I figure Deval Patrick has been holding his breath for my endorsement long enough. He can’t turn any bluer, so I might as well just throw in my lot with him now.

Actually I hadn’t seen him in the news too much lately. I was wondering when he’d start running campaign commercials. But in the last couple of days his campaign seems to have kicked into high gear, unveiling two new ones–one that showed him out among the people, and featured tingly words like “hope” and “justice”. Another where he’s addressing the camera directly from in front of a blackboard in a classroom. More “hopes” and “dreams” and lives “transformed” (mainly Deval’s). He gets mildly medieval on the current administration in this one: “It’s not a deficit of dollars,” he says of the “education crisis,” “it’s a deficit of leadership — the failure to ask hard questions and tell the truth.”

This would seem to imply that his Republican opponent, Kerry Healey, the representative of the current administration seeking the governorship, too, has not asked the hard questions or told the truth. You could argue for the first, depending on what you consider to be the “hard questions” to be, but I think the second is a stretch, and I’ll tell you why.

I don’t think the truth is a big issue for Republicans, first of all. Healey’s positions would certainly “evolve,” just as Romney’s have while in office.

Neither Romney nor Healey is a leader. Both are managers, and managers are interested in the bottom-line, and they will change their management strategy according to whose bottom-line they’re paying attention to.

For her part, Kerry Healey’s latest ad characterizes her opponents as traditional “tax-and-spend” liberals, and then there’s a bit of fluff about how she will spend your money on “things like education.” And who could object to that?

What rings particularly hollow with Healey is the promise to “suspend the gas tax,” which is something no one’s all that interested in. Even the President recognizes America has an oil addiction. “With a billion dollar surplus,” she claims in one ad, “we can afford it.” Well, if we’ve got such a big-ass surplus, why not put some of it into transit-oriented development? Maybe make alternatives to automobiles a feasible alternative for people. I mean, two of her, like, four campaign promises have to do with making driving a car cheaper.

None of the Healey’s opponents are fool enough to propose new taxes, by the way. And none have mentioned our supposed billion dollar surplus. (I don’t know where this figure comes from, actually–The Mass. Budget and Policy Center puts the surplus at $120 million–if anyone has insight on this, please share.)

Healey wants it both ways here. She wants to say, on the one hand, that when she came into power four years ago, as she told channel 4’s Jon Keller, “things were very tough; we were having an economic downturn.” But now we have this billion dollar surplus, according to her. So why are we still experiencing “the big squeeze,” as she calls it in her ad? That’s the question, isn’t it?

She is literally the poster child for her own administration’s lack of effectiveness. She’s trying to court the very people her own administration could not help, by her own admission, over the past four years. It’s the legislature’s fault? OK, so how is she going to be any more effective in dealing with it than Romney’s been? And Romney had a lot more impressive management experience than Healey when he came to office.

But back to Deval. What he’s got that Healey doesn’t is precisely “hope.” And that’s what separates leadership, particularly on the executive level, from management. Managers strategize and build systems, leaders inspire and motivate people. And don’t underestimate the power of inspired and motivated people. The Healey camp says, leave it to us. We’ll manage it for you. Deval says “together, we can.”

The question for Deval is, can he leverage his charisma to convince the legislature to make changes once in office? But even if he can’t, he starts out in a stronger position than Healey. He at least has the charisma to begin with.