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Patrick's power of positive thinking
The governor wants to make a feel-good case for re-election. The question is, these days, is anybody feeling good?
Sitting down at the conference table in his tidy Corner Office, jacket off, sleeves of his pale-blue shirt rolled up, Governor Deval Patrick didn't wait for the first question before launching into his re-election pitch at the start of an exclusive hour-long sit-down interview last week with the Boston Phoenix .

"People have to believe in the future of the commonwealth ? they have to understand and trust the direction we're headed in," said Patrick, who was aggressively positive and energetic throughout the policy-oriented discussion, without notes or reference materials, always on the record, and only rarely calling upon Communications Director Kyle Sullivan ? the sole staffer in the room ? to check a company name or data point. "We've got work to do, but I think that we're on the right course."

He rattled off an impressive list, as if answering the strikingly defensive question posed at the top of his campaign's hand-out literature: "What has Deval Patrick been doing?"

THE GOVERNOR'S PREAMBLE

GOVERNOR DEVAL PATRICK
It has been ? you don't need me to tell you ? we're living through the worst economy in living memory. Everybody's been hurt, and a lot of people hammered by the economy, individuals and families, small businesses, large businesses, governments across the country.

And meanwhile, we have continued to govern. We are first in the nation in student achievement, first in the nation for healthcare coverage for our residents, first in the nation in clean and alternative energy policy ? in fact the clean tech sector is the fastest growing sector in the economy right now ? none of that by accident.

An electoral novice when he set his sights on the chief executive's chair, Patrick proved to be a shark of an organizer and a pro on the campaign trail.

Those skills, however, did not translate well to the State House. Beacon Hill is a cloister of special interests. It is populated by big egos and delicate ids.

No slouch himself in the ego department, Patrick assumed office as a self-styled outsider with a reformer's zeal for transforming the tone of politics and a populist's commitment to changing the priorities of the back rooms.

Reform is a dirty word at the State House. And despite the lip service legislators pay to such phrases as "the will of the people," Beacon Hill (like Washington) is deeply suspicious of the populist impulse. Rewriting the equations of power is just too uncomfortable, too risky, too radical in an environment that favors going along in order to get along. The people may vote, but in the final analysis they are a bit of a nuisance, at times even a pain ? unless they are willing to make campaign contributions.

Big-time change did not come to Massachusetts with Patrick's election, as promised. But with the economy still in a state of shock, the bad-old days look not too bad at all.

After six years at the Phoenix, I recently got my first pre-emptive libel threat. It came, most unexpectedly, from an investigative reporter. And beyond the fact that this struck me as a blatant attempt at intimidation, it demonstrated how tricky journalism's new, collaboration-driven future could be.

But first, a bit of background. On February 25, the Boston Globe published a front-page story on the collective failure ? by 10 local colleges and universities ? to seriously sanction students who have been accused of on-campus sexual assaults. The piece, however, was based on new data from a voluntary US Department of Justice program in which participating schools can obtain grant money for working to improve their response to alleged sexual assaults. It was written ? with assistance from the Washington, DC?based Center for Public Integrity ? by Maggie Mulvihill and Joe Bergantino, two veteran Boston reporters who now head up the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NECIR), which is based at Boston University (BU). The piece offered no data whatsoever on sexual assaults at BU.

In a statement that was provided to the Phoenix and the Boston Herald, Bergantino offered several reasons for this omission. He said, for example, that the Globe and New England Cable News (NECN, which also broadcast a story based on NECIR's reporting) were primarily interested in the new DOJ data, and that BU did not participate in that program. He also said that focusing on this new data helped keep the story tractable. And, Bergantino added, while NECIR did have some data on sex assaults at BU, it was saving that information for a follow-up piece on nonparticipating schools that will run at an unspecified time in the Daily Free Press, BU's student paper. The Globe and NECIR's other media partners could reprint or follow up on that story when it appears, said Bergantino. (Full disclosure: El Planeta, a sister publication of the Phoenix, is one of those partners.)

Photo: Richard McCaffrey (taken at the Providence Athenaeum) DARWIN?S SPOKESMAN What happens when America?s top evolutionist goes to church?

Brown University biology professor Kenneth R. Miller is, perhaps, the nation's most important Darwinist.

He has spilled considerable ink in defense of evolution. Debated creationists in Rhode Island and Florida. He was the star witness in a high-profile Pennsylvania schools case that put creationism's latest iteration, intelligent design, on trial.

And when President George W. Bush suggested in 2005 that intelligent design make its way into the classroom, everyone from The O'Reilly Report to National Public Radio came calling.

But lately, there has been a curious turn in the tale. Miller has come under heavy attack from Darwin's fiercest acolytes: the New Atheists, a collection of sharp-elbowed intellectuals who have filled the New York Times best seller list in recent years with provocative broadsides against God.

A flush-faced Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, shook his finger at Miller during a tense panel discussion at New York University a few years ago. Christopher Hitchens, who wrote God Is Not Great, accused Miller of doing "damage to the good name of science" ? and worse ? in a recent on-line debate.

And Jerry Coyne, the University of Chicago biology professor who penned Why Evolution Is True, wrote a lengthy essay in The New Republic last year attempting to dismantle Miller and his intellectual ally Karl W. Giberson.

The source of their concern: Miller, a practicing Catholic, has made a very public bid in the last decade or so to square religion and science; to mix church and state, in their view. "It's an effort to reconcile a legitimate discipline," says biology professor and prominent atheist blogger PZ Myers, "with foolishness."