnerability of America’s electric power, water, mail and travel systems.

Binyamin Appelbaum: Massachusetts has invested heavily in universal health care and public education. You have some of the most progressive taxes in the nation. You adopted this infrastructure ——

The two states with the most progressive income taxes are New York and California, according to the Tax Foundation.

Not so progressive.

BA: Relative to other states, they’re actually quite good at the state level. But Massachusetts has seen increased inequality. You’ve fundamentally failed to address the problems that you’ve set out to address. Growth is more concentrated in Boston than ever before. There’s an affordable housing crisis. If these measures have been insufficient to address these problems in Boston, what makes you think it’s going to work at the national level?

The Economic Policy Institute’s 2018 report found that Massachusetts has the sixth-largest gap between its highest and lowest paid residents of all states. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that the state’s income inequality has worsened in the last five decades. Over the last decade, the average income in the lowest 20 percent of households has dropped.

Well, first of all, it’s not all about Boston, but you’re right, income inequality has gotten worse in Boston, and the investments that we need ——

KK: It’s worse across the entire state.

No, no. It’s acute in Boston. It’s worse across the entire country, and I think part of the solution, I think, we didn’t get to do. For example, South Coast Rail, the project down to New Bedford and Fall River, the fact that it does not exist means that workers are cut off from jobs in the greater Boston area and folks who work in greater Boston are cut off from affordable housing just to half an hour ——

The state’s most unequal county is Suffolk, which includes Boston. In Suffolk County, the average of the top 1 percent made 54 times more than everyone else in 2015. Another study, found Massachusetts as a state had among the worst income equality in the country.

Nick Fox: Yes, but if you can’t convince a Democratic supermajority to build a rail line to New Bedford, how are you going to convince Republicans in Congress to do it?

Well, first of all, I think they were convinced. It’s just that when the money is ready to be spent, it keeps being spent close to Boston. I think I can have some greater influence on that as president. It won’t be easy. It won’t be easy. I’m not the first one to identify that there were infrastructure needs unmet around the country. Even candidate Trump talked about that. It hasn’t happened. We’re going to have to build coalition outside of Washington in order to drive results in Washington, and I think lots of people understand that. This is why this notion of campaigning at the grass roots is just the start. We have to learn to govern at the grass roots and part of the …

Let me just make this last point. It’s one of the reasons why, in our policy agenda, we’re going to be rolling out something called the Democracy Agenda, which is about how we address the hyper partisan gerrymandering, the amount of money, much of a dark in politics of voter suppression, and purging some of the things that we have permitted over the years so that we end up with undemocratic outcomes. So, none of this is about what happens on Day 1. People ask me that, you didn’t, a lot. It’s about how we create pathways so that we can actually achieve the outcomes that people want.

As of late December, Mr. Patrick had not released the details of his Democracy Agenda. He said it will focus on countering the influence of lobbyists and voter suppression.

BA: Tell me specifically, for the life of a home health care worker living in, say, Springfield — you’re president now — how do you improve her life over the course of your four years?

Driven by the increase in the country’s aging population, home health care workers comprise one of the country’s fastest growing occupations. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the American economy is predicted to create another 1.2 million home caregiving jobs from 2018 to 2028.

Well, I think, first of all, it has to go beyond raising the minimum wage. We have done that in Massachusetts. It’s not enough. And when folks oppose raising the minimum wage, I often answer, “Well, try living on it.” That’s not it. We’ve got to focus on a livable wage. We have to, I also think ——

BA: Meaning that the government should mandate something fixed minimum?

In December, the editorial board called on the federal government to double the minimum wage, taking a lesson from state and local governments that have shown that high minimum-wage standards don’t lead to unemployment.

I think that the government should express what those livable wages ought to be, and then we’ll see whether it requires a mandate. It doesn’t always. Sometimes it’s about leadership. Sometimes it’s about calling attention to those issues and what those expectations ought to be. I think a conversation in the general economy — for example, from the Business Roundtable — thinking that the purpose of businesses beyond the interest of shareholders, is in part because of the work we were doing in our impact fund showing that it was a false trade-off all along. Sometimes leadership is about setting an example. I also think that the question of affordable housing can, in part, be addressed by stimulating conditions for investors to build affordable housing. We were doing that in Massachusetts, and we have some results to show for that. Didn’t meet all the need because supply is a big part of the need, but making resources available so that people can get an ownership stake and create wealth, I think is enormously important and is an opportunity to participate with the private sector.

