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Who are you calling a special interest party? Scot Lehigh thinks the State democrats have a choice between the public interest and playing to their constituencies:

Still, your platform opposes the MCAS, just as it opposes any expansion in charter schools, another important educational development, and one that has proved a popular option for inner-city families.

Provisions such as those read like communiques from interest-group dreamland. They are all the more reason why you need candidates independent enough to chart their own courses, with the public interest as their only compass. 

This reminds me of Lippman’s dictum that the role of democratic politics is to distinguish the public interest from vested interest. And I agree with Lehigh on the substance: I, too, support the MCAS requirement, think the Democratic Party should embrace it, and suspect it’s not to their tactical electoral advantage to hem and haw about it.

But if you stop to think about it, the MCAS issue wouldn’t be on the platform if a large number of party activists, many of whom have nothing to do with the teacher’s union, didn’t have a sincere opposition to standardized testing. I happen to find the progressives’ opposition to MCAS well-meaning but misguided. But If Lehigh can’t imagine what sincere oppositions to such testing would be, then he has no business being the Globe’s columnist on the state politics beat. surely it doesn’t take much imagination or research to determine what sincere reasons people have to such testing.

Furthermore, within the democratic party there is a split between machine politics and ideology-driven politics. Deval Patrick, whatever limitations his candidacy brings, represents the latter. It strikes me as perverse for Lehigh to blame him for interest-group checklist policy formulation, when in fact he’s the only real possibility for breaking that logjam.

We can get all grumpy-centrist and blame the ideoligcal types in the political parties are obstructing the public interest, but truth is, it’s not always clear what the public interest is - at the very least, that’s where the disagreement lies. Regulating insurance makes for an inefficient market (bad) but may protect consumers (good). Standardized testing helps employers trying to rely on educational credentials (good) but means that a lot of disadvantaged kids won’t be getting a high school diploma where a few years ago they would have (bad). Where you come down on these issues depends a lot on your political worldview as much as on your particular self-interest.

So on most issues, self-interest dovetails neatly with ideology. The same applies across the aisle. Yes, the current Congress has entered a period of high corruption and cynical exercise of power. But the age of the K Street Project got under way because Republican legislators had ideological reasons for things like telecommunications deregulation or loose antitrust legislation, in addition to interest-group benefits that accrue to such positions.

By the way, if Scot Lehigh thinks being in power makes one’s party platform more down to earth, he should note that fairly recently the Texas GOP was pining for a return to the gold standard.

UPDATE: On a moment’s reflection, the comment about Lehigh having no business being a columnist is over-the-top and just the sort of invective that I find offputting when others use it. I just found his article maddening.