In January, LePage caused a similar controversy – and generated national headlines – when he said men with names such as “D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” bring heroin into ME and “half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave”.
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LePage has been criticized in recent days for leaving an obscene voicemail on the cellphone of a Democratic legislator and for blaming minorities for the state’s heroin crisis. Meanwhile, a top state Democrat repeated a call for the Republican governor to resign.
Governor LePage has called the obscenity-laced voicemail he left for a state representative “unacceptable and totally my fault”.
LePage said he still has the energy to tackle issues like wait lists for state services and solar policy, but if he’s “lost my ability to convince the ME people that’s what we need and that’s the type of people we need in Augusta, you know, maybe it is the time to move on”.
“I’m looking at all options”, LePage told WVOM.
Hours later he changed his tune, paraphrasing Mark Twain on Twitter saying, “The reports of my political demise are greatly exaggerated”, before trying to change the subject with a series of messages on a visit to a tissue factory. Some are calling for his resignation.
“He’s abrasive and rough on the edges and no one agrees with that”, Fredette said.
I mention this because the governor’s willingness to say he might quit does not mean he’s actually prepared to quit.
“I would like to talk to you about your comments about my being a racist, you c–“, LePage said in the voicemail, which was first published by the Portland Press Herald. Now ever since I said that comment, I’ve been collecting [the photos of] every single drug dealer who has been arrested in our state.
LePage won election twice in multi-candidate fields because he attracted a loyal group of conservative voters who hate political correctness, and see LePage as their only hope for real representation, warts and all.
On Monday, a previously scheduled town hall meeting with LePage was canceled.
Rep. Kevin Battle, a Republican from South Portland, said LePage felt provoked, though that didn’t excuse him from failing to control himself.
Statistics on ME arrests for making or selling all types of drugs in 2014, the previous year for which FBI Criminal Justice Information Service data is available, show that only 14.1 percent of the 1,211 people charged were black. But he also said it’s true that most women in ME are white, so he was factually correct either way. Of those, 170 were black.
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican like LePage, and Connecticut Gov. Daniel Malloy, a Democrat, also reacted. But any possible ramifications against LePage – who has repeatedly avoided punishment and retained his base of political support – are unclear.
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Or they could say: We’re done. We will make them as carefully and consistently as we can. No we discuss how we can fix our gun problem together. Don’t include URLs to Web sites. “We don’t talk about ME”. Instead, corrections will be made in a blog post or in an article.