BA: The best form people have. Most Americans, their biggest investment is their home. That’s how they create an ownership stake. That’s how they grow wealth. Back in 2005, you described Ameriquest as in good company. That’s a company that destroyed the wealth of a lot of American homeowners. What did you mean, and do you regret it?

In 2004, Mr. Patrick was making $360,000 a year sitting on the board of ACC Capital, parent company of subprime lender Ameriquest. In 2005, he wrote to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to advocate on behalf of ACC Capital’s owner Roland Arnall, who had been nominated for an ambassadorship. Ameriquest made subprime loans to people with poor credit; it was one of the most aggressive players in the subprime boom and paid $325 million to settle predatory lending investigations in 2006.

Look, I think the reason I went on that board is because they needed some help in trying to figure out how to make their products available to people who wanted homes, who couldn’t get a mortgage in the regular market. We did, I think, a lot of good work in that respect. Not all of those loans were bad loans. I think, in retrospect, the bundling of those loans and securitizing them in a volatile market was a terrible idea and contributed to a lot of the hardship. But it’s also true, it’s also true, a lot of folks who wouldn’t have been able to get access to mortgages got them and are still in their homes. So, yes, I think I wouldn’t do it again, and I don’t think Ameriquest would do that again in the same way, but I think the intentions were right and I think that the problem remains. And we do need solutions to get at that, but the market alone is not going to deliver.

Ameriquest, for a time the nation’s largest subprime lender, paid $325 million in 2006 to settle allegations of predatory lending in 49 states. The company specialized in lending money to people who already owned homes. Very few used its loans to purchase homes, but thousands of its borrowers ended up losing their homes.

KK: As you probably remember, in 2012, Governor Romney, now Senator Romney, received a lot of criticism for his tenure at Bain. I guess, could you speak to voters who have similar concerns about your time at Bain?

I was co-chair of that campaign, and I remember I was with some other folks from that campaign the other day talking about how they’d done too good a job. Look, my work at Bain Capital was to found a business that invested in businesses for social and environmental impact and to demonstrate, through that, that it was a false choice all along to say you had to trade return for that kind of measurable impact. Examples are a company in Texas that diverts green waste from landfills, where it would otherwise break down and turn it into methane, and instead recycles it and sells it as composted soil and ground cover. Or another company that delivers health care to poor kids. Excuse me. Dental health care to poor kids, which has been a huge challenge. The connection between the lack of access to adequate oral hygiene in the early years can be traced to, not just health, but learning outcomes later on.

Mr. Patrick was co-chair of the Obama-Biden campaign in 2012, and when asked about the campaign’s attacks on Mr. Romney’s record at Bain Capital, Mr. Patrick said, “I didn’t buy it then, and I don’t buy it now.”

Companies like that, they’re trying to scale. They need capital, too. Great mission oriented companies trying, frankly, to respond to what a whole lot of us are now — choices we’re making differently about how to eat, what to wear, how to build, how to get around. Those companies need an opportunity to scale, as well. Many of those entrepreneurs were looking for capital that was just as focused on their mission and the integrity of that as they, and I think we were a good partner in that respect.

The same day the board interviewed Mr. Patrick, an article by Politico reported that many of the companies he invested in while at Bain have been hit by lawsuits. Read more here.

KK: Binya, do you want to finish up or do you want me to move on?

BA: We can move on.

KK: O.K. So, we only have about 25 minutes left. I wanted to pivot a question that we’re asking all of the candidates is, I want to get to foreign policy, but a question we’re asking all the candidates is, who has broken your heart?

Who has broken my heart? So, I won’t name her. Is that what you mean? Do you want me to make it more political?

KK: You’re welcome to answer it however you want.

BS: However you want.

I dated this wonderful woman from high school, she was a year behind me, and through college, and I thought there was a future. I went off and lived in Sudan for a year, and I came back and she was engaged to somebody else. So, all the time, I mean, apart from just the heartbreak, practically, all the time when you’re learning to date — I had only dated one person, so I had a lot of catching up to do. But I think there are reasons for all kinds of things. I think I’m with exactly the right person and have been for 35 years. But that was a heartbreak at the time.

