Fairview and Major County in northwestern Oklahoma were voting Republican before most Oklahomans had ever met a Republican. Landon’s home, Independence, Kansas, is an oil city 205 miles from Fairview, so maybe Major Countians felt a kinship.
That headline pops to mind when the Janus in me looks at how politics in Maine used to work and looks ahead to how it might work again in the future. Civilly. Able to have a bit of fun with politics. Expect a clue nine days hence as to whether Maine politics will return to civility or will stay with the petty and personal style of the past eight years.
Petty and personal are the hallmarks and the Achilles heels of Gov. Paul LePage. He took office in the election of 2010 with majorities in both houses of the Legislature. But, as was said of Yasser Arafat, “He never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
At the start, he correctly labeled the practice of Gov. John Baldacci — can you say failed governorship? — a gimmick that “balanced” the budget by postponing payments the state owed to hospitals. LePage sold a liquor revenue bond, which triggered a federal match of more than 60 percent of the money owed. He also has presided over increases in state funding to education. But even as the Legislature has tossed more money into the school pot, property taxes have soared.
LePage’s top goal was to end the state income tax, a pet peeve of the Tea Party. Bipartisan votes got the top rate for a couple down to 7.15 percent (from 8.5 percent in 2013), but the top rate kicks in at taxable income of $50,750. The top rate begins at a higher income in other states. In Vermont it’s $416,500. A Vermont couple pays 6.8 percent on $50,750, a couple hundred bucks less than a Maine couple at $50,750.
Getting only part of a victory on income tax may have been the trigger that set LePage on a path of slashing and burning Augusta. I’ll bet he isn’t done yet.
Remember just into his first term when LePage said his motto was “people before politics?” He chanted it almost like a mantra. People before politics. So what happened to his motto when he opted — I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt that it was a change of heart, not just an unmasking — to put politics ahead of people?
“No, no, no, no, and no.” That was LePage’s advice to voters in 2016 on five referendum issues (legalizing recreational marijuana, income tax surcharge for high-income people, background checks on more firearms sales, higher minimum wage and ranked-choice voting). The voters said, “Yes, yes, no, yes, yes.” A year later, he bitterly opposed Medicaid expansion, which nearly 60 percent of the voters supported.
So, LePage was in step with voters on one issue in six. That’s a 0.167 batting average. How many Red Sox would still be on the roster batting 0.167? Even Jackie Bradley Jr. gets hot with the bat. And LePage will never have Bradley’s peg from center field.
Never did LePage say, “The people have spoken, and I always put the people before politics.” Even imagining his saying such a thing is laughable. Clearly what the people voted for was not important to LePage.
I had to rethink the benefit of the doubt I had given LePage. I did not vote for him — Democrats must remember that they elected LePage in 2010 when state Sen. Libby Mitchell refused to drop out in favor of independent Eliot Cutler — but I still hoped that he could reverse Maine’s high taxation and low performance of government services.
Didn’t happen. Maine still ranks third in the burden of taxation, according to WalletHub, a tax-rating website. Most telling, we rank fourth in the proportion of personal income we pay in property tax. We remain a low-income and high-tax state.
Early on, LePage made a lot of noise about the mess that is the Department of Health and Human Services. It had spent millions of dollars on computer systems that didn’t work. It had few controls on spending and virtually no accountability. It was ripe for reform. But his ideas for fixing DHHS turned out to be, basically, to tinker with SNAP (food stamps) in a move that the feds, who send the money, said was illegal and to spend other federal money for purposes not intended by the donors. DHHS is still a mess.
His DHHS “reform” agent was Mary Mayhew, who recently moved to Washington as the fox guarding the chicken coop of Medicaid. Mayhew basically opposes Medicaid.
So, when Mayhew ran for governor, one might have expected a governor who puts “people above politics” to support one of “his people.” He had two in the race, Mayhew and Rep. Ken “Kenny Boy” Fredette of Newport, who had mastered the job of toady by marshaling a band of House Republicans to uphold most of LePage’s vetoes.
Instead, LePage worked, sotto voce, for Shawn Moody, a marvelously successful businessman from Gorham, whose bootstrap story parallels LePage’s own. Moody ran against LePage in 2014. So much for loyalty. So much for people above politics.
While LePage has been busy putting politics before people, state needs go unmet. DHHS is still broken. The tax load continues to be pushed down onto the property tax. Much if not most of the state is without broadband internet service. The state has no mental-health system worthy of the name. People before politics, indeed.
Bob Neal vowed to write this column without comparing LePage to Trump. It wasn’t easy. Trump’s behavior, not LePage’s, led him to change his enrollment from Republican.
Bob Neal
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