If somebody held a competition for most politically cynical person in Rhode Island, I probably wouldn’t win, but I’m pretty sure I’d get through the preliminaries. There’s a reason mainstream journalists block me on Twitter and some legislators see me as an implacable enemy.

But I have to say that a number of folks in the right-of-center reform movement have been too quick to proclaim that now-Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello (D, Cranston) is certain to keep up the same failed method of operations at the State House.

Will the former majority leader under Gordon Fox keep up the status quo? Maybe… probably. Two weeks ago, I would have cited him as an archetype of the Democrat status quo. We have to leave open, however, the possibility that a person whose role was to help implement somebody else’s agenda will go in a different direction when he or she actually gets to make the choice.

Maybe a relatively conservative legislator ascending to the speakership in an unexpected four-day whirlwind at a time when his state is at the bottom of every ranking, including a chronically high and now dead-last unemployment rate, will see the opportunity to really and truly make a mark in history. Maybe he’ll see the late spring budding, to be followed by another summer, another autumn, and another winter, burying us all in the settling dust of yesterdays, and he’ll take the risk of conspicuously doing what’s right for his state, what will work.

Maybe.

It’s an iffy thing, taking the reins. Two weeks ago, if Representative Mattiello paused for a moment and daydreamed about one day when he’d get his chance at the raised seat in the front of the House chamber, he himself may have thought he’d make some small changes, pay off a few political debts, help out a few political friends, but mostly keep things in place. Actually climbing up to that chair, however, and seeing the scene reversed is an unstable moment.

Rhode Islanders ought to be hoping that Speaker Mattiello responds to the instability by giving himself permission to make history.  He has an example of a future of federal investigations.  He also has an example of a future of lucrative lobbying contracts.  In contrast, the library is full of examples of other futures — the kind worth writing about centuries later.

In the present, we can only judge Mr. Mattiello by what he’s said and done in the past and what he’s saying now. Soon, we’ll be able to judge him by what he’s doing.

In this moment of instability, between the promise and the reality, it doesn’t make it any easier for the new speaker to make the daring, right choice if we start digging ruts of expectations. He’s proclaimed an intention. Encourage him to follow through as he takes his first, tentative steps.

If nothing changes in the next few months, work to give somebody else that moment of exhilarating choice.  In the meantime, anybody who wants Rhode Island to be not a diamond in the rough, but the shining gem that it ought to be — a land of hope and opportunity — should be much more anxious to say “I was wrong about you” than “I told you so.”

 

Featured image: Ocean State Current stock photo, June 26, 2013.