After graduating from Harvard, Mr. Patrick won a Rockefeller Fellowship and worked for the United Nations in Sudan.

KK: For millions of Americans, church and religion are a central part of their lives. Can you talk to us a little bit about your own faith? Do you believe in God? Who are your main spiritual advisers?

I was raised in the church. I am a person of faith. My church, you know, it’s interesting, our church on the South Side of Chicago was unusual as black churches go. It was quiet.

BS: Where was it?

Do you know Chicago?

BS: Very well.

Fifty-fourth and Wabash is where I lived, and it was on the corner of — So, we were close to the 53rd end, it was on the corner of 54th and Wabash. Cosmopolitan Community Church. Does that mean anything to you? Had a woman pastor in those days, Mary Evans. It was like other black churches in terms of the transformational power of music in the church and also old ladies in hats who took the business of worship seriously.

What I took from that experience, and still take from that experience, is that faith is not just what you say you believe, it’s how you live. It’s the choices you make, the good you try to do. And I will say, also, I love Democrats. Democrats get on my last nerve, and I don’t know why it is. We are so uncomfortable with the language of faith when the work we are about, and have been about as a party, is very much what Christ asks of his disciples in the last story, in the last Gospel, “Feed my sheep.”

KK: Given your faith, how do you reconcile the job of directing the largest, most powerful military in the world with the Christian obligation of loving your enemy?

Well, Scripture also teaches, I can’t remember where it appears, when they’re building the wall of the second temple, to do so with a shovel in one hand and a sword in the other. The world is a dangerous and difficult place. My faith tells me, and wisdom tells me not to be trigger-happy. Try not to be the first one to fire that shot, but be ready.

In Nehemiah 4:17, the New King James Bible says of the workers building the temple: “Those who carried burdens, loaded themselves so that with one hand they worked at construction, and with the other held a weapon.”

Our power in the world is not so much our military or our economic power. I mean, great nations with great armies and great treasuries have come and gone with the winds of time. Our power is our values. It’s the aspirations of the American experiment, which go back to those notions, those civic ideals, of equality, opportunity, and fair play. And we are more powerful in the world when we have fealty to those values at home and more at risk when we don’t, and I think that’s part of our challenge today.

Serge Schmemann: Now, let me ask you — continuing that thought perhaps — about Israel. President Trump has taken some fairly controversial unilateral steps recognizing Jerusalem as the capital, accepting that the settlements are legal, accepting Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Would you reverse those actions?

The first time I went to to Israel was as governor, and I remember I sat down with Prime Minister Netanyahu in Tel Aviv and then I sat down with Abu Mazen in Jerusalem, because the consulate functioned as the embassy for the Palestinians. I don’t know. Realistically speaking, the capital of Israel has been Jerusalem for a long time, but I think the business of tolerating and, in fact, encouraging the settlements as someone who believes in a two-state solution, seems to me to be completely counterproductive, and to make harder what Israel says it wants, which is both a democratic and a Jewish state, and without a two-state solution, I’m not sure you get there. Yeah, I’m not sure you get there.

The editorial board wrote that Mr. Trump’s decision to open an American Embassy in Jerusalem without seeking any concessions from Israel was “a blow to the Palestinians.”

SS: Would you reverse those actions that he’s taken?

Well, reverse means what? In the case of settlements being ——

SS: Declaring that they’re illegal.

Say again.

SS: Declaring that they’re illegal.

Well, I think they are illegal, but I think declaring is one thing. I think actually delivering a long-term solution is another. That requires both partners who are willing, and that’s been a problem I think on both sides, but also more than declaring. We have leverage points, and I think we should use them, and we should use them respectfully. By the way, the interrelationship between that — First of all, Israel is an incredibly important democracy and partner of ours in the region and will always be if I’m president. I believe in Israel’s right to exist. I believe, also, that Palestinians deserve the dignity of being human beings and being treated so.

What I was going to say is the interrelationship between what is going on between Israelis and Palestinians, and what is going on a larger region between Shia and Sunni and the proxies of Iran and Saudi Arabia, I think it can be, and probably ought to be, a focus of a comprehensive approach by my administration.

---

Alex Kingsbury: Can I ask about Afghanistan? Do you think the Trump administration is going about resolving that war in the appropriate way?

