Box Turtle Bulletin

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

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:

Mr. 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.