Pres. Obama’s “Bring the Bain” campaign produced another defector last night, as BuzzFeed reports:

Deval Patrick Defends Bain Capital: “Not A Bad Company”

Democratic Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick appeared on CNN and defended the Boston-based company Mitt Romney led, saying it wasn’t “a bad company.” Patrick added “I respect what Bain does and its role in the free market system,” he said.

(The hardworking staff has alerted its Department of Redundancy Department – tip o’ the pixel to the Firesign Theater – about that last quote.)

Meanwhile, Patrick’s CNN turn:

Add Patrick to the list of “Black Democratic Stars” who have proven to be “Fickle Obama Allies” according to another BuzzFeed post:

As Senator Barack Obama rose toward power in 2007 and 2008, he was sometimes taken as the avatar of a new generation of African-American leaders.

They were, PBS’s Gwen Ifill wrote, a “Joshua Generation” led by figures from Alabama Rep. Artur Davis to Newark Mayor Cory Booker. They were, like Obama, born too late to participate in the Civil Rights movement, and late enough to benefit from it with blue chip educations and direct paths to power. They were free of the urban machines that had defined black politics in America, and ready for a different and more hopeful sort of politics of race.

But as President Barack Obama struggles to keep his party united around him, few figures have proven more troublesome than that cadre of black leaders, each of whom was seen at some point as a candidate for the post which only Obama will ever hold: First Black President.

Davis, 44, a fellow Harvard Law School graduate, was among the first members of Congress to endorse Obama in 2007; a campaign joke labeled him the “Second Black President.”

Now he’s out of politics after an unsuccessful run for Governor of Alabama, and writing for the conservative National Review. Harold Ford, another leading light of his generation of black leaders, this week re-emerged as a spokesman for the finance industry that employs him. And Booker, 42, a Rhodes scholar who has remained closest to Obama and to his party, had to be pushed firmly back into line by the White House after saying the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital were “nauseating” and made him “very uncomfortable.”

Booker has, of course, moonwalked away from that statement, but you have to wonder if Obama’s smashmouth reelection campaign will wear well with the choir.

Early indications are not, as they say, hopeful.