Do I think that the Trump administration ——

AK: Yes, they’re negotiating with the Taliban. It’s been off and on, but he hasn’t done the deal. This is somebody who wanted to end the war. He’s had three years to do it, and it still hasn’t been done.

I read the series from The Post as well. I don’t know what the answer is.

The Washington Post obtained a trove of government documents revealing that senior American officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan and hid evidence that the war could not be won.

AK: Do you find anything surprising in that series?

I went to Kabul with some other governors several years ago to visit National Guardsmen and women who were there because there was so many National Guard supplementing regular military. I went and visited Iraq and Afghanistan. General Petraeus was still there at the time. He did not say directly, but you get a feel from his team that there wasn’t really a plan. There was a hope that the Taliban would take back, or that a government would take back, responsibility for Afghanistan and manage going forward, but not really a plan.

Mr. Patrick arrived in Afghanistan in March 2010. He was briefed by Gen. David Petraeus who, he said, felt “very good” about efforts to target the Taliban’s leadership. That year was the deadliest in the war.

I don’t know enough. I don’t have all of the intelligence and the diplomatic information, but there has got to be a way for us, responsibly, to end endless war and to be more rigorous about our objectives going in and our strategy for coming out, mindful that things change. But it doesn’t seem like we had much more than a grudge for going into Afghanistan in the first place.

Jim Dao: Governor, a number of national security experts assert that the real threat to the United States, at least in the long term, is China, not a place like Russia. Do you agree with that?

Threat? They are a major competitor. I mean, let me be clear, I think the TPP conceptually was right. Meaning, the idea of forming bonds with other nations in the region and along the Pacific, including Canada and Latin American countries along the Pacific, because I think the concept was create an economic counterweight so that we have some influence on the shaping of the rules and the accountability for breaking the rules. I think that the political agita around trade agreements, I understand. I understand the concerns with NAFTA. I understand that TPP may not have been, in every respect, perfect, but I think, conceptually, it was right. That there must’ve been folks in the leadership in China who were just laughing at us as we pulled away from it because the opportunity to advance in the ways they have, not just in the region but in Africa and, to some extent, Latin America, have been profound.

Senator Warren was a particularly vocal critic of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. One of her major criticisms is the secretive nature of government trade negotiations.

I’ve been to China a few times, both as governor and in business. I’m not a China expert, but my sense is that, in China, folks tell time differently. For China, the 20th century was an afternoon. They were a superpower until the 20th century, and they expect to be a superpower in the 21st century. And frankly, like everywhere, finding a respectful balance that doesn’t embarrass China but also asserts not just our own interests of Western democracy is important. It is one of the examples where we have to understand the power of building bridges with our allies and making new friends in order to do so.

AK: Sorry, just one really quick. Thinking about your Afghanistan, and I’m not really satisfied with it so ——

I’m not satisfied with it.

AK: Yeah. So, you said that you were there and you came away with a sense that there wasn’t a plan. I mean, shouldn’t you have said something at the time? This was exactly the lesson of these Washington Post papers, that everybody knew and no one had the courage to come out and say it publicly.

In “Lots of Lessons From Afghanistan; None Learned,” The Times editorial board wrote that a takeaway from The Post’s papers is “the inescapable notion that the American government refuses to be honest with itself.”

Well, when you say, “Come out and say it, stand up and make a statement,” what I did do ——

KK: Well, you had National Guard troops, constituents, who were from Massachusetts.

What I did do before I went and after I came home was debrief with the State Department. I briefed before I went, and I debriefed with State when I got back.

AK: And if we had that declassified, would it show your concerns?

A Times Opinion FOIA request for this briefing has not been fulfilled yet.

I think it would.

KK: So, we’re running out of time. I want to get, maybe, one question on technology, one question on health care, and then wrap up. Is that O.K.?

Sure.

KK: Great.

Charlie Warzel: Sure. For technology, nearly all your opponents have a plan to either regulate technology companies or rein in their power. I’ve seen no mention at all of your opinion on the subject, so do you think Facebook, Google, Amazon, should these companies be broken up? What should be done?

