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You shouldn’t be too pushy when you move to a new place, politics-wise. You need to see the lay of the land first, and since the land is often under four feet of snow, you've got to be patient. But I think I'm getting the hang of being a Mainer.
For starters, I now loathe and detest everyone from Massachusetts. Hmm. That sounds a little harsh, especially since I’d lived in Massachusetts since Kennedy was a still a Senator. Jack Kennedy, not Teddy. There’s no malice in it, though. People from Maine aren’t capable of hate; it’s a kind of joshing, commingled with wonderment at how those people manage to shave in the morning without turning the razor on themselves.
I'm no longer “from away,” as they charmingly refer to strangers here, so I’ve learned that there's only two ways to refer to people from the Bay State: if you're a Maine guide, and the deer hunters from Worcester tip heavily, you refer to them as flatlanders, and in a quiet moment you tell your friends they ain't half bad is what I mean. Everyone else cutting the lines at the ski area is just a Masshole. It is the central theme of Maine life, and I've taken to it like a canvasback.
Maine is one of two states whose legislatures and governorships flipped from entirely Democrat controlled to entirely Republican controlled in the last election, Wisconsin being the other. The last time Maine was so infested with Republicans, JFK was President. I don't know anything about Wisconsin, but in Maine that switch reminded me of a person with the flu rolling over in bed, hoping it would make you feel four percent better.
The current, outgoing governor is John Baldacci. He may possibly be the homeliest person in the state, which is saying something. He's bald, jug-eared, weighs about eight stone, and looks like he should be fingering a ring and muttering Precious. But I like homely people in politics. They are more likely to at least seem honest. And as the homely Honest Abe said, God must like homely people, because he made so many of them.
Baldacci is not going to be confused with the Great Emancipator anytime soon, no matter how homely he is, but I can't help but notice everything governmental in this state functions properly, more or less. Going to the Registry of Motor Vehicles in Massachusetts is like a crash course in Byzantine politics taught by crooked longshoremen. In Maine you just take a seat until a heavy woman with lots of Post-It notes adorning her porthole-sized cathode ray tube monitor calls you by your first name, fills the forms out for you if you're stuck, and shows you your first take of your photo and asks if you look handsome enough, or do you want to try again. The walls are adorned with paintings of woodland scenes, obviously drawn by the relatives of the clerks, probably with their feet, and add another homely touch to life here. In Massachusetts they'd all be poster-sized threats and legal admonishments for coloring outside the lines on your forms, or pictures of former registrars dressed in some sort of powder blue police tuxes.
But for all her bucolic charm, the clerk in Maine immediately noticed I was blind as justice, and told me to go out to my car and get either my glasses or a dog and a cane if I wanted to continue further. In Massachusetts, the imperious clerk just stapled the paperwork I brought from the optometrist to the back of the license form without reading it -- it said plainly that semi-trailers were just vague concepts to me at a hundred yards -- and gave me an unrestricted license. Reading in a Massachusetts government office is for benighted people who aren't state senator's nephews. And Maine’s computer system auto-filled my wife’s info immediately although she hasn’t lived in Maine for twenty-plus years and has a different last name now. You would have needed a note from the Pope and James Michael Curley to straighten that out in Massachusetts.
Baldacci couldn't win because he can't run. Maine doesn't allow three consecutive terms for a governor, and he's had his two. Massachusetts doesn't have laws like that. Barney Frank was my congressman forever, it seemed, even though I moved all over the place. Before that, he was my state representative. After I moved to Maine I found out that Barney’s Massachusetts Fourth District used to include all of Maine, and for a tense moment I thought I'd have to move to Newfoundland next to finally be shorn of him, but apparently in 1795 Maine decided on electing their own weirdoes and not outsourcing the job to people who yell "Do you know who I am?" at ferryboat ticket counters. In Maine no one knows who you are, and they’re proud of it.
All the candidates for governor said they were for education and jobs. The way they said "education and jobs" sounded like they were describing a Loch Ness monster or a Sasquatch or some other creature they'd heard of, but didn't have a current home address for. Since all the candidates vehemently pronounced their love for education and jobs, no matter what question was posed to them, I figured there must be a dastardly candidate that was for unemployment and ignorance, but I couldn't find one. My wife helpfully offered to write my name in.
