Love or hate him, Gov. Paul LePage is certainly the most entertaining Blaine House resident we’ve had in awhile.
If he isn’t telling President Barack Obama to go to hell or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to kiss his butt, then he’s calling state middle-managers corrupt, which to him means broken and spoiled.
Media outlets, liberals, Democrats and labor unions have wrung their hands with anticipation of the distraction they could create from the “LePage-foot-in-mouth” effect. Our governor has not disappointed!
It’s easy to find things to attack. He’s outspoken and often coarse. As a CEO myself, I sometimes shake my head at the controversy he creates that will not help him do his job. His disgust and impatience is apparent — but why?
To start, he has the most unenviable job in Maine — to clean up a mess of almost unimaginable proportions. A few of his challenges:
• Maine has never met its education funding promises. Schools — and test scores and students — have suffered, and we have failed to produce and retain a sufficiently skilled work force.
• After years of underfunding the Maine Department of Transportation construction budget, we are left with a several-hundred-million-dollar structural deficit and a road and bridge grade of “D” from the American Society of Civil Engineers.
• Our telecommunications and Internet systems are second-rate compared to our neighbors to the south.
• We have chosen to allow MaineCare benefits and eligibility to so far exceed national averages as to crowd out necessary portions of the state’s budget.
• Our state and local tax burden is ranked among the nation’s highest.
• We are considered one of the worst states for business in the country.
As a result, our best and brightest leave Maine in droves for better wages and opportunities. What employers can afford to pay (and still compete) gets lower each year, accelerating the drain. Our state has become the most rural and has the oldest median age in the nation.
We have allowed this to happen. Our elected officials have lacked the courage to make the tough choices in order to ensure long-term prosperity and success for our citizens and businesses. We have not realized that the best thing we can do for Mainers is to create a climate in which our economy can thrive.
We must bring our state more in line with what works elsewhere: lower taxes, investment in infrastructure, education and work force development, smaller and less expensive government, aligning social service costs to the national average and reducing the cost of business operation in Maine.
This will mean reducing employment within state government, wholesale elimination of unaffordable programs and sensible reduction in our bloated MaineCare system.
As a CEO, I know it’s not easy to make these choices. Unfortunately, we now have to correct 30 years of misguided lack of discipline. This job has fallen on the shoulders of the current governor and Legislature, and they are tackling the difficult issues that the previous administration(s) would not (and, in fact, have caused). It’s a job I would not want.
And LePage? He’s the perfect guy for the job. What he’s accomplished is because of a strict adherence to a rigid personal discipline that, in the end, benefits all. He has chosen to make up for the lack of past leadership and stick to a simple principle that we control our own destiny and can choose whether or not to make Maine a place where our kids can stay and live a prosperous life.
Will we allow ourselves to be distracted? Or will we see beyond the rhetoric — to the causes of and solutions to our problems? It is up to us.
Karl Ward is president & CEO of Nickerson & O’Day, Inc., based in Brewer.
Well said. Karl is absolutely on point. LePage has been consistent with respect to his vision and what has to happen in order to put Maine on a course to prosperity. The decisions that have to made are tough decisions that necessarily involve a reprioritazation of resource allocation and not everyone can be a winner in this process. It’s easy to scapegoat any leader who has the courage to make the tough decisions and take away the cookie jar. Anybody that listened to LePage during the campaign should not be at all surprised by the course he has charted as governor.
LePage himself could learn to stop scapegoating groups of people.
Speaking of scapgoating. LePage is a past master.
You are correct..
Oh stop trying to spray perfume on this pig. LeBUFFOON is a ROTTEN governor not just on his horrid personality and disgusting demeanor, but also on his anti-Maine ALEC-written policies. He is a corporate toadie AS WELL AS a foul-mouthed jerk. He is a disgrace to the Blaine House and a shame on this state. And his silly Goofy Old Party will pay dearly at the polls in November.
As a CEO you know it’s a tough choice to lower taxes? LOL!
I think we need to admit that many of Maine’s problems have little to do with politics. The climate here isn’t exactly always desirable, so we’ll probably never see huge population booms. However, we can highlight what makes our state unique and bank on that. We should cut costs in government, but we shouldn’t slash tax rates as well. We need real investments in our education and infrastructure.
Also, you can’t argue that having a bully in the Blaine house is appealing and would ever make kids want to stay here. You can make tough choices and have disagreements without being disrespectful.
Yorkshire pudding, anyone?
It is the typical American CEO mentality. Everybody else must hurt but you HAVE to lower my taxes. They are sociopaths who do not care about their fellow Citizens.
I would only object to one thing you said DnLewis…. the climate thing.
Many cold places have had economic and population booms, despite their cold climate. People have flocked to northern cities over the years when factory work called. Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, Rochester, all had boom times when the economic climate was right. Alaska, and right now North Dakota are enjoying good times due to their energy economies. My brother and his family live in Bend, Oregon, one of the fastest growing places in the West, this despite Bend being as cold, if not colder than at least southern and central Maine, being on the edge of the northern High Desert as it is (but yes, they get snow in the winter.)
Blame Maine for many things, but don’t think that it’s simply cold weather that is quelling the economy.
And continuing to bad mouth Maine and use gutter language helps us how?
This felow wants to spend more tax dollars on construction and teaching and less on everything else. I’m guessing he’s in the construction business and has a spouse or other relative who is a teacher.
Just another Republican who thinks the world would be a lot rosier if we gave him more money and the heck with everyone else.
A real civic minded citizen, this guy.
Nothing wrong with fixing our infrastructure. It would put a lot of people back to work and enhance our image as a state.
I wouldn’t mind paying for education if there was some demands put on the students to perform and stay in Maine to help this state grow and prosper. I doubt that will happen until the so called ‘Job Creators’ are willing to pay competitive wages with the rest of the country.