Well, it depends on what problem we’re trying to solve. The thing that alarms me the most about Facebook is the lack of accountability for the accuracy of the political ad buy. I have had a security briefing about what the Russians did, and it’s pretty chilling. It’s also pretty chilling that it was as easy.

CW: But in terms of advertising, that’s a very small amount. I mean, there’s a very … it is $120,000.

I got you. But the use of Facebook as a platform to divide us is profound, and that worries me. And the fact that the leadership of Facebook has said, “We can’t do anything about it on account of the First Amendment,” to me is not adequate. In the same way, we found a way to acknowledge that yelling fire in a crowded theater was not protected by the First Amendment. It seems to be, we ought to find a way to hold a vehicle for foreign disruption in our democracy accountable, in accordance with the First Amendment.

The issue with Google and Amazon, in particular, of owning both the market and participating in the market, is an issue … In my Justice Department, I would want our antitrust authorities to deal with, whether that leads to breaking them up or some other kind of solution. I just don’t know, but I do feel like there is … We like the conveniences that we get from some of these companies, but their power to influence social and political outcomes seems out of scale for the kind of democracy we want.

Other 2020 candidates have been far more detailed in their antitrust plans — notably Senator Warren, whose plans to break up Facebook have prompted Mark Zuckerberg to say a Warren administration would “suck” for his company.

CW: Since Facebook is different than just the traditional marketplace antitrust measure, I mean, what in your mind is to be done about that, about their influence? Since it’s not a traditional lever.

Yeah. Well, so what I was saying earlier is that what concerns me mainly about Facebook is their unwillingness to deal with the accuracy of content. I don’t know what the solution is, but there’s got to be one, and I think smart people around the table can help us find one. But the fact that the leadership is simply saying, “We can’t on account of the First Amendment,” seems, to me, not enough.

Jeneen Interlandi: As governor, you were tasked with presiding over the earliest years of RomneyCare and really forced to ——

She said it again.

JI: With PatrickCare. And you were really forced to grapple with the balance between expanding access to health care and containing costs. And I’m just curious, looking back what the key lessons you think you learned from that are, and which of those lessons you would take to the White House?

Unlike the A.C.A., our health care reform was only about access and not about cost. It had no cost containment mechanisms. The medical home idea, for example, and the incentives that enabled it, that’s entirely from the A.C.A. Fabulous idea. But we didn’t have that. One of the things I found about the conversation around cost, remember I was talking about that coalition that came together and stuck together, is that here we have the economy collapsing and premiums going up year after year well ahead of inflation. The great power of a governor, and a president for that matter, I think is the convening power.

The Affordable Care Act was similar to Massachusetts’s health care reform in their individual mandates, but Massachusetts’s did not address cost containment, and the state turned to this matter only in 2012 as health care costs continued rising.

Everyone will come to the table, and everyone came to the table. I would say, “What is going on? We need a solution to that.” The answer always started with, “It’s complicated.” And then the hospitals would point to the doctors, and the doctors would point to the specialists or the labs or to the insurers and someone, and no one took any responsibility for any of it. That’s one of the reasons, by the way, why the appeal of a Medicare solution is so great: It’s so simple and familiar seeming.

JI: I was going to say, it sounds simple.

Seeming, right, and at one point, I had sort of a public hissy fit, and we froze the state’s willingness to pay any more for services that were provided on our own exchange. We ultimately got to a piece of legislation and some regulations under it that required a collaborative arrival at what increases could be, should be.

Still too high in my view, but we got to something, and I do think that still, problem solving is going to be about collaboration. One of the reasons why a low-cost, publicly paid, public option is attractive to me, it goes back to something I was saying earlier, is that the private … not just insurance but the private health care environment will figure out a way to compete for that part of the market.

KK: Allow me one follow up on that. Massachusetts is home to many of the nation’s most prestigious hospitals. You just mentioned hospitals yourself, but yet they’re not often part of the conversation around the questions of health care costs and what are driving them. We often hear about prescription drugs and insurance. Can you talk a little bit about what changes you think hospitals need to make in order to bring down costs in health care?

Yea, so most of the — And by the way, I don’t know that this is true everywhere, but it was true in Massachusetts, community hospitals and community care have to be a big part of the solution. By the way, they’re a lot more convenient, all apart from the ——

KK: Well, you know what the problem is there though, right? If you have ——

Prestige.

