Maine’s Governor Is the Epitome Of What’s Wrong In The Republican Party

Jim Burroway

August 29th, 2016

Goldwater, then Reagan, made the Republican Party a party of ideals. Whatever you may think of those ideals is another matter altogether, but at the core of everything they fought for and everything they did stood a set of principles that anchored their positions.

Those kinds of people still exist in the Republican Party today. But those kinds of people have largely been shunted aside in favor of a party that is now driven but pure, unmediated rage. It might be tempting to feel sorry for the principled wing of the Republican Party if it weren’t for that fact that the principled wing — now dismissed as “the establishment” — is in large measure responsible for the pure screaming id that is now at the top of the GOP ticket. By courting the Tea Party and nurturing it from one manufactured outrage to the next, as a deliberately obstructive tactic against the past eight years of the Obama presidency. The party of ideas in Congress spent the last six years in an internal battle with itself, against the emerging party of “no” — it’s perhaps more accurately described as the party of “gaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!”

Trump is the “gaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!’s” standard bearer, but he’s really a johnny-come-lately to the scream-till-you-turn-blue wing. Maine Gov. Paul LePage, on the other hand, is something of an éminence grise of the tantrum set. Since his successful 2010 run for governor, LePaul has gone from one head-scratching outrage to the next. It’s hard to know how to rank the latest outrage against the others — there were have been so many that his Wikipedia page could probably be used as a useful diagnostic guide to identify political batshitism in its sufferers. But what’s particularly noteworthy about his latest remarks is how it perfectly illustrates the mindset of the Republican Party’s new establishment. Here is LePage’s message he left as a voicemail to State Rep. Drew Gattine:

Paul LePageMr. Gattine, this is Governor Paul Richard LePage. I would like to talk to you about your comments about my being a racist, you cocksucker. I want to talk to you. I want you to prove that I’m a racist. I’ve spent my life helping black people and you little son-of-a-bitch, socialist cocksucker. You, I need you to, just freakin’, I want you to record this and make it public because I am after you. Thank you.”

LePage was apparently proud of his soliloquy:

LePage later invited a Portland Press Herald reporter and a two-person television crew from WMTW to the Blaine House, where during a 30-minute interview the governor described his anger with Gattine and others, told them he had left the phone message and said he wished he and the lawmaker could engage in an armed duel to settle the matter.

“When a snot-nosed little guy from Westbrook calls me a racist, now I’d like him to come up here because, tell you right now, I wish it were 1825,” LePage said. “And we would have a duel, that’s how angry I am, and I would not put my gun in the air, I guarantee you, I would not be (Alexander) Hamilton. I would point it right between his eyes, because he is a snot-nosed little runt and he has not done a damn thing since he’s been in this Legislature to help move the state forward.”

The ironic fact that LePage used a homophobic slur to argue that he’s not racist isn’t, in itself, being commented on very much. Comments lean more to wow, LePage really is a truly awful person, which kind of misses the point when in a political culture where being a truly awful person is a badge of honor and hailed as a substitute for “strength.” He also doubled down on the racially explosive comments that Gattine had criticized:

In a State House press conference, the governor restated previous comments about the numbers of black and Hispanic drug dealers who are bringing heroin into Maine and likened them to the enemy in a war.

“Look, the bad guy is the bad guy, I don’t care what color he is,” LePage said. “When you go to war, if you know the enemy and the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, then you shoot at red.”

LePage then turned to House Minority Leader Ken Fredette, R-Newport, an officer who serves as a military lawyer in the Maine Air National Guard and sat in on the press conference. “Don’t you – Ken (Fredette) you’ve been in uniform? You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy and the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of color or people of Hispanic origin.”

The governor met with reporters to explain statements he has made about drugs and race dating back to January, when he said in a town hall meeting in Bridgton that dealers from Connecticut and New York bring drugs to Maine and “impregnate a young white girl before they leave.”

LePage was the second sitting governor, after New Jersey’s Chris Christie, to endorse Trump last February. LePage is now being condemned by Democrats and Republicans alike, both locally and nationally. But don’t expect that to mean much. He won’t resign, and why would he? He’s a hero to his die-hard supporters. And besides, his remarks aren’t any more incendiary that those uttered by his own hero, the man sitting at the very top of his party’s ticket.

MattNYC

August 29th, 2016

When he was still a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt liked the exclamation, “Bully!”

Is it possible that today’s lunatic GOPers are just taking that literally???

Hyhybt

August 29th, 2016

I remember a while back some judge or other declaring calling someone gay no longer counted as defamation because there’s nothing wrong with it. How long until “cocksucker” ceases to be a slur?

Lucrece

August 29th, 2016

That’s really odd, I thought Maine was a fairly progressive state, with a conservative contingent but not a batshit crazy one.

What went wrong for it to get bad even in Maine? What’s next, New Hampshire and Vermont?

Hunter

August 30th, 2016

Lucrece: A friend who lives in Portland says the urban centers along the coast are fairly liberal, but the interior is real teabagger country.

I can’t help but wonder how much the wooing of the religious right has contributed to the present state of the GOP. They, after all, are the ones who have “permission” to spew hatred toward everyone not just like them. If anything, they’ve laid the groundwork for the likes of LePage and Trump.

MattNYC

August 30th, 2016

The reason that Mainers got LePage twice is they have a vibrant independent political environment. In both elections, a relatively progressive third-party candidate took too many votes away from the Democrat. It’s teh same way that Angus King won his Senate race (basically at the last minute the Dems decided that they couldn’t win a three-way race and committed to King).

Joe Beckmann

August 30th, 2016

The real danger is that the Tea Party players are so cheap to buy that the Koch’s and others can win easily with those votes, and exploit exactly those who most fear that exploitation. It’s not a matter of “liberal” or “conservative,” but, rather, cheap or serious about blending progressive change and with stability. Ideology is the bargain basement of politics, both in location and in advocating for causes which cause them to stay in that location.

And it’s just as serious on the left as on the right: higher ed is no longer “higher” in anything but variables like cost, power, and influence. And education is no cleaner than biotech and health, finance and housing, transit and even environmental issues: the bad guys buy the case cheap and exploit their volunteers without mercy. That’s why they fight college credit for community applications; “market pricing” for drugs invented and developed by NIH and other public funders; and rental real estate for the poor, that can be escalated without limit, while the rich build equity.

And, the way to fight them is not to argue, but to subvert. The LePage’s of politics are hardly new or unique. They are even easier to subvert than smarter conservatives. Engineering coursework that pays while learning; health that prevents the need for overpriced medications; and housing that builds equity among the middle class frozen into rental are not difficult “innovations.” But too often the liberals are as much at fault as the conservatives in ignoring opportunities when they quiver on the plate.

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