In the governor's race, a Republican fellow named Paul LePage won. He is, interestingly, the first person of Franco-American descent to be elected governor here, though every-other person in Maine has a French-sounding name. I have no idea what that means, as I'm still trying to figure out why French-Canadians all go to Old Orchard Beach in the summer for vacation, wear banana-hammock Speedos in the frigid surf, eat at the Olive Garden, and think it's the Cote d'Azur.
LePage's platform, roughly -- I’m paraphrasing here -- was an assessment that lots of deadbeats from places like Massachusetts were moving to Maine (what are you looking at?) and sucking the state dry, and he promised to ride around the state in his mother-in-law's Escalade chloroforming all the hobos he encountered, then drive them to Massachusetts, push them up Deval Patrick's walk in a shopping cart, and ring the doorbell and run away. When he ran out of hobos, he was going to start on hippies. That was second termish, I think. This resonated with the harrumph crowd, which goes to the Olive Garden just before the Canadians to get the specials. LePage was the mayor of Waterville, and operates a chain of discount stores, Mardens, for people who think Walmart is too glitzy.
LePage's Democratic opponent was a hundred and fifty year old woman named Elizabeth Mitchell, but everyone here calls her Libby. That's good, because there's an entirely different Elizabeth Mitchell holding up a tank top on the TV series Lost, and a General Internet Search for "Elizabeth Mitchell naked" could have terrified lots of naughty schoolboys.
Libby's platform -- and I may be oversimplifying here -- was that education was the way to have education and jobs and education and jobs and education. She proposed some sort of scheme where 180 percent of the budget would be spent on Head Start programs for every citizen -- and anyone she found at the bus station, from conception to funeral reception. Half the state would be teachers, and the other half would be retired teachers, which would boost the economy with all the pension coin they dropped at the Olive Garden and Mardens. She only got 19 percent of the vote, which isn't good for a Democrat in this state. I don't think she campaigned all that hard, figuring she could go back to being Senate President if she lost. Whoops.
There was a guy named Eliot Cutler in the race. He ran as an independent. I think “Independent” means Democrat without donors but plenty of money. Among a host of accomplishments, he touted the fact that he was a big wheel in the Carter White House in charge of "Energy Matters," which struck me as similar to claiming you were the A&R man for General Custer's tour of the Black Hills.
Anyway, I think his platform was for him to stand on a yacht in lime green pants with whales on them and yell environmental legalese at us through a bullhorn, and thereby corral the coveted “stringy oceanfront matron with two corgis in her lap” vote.
Cutler promised to create jobs like he did in the private sector. His last job was running a law office in Beijing. I don't know how many Chinese lawyers he expected to find in Bangor. They’re rarer than a Mormon in Massachusetts. Eliot only lost by a few thousand votes to LePage, and blamed the fact that everyone in Maine is as old as Libby Mitchell and voted early by absentee ballot before they had a chance to hear the siren song of his bullhorn, and feel the power of his vapor trail of Jimmy Carter mojo. He shook their hands at the Olive Garden, and kissed their babies, who were forty-ish and lived out of state, mostly, but by then it was too late.
So I admit I didn’t pay close attention to the governor’s race. I was in a new and strange place and working feverishly trying to figure out what’s what here. I was working at my desk one day in October, and there was a knock on my ramshackle door. The man at the door said he worked for my state representative. Would I like to meet him? Sure. He’s disabled. Would you mind walking out to the car to talk to him?
There was an old Honda parked out in front of my house. I’m Matt, he said, and shook my hand. He seemed very young and earnest. He had a wheelchair shoved unceremoniously in the back seat, and a pile of flyers for his friend to bring on his peripatations. He said he was for improving the economy through education and jobs, or improving jobs through education and the economy, or improving education through the economy and jobs, or something.
He lives down the street from me, so I know he’s not rich. There was something Sisyphean about his task, resolutely determined to shake the hand and ask for the vote of every person in town that would answer a knock. 99 persons out of 100 would have found a reason not to do it, and that’s if their legs worked. I watched a little while as they went down the street and stopped at every house. I didn’t feel sorry for him. I admired him a little bit.
I didn’t vote for him. I was glad to hear he won. That’s Maine.