KK: Mass. General an hour away, why would you go to the local hospital?

Well, so one answer to that has been transparency. I’m just not sure that people pay for — that they buy a new hip in the same way they buy soap. You understand what I’m saying? I’m not sure that we make our health care decisions that way. I’m all for transparency. You can go on the website in Massachusetts and see what a new hip costs at Milton Hospital versus at M.G.H. or, frankly, what an M.R.I. costs at Milton Hospital versus M.G.H. That’s a part of it.

KK: But it’s a perception of quality.

I understand. I understand, and that’s actually the argument that the hospitals make for why it is they should acquire all these local hospitals and community health centers: because by branding them, their argument has been folks will get over the perception issues ——

JI: Go back to the antitrust issues later.

Well, no, but see, this is it, right? What’s the trade we’re prepared to make between innovation that serves the common good and concentration, which may not?

BA: Is Partners an antitrust problem?

Partners Healthcare is a Boston-based nonprofit hospital network that includes Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Its total assets in September 2018 were $18.3 billion, according to its annual report that year.

I think personally, Partners has a outlived its usefulness, but ——

KK: What does that mean? Well, look. First of all, how it gets described as a not-for-profit blows my mind, but that’s an issue for the attorney general, not me.

KK: Let’s finish on a question that we’re asking everyone as well. Brent, you want to …

BS: Just a couple things. Why is it that we hear so little about disenfranchisement in this campaign, generally speaking, when it’s really driving a lot politically, and we’ve seen how it turned races in Georgia and Florida? Why are we not hearing more about that?

Well, I don’t know about the others, but when I talk about the democracy agenda, it’s very much about making access to the ballot work. It was great to be in the Justice Department Civil Rights Division when we had an administration that was actually interested in civil rights. We could do a lot ——

BS: Or justice.

And justice. We could do a lot, and a Civil Rights Division in our administration would be in that business again. We need a reauthorized and updated Voting Rights Act. You’ve seen what the Supreme Court has done with it. We need to go back to the business of putting that together and updating it. It doesn’t have to be the same. It won’t be the same because life is different, but I mean, I campaigned in Florida and in Georgia, not in the state races because I couldn’t, but in the federal races, I was there.

I was listening to voters. I was watching the candidates for Congress we were working with and hearing what they were hearing. And those elections were won by the candidates who are not in office today, and they can be won again. There’s been a whole lot of looking the other way. I was on the commission that President Carter led after the 19 — What was it? When was Gore-Bush?

KK: 2000.

In 2000 election. You remember after Florida, there was a commission ——

JW: You mean the HAVA, the Help America Vote Act.

Right. Exactly. Exactly, and it’s never been adequately funded. It was authorized, but there weren’t appropriations under it, and frankly, without that, a whole lot of the policy ideas that I and others are talking about won’t happen, which is why I think it’s important to see our policy proposals as part of the whole.

BS: One last thing we’re asking everyone: What are you likely to fail at as president?

I’m impatient, and these jobs require patience. I’m a pretty good listener. I acknowledge that I don’t have to be the smartest one in the room and am often not. I want the smartest people in the room to help me make decisions, and I want them to feel free to disagree and push back, so I don’t want people who just say yes in the room. I think those are the best teams I’ve been on, and those are the best outcomes. But I am very impatient because it turns out four years, eight years, it’s just not long. It’s just not long, and I’m proud of the fact that after eight years, we were, in Massachusetts, first in student achievement and health care coverage and veteran services and energy efficiency and entrepreneurial activity and the highest bond rating in our history, a 25-year employment high.

But I also know how much we didn’t get done. I also know what we didn’t get right in terms of some of the social services and in particular the loss of children. I also know that someone brought up the question about the cost of housing, and I know how much of the infrastructure we did get right, but some we didn’t get to. You just don’t have as much time as you think, and so I try to cram a lot into a day and into the time I have because I think you’re supposed to do as much good as you can for as many people as you can in all the ways you can for as long as you can. That’s taxing on a lot of people on your own team, on the Legislature, on all you all in the media trying to keep up with it, and sometimes on the American people.

BS: We’ll leave it there.

Thank you.

---

---

This interview was conducted Dec. 12, 2019, and published Jan. 16, 2020. Illustrations by Jules Julien; Elizabeth Frantz for The New York Times