A couple of thoughts came to mind after reading this contribution to the BDN and the responses to it. The budget that the Democrats claimed they had balanced all those years in the past were not in fact balanced. All the high fives and congratulatory back slaps were staged for the benefit of “duping” voters that everything was fine in Augusta. We can live well beyond our means and get away with it. There is no “piper to be paid for this largesse.” The second thought is if the “restoration” of the Democratic occurs taxes will go up way up. The will immediately “knee jerk” restore all benefits no matter what and discover there isn’t money to pay for them now either. The tax increase will not in anyway be revenue neutral.
It may be tempting to think that running a state (or country) is similar to running a business
but it is also terribly simplistic. A governor must deal not just with state budgets but also with the underlying long-term macro-economic realities, all too often in a politically divisive setting where multiple political interest groups vie for attention and advantage. CEO’s ultimately represent small interest groups of stockholders and employees; a Governor represents an entire state’s diverse population, including city-dwellers and rural residents, infants and elderly, unschooled and educated, sick and healthy, conservative and liberal, rich and poor. While that shouldn’t prevent Maine’s Governor from pursuing bold or decisive action in tackling the state’s long-simmering economic challenges it does require tact, diplomacy, compassion and a keen understanding that Maine’s economic woes are at least as much a consequence of geography, demographics and larger economic trends as of earlier shortcomings in political leadership.
And so for you and many like you, personality is everything. The problems will go away with the right personality. Pain, budget cuts, program elimination, entitlements will all be okay so long as we have a nice personality leading us. Look at the United States. We have a nice personality leading us. Hasn’t a clue what to do about anything but he is a nice person and has a great personality. It’s what us American’s want, a nice personality.
Nobody is asking for a love fest from a governor or president for that matter. What we are asking for is someone who can operate with a small knife and fix what’s wrong, not with a machette and destroy everything in their path. This is what seems to be the problem in business and government. Nobody has the guts to tell an employee that he’s doing something that is inappropriate. They seem to just find it easier to make a blanket change to everyone.
Blanket statements and eddicts seem to be the only way Governor LePage knows how to operate. He shouldn’t feel wounded when people resent being accused of things that they have nothing to do with. Liberals and conservatives alike would resent being called corrupt if they were not.
You said it. A small knife, tho I don’t think he’s quite using a machette. And honestly I’m glad someone is doing something, because we really didn’t need Libby sitting in a corner, rocking back and forth saying, “stay the course…everything will be okay” over and over.
I’d like to see someone else come in next and continue making some changes with that small knife…someone deft and with a filter on his mouth.
Scapegoat him??? He seems adept at blaming problems on anyone but himself and his inept administration. It’s always the unions, corrupt state workers, or legislators that like to cause problems. However, when his own DHHS chief failed to disclose to the legislature that there wereproblems within her department and that her numbers could not be relied upon, nothing at all was said or done by the governor. Hmmmm……
Our governor has blinders on, has no couth, refuses to think, preferring to fall back on rhetoric and mythology, and thinks he has a mandate, when, in fact, he was elected by a minority. Are these virtures? Maybe, if you think that indiscriminate tax-cutting, unthinking repeals of benefits, and a wholesale gutting of the regulatory process in Maine are great ideas. I tend to think not. What we need is to develop a vision for the future based on reason and fact, not ill-concieved ideology on either the Left or the Right. Governor LePage seems incapable of this. He is embarassing, closed-minded, divisive, and seems to think he and his cronies are above the law. I think it sad that Maine has no way to recall such a mistake. Maybe we should change that.
Very well said, Mr. Ward. Gov. LePage, like Nickerson & O’Day, is results-oriented. I expect the positive results will be irrefutable by 2014, and he will see a second term. Good luck to him.
You hit the nail on the head!!!!
Perfectly stated. As a business owner, I also commend what Gov. LePage has accomplished and what he is trying to accomplish. His job would be easier if he wasn’t so outspoken, but he would still be demonized by those who like the status-quo. For our state to grow, we need someome like LePage.
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When it comes to LePudge and his cronies its a matter of too many clowns and not enough circuses. This mistake of a leader will have his claws pulled on Nov. 6th when the repugnicant majority becomes history.
I would really like to see a list of LePage’s accomplishments. I’ve never seen one. It may be possible that his accomplishments have been overshadowed by everybody’s outrage over his insults, bullying and bad-mouthing or it may be that his bullying, bad-mouthing and insulting really have prevented anything positive from getting done.
A list of accomplishments from a conservative point of view would be helpful.
Note: LePage’s insults to the press, unions, teachers, state workers, etc. may give you joy but it really isn’t an accomplishment, so it would be better not to list that.
Karl is right. LePage is often overly blunt and somewhat foul-mouthed, but he is nonetheless correct most of the time. He is like the bad-tasting medicine that goes down hard, but is necessary in order to get well.
I remember when Harry Truman was beloved by Democrats because of his straight talk and sometimes salty language; in fact, he was affectionately nicknamed “Give ’em Hell Harry.” At one time, he publicly announced his intention to punch a music critic in the nose for giving his daughter Margaret a bad review.
Yet, it wasn’t smooth-talking FDR who desegregated the U. S. military. It was Truman, with his blunt language, who accomplished the honorable and long overdue feat.
Maine has allowed itself to be mesmerized too often by silver-tongued politicians who’ve feathered their own nests at the expense of the well-being of the state.
A straight-talking Governor LePage is the perfect antidote for the malaise that’s shrouded the state for far too long. He recognizes the urgency of the situation, and all the flowery language in the world won’t cure it. He says what he means and means what he says, and I, for one, salute him for it.