As you might expect, the “Front Porch” has not been a particularly happy place recently.
The election results hang like a huge cloud over some of us. But, in a recent article, Ellen Goodman offered good advice: Grown-ups move on.
Stop the whining, and let’s get at the business of forging reasonable solutions to the many challenges ahead of us. I just wonder whatever happened to the validity of the phrase, “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.”
I hope you will allow me one more column around the significance of the election, state and national, and I promise to try to avoid whining. We simply need to learn on a macro level what is happening to American politics.
Let me turn my attention to Maine first. The story really starts 50 years ago this past September when Ed Muskie was elected the first Democratic governor of Maine in a very long time. Muskie had been approached by Frank Coffin, who was determined to restore the two-party system to Maine. Coffin wanted a “responsive and responsible” party, and Muskie agreed to lend his name to a building effort.
Joined by Don Nicoll, John Donovan and candidates Paul Fullam, Jim Oliver, Tom Delahanty and Ken Colbath, they challenged the Republican stronghold for the governorship and all congressional seats. They did not expect to win. This was to be, in the immortal words Red Sox fans often heard for 86 years, a “building year.”
The Muskie campaign had as its theme the need for a viable two-party system to provide ntegrity and “high purpose” in public office.
It was an intense campaign that saw Muskie and company traverse the state in search of support. The newest element in this election was the use of television and radio in a significant way as part of the campaign. Muskie introduced TV to Maine politics.
Much to everybody’s surprise, $18,000 and many miles on Maine roads later, Ed Muskie was elected governor. He and his hardy band broke the Republican stranglehold on Maine politics.
Maine has benefited from that for 50 years. The most recent election shows two very vital parties working hard to make their case to Maine voters.
The two houses of the Legislature may be in Democratic control, but not by much – one seat in the Senate. In the long run, that is healthy for the state, but it places a very special burden on this Legislature to tackle tax reform.
They must truly reach across the aisle, abandon ideology and look for common, practical ground that will help to move the reform agenda forward.
Tax reform is enormously complicated, and far be it from me to offer the solution. But some principles ought to guide the discussions. Tax reform cannot become a code word for slashing the efforts of the state to stand by the most vulnerable among us. We need to remember that progressive tax policies is a hallmark of a fair system.
We need to recognize that 20 percent of property in Maine is owned by people from away, and we do not want to enact a reform that transfers that source of revenue onto Mainers in another, more regressive form. We need to get honest numbers about our property-tax burden (subtract out the 20 percent, because their incomes are not counted against the tax level in many computations). Finally, use carefully targeted expansions in the Circuit Breaker program to provide relief to those who need it the most, focus any increase in the sales tax on areas such as lodging, restaurants, etc., so that the people from away contribute to the enormous cost of maintaining the infrastructure for their time here, and consider some alignment between taxes assessed and income.
Just a quick comment on another aspect of the elections in the state. The whole Palesky debate may be one of the best examples of effective democratic action in a long time. The issues were robustly debated. The quality of the discourse was civil and respectful. People changed their minds after listening. Isn’t that the way it is supposed to work?
What Ed Muskie and Frank Coffin started 50 years ago continues to play well in Maine – “integrity and high purpose in public office.”
Just a few words about the national scene. Pundits point out on one level that fear, capturing the “leadership” issue and moral values had much to do with the outcome. They also point out that Kerry had to spend so much time recovering from the Bush-Cheney definition of him as an uncertain, unclear, inconsistent person. There is some truth in what the pundits say. But there is more on a different level, a level on which Karl Rove works masterfully.
Richard Hofstadter wrote an influential book more than 50 years chronicling America’s penchant for anti-intellectualism. In the Nixon campaign, Spiro Agnew called it “effete.” Bush called it flip-flopping. The anti-intellectual component in American life – large in numbers in those red states – wants simple, direct answers to complex issues, no nuance appreciated here.
Bridging this divide in American life takes consummate skill. Muskie had it and, of course, Bill Clinton did as well. Kerry tried valiantly, but he did not quite make it.
The other macro quality worth considering – you have heard it here before – is the enormous power of television. Rove’s genius was in wedding simplicity to television. Notice how the phrases of Bush have gotten shorter. They no longer approach full sentences. Even the Texas twang was more pronounced in the campaign. He came across as a clear-minded guy who was just like those folks sitting in the NASCAR stands (no offense intended). Just one of the guys with determination. Bush turned simplicity into a virtue, and the nightly news replayed it for six months.
But we move on. As Red Sox fans have said for many years, “there is always next time!”
Jim Carignan is a retired educator who lives in Harpswell. His e-mail address is carignans@suscom-maine.net.
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