Governor Paul LePage of ME said on Tuesday he might not finish his second term in office less than a week after he called people of color “the enemy” and threatened a state lawmaker.
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LePage’s angry voicemail followed an exchange with a newspaper reporter who asked about comments the governor had made blaming black and Hispanic people for the heroin trade in the northeastern state. “What I’m going to do right now is I’m taking one step at a time”. In it, LePage acknowledged he’d purposely called Gattine “the worst word I could think of”.
First, there was the expletive-laden voicemail left for ME state Rep.
LePage described Gattine as a “cocksucker” in the message that he left on his voicemail last week.
LePage told WVOM that there were some demands that “I just can’t do”, which has him in mind of resigning. Drew Gattine and said it was “unacceptable”. “I would like to talk to you about your comments about my being a racist, you (obscene term)”. It was really totally, totally unnecessary, and I need to do something about it.
If you want a microcosmic preview of what the post-Trump recriminations might be like, or what the inevitable progressive-purity disappointment with Hillary Rodham Clinton will be like, then ME is your flawless point of observation.
“When it comes to meth labs, [arrests] are essentially all ME white people”. Since he was elected in 2010, the Republican has told critics of his decision to skip a civil rights breakfast to “kiss my butt” and accused a Democratic rival of forcing budget measures on taxpayers “without Vaseline”.
In a recording of the message obtained by the Press Herald, the governor identified himself and went on to curse out Gattine.
Amid political pressure and calls for his resignation, Republican Gov. Paul LePage on Tuesday suggested that he might be considering stepping aside but seemed to reject the idea entirely hours later in a tweet, saying, “The reports of my political demise are greatly exaggerated”. I want you to prove that I’m a racist.
One of the main reasons is because of the upcoming election cycle, both Fredette and Espling said they want voters to understand the issues and the positions of both Democrats and Republicans, rather than to focus on the governor’s latest slip up.
“When I was called a racist I just lost it and there’s no excuse”, LePage told WVOM.
“They’re Hispanic and they’re black and they’re from Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, Waterbury, Connecticut, the Bronx and Brooklyn (in New York)”, LePage told State House News Service in Boston Monday while attending a conference of other New England governors and Canadian premiers whose goal was, in part, to address the opiate crisis.
It was at least the third time since the North Berwick meeting that LePage has publicly repeated some variant of his original statement linking the race of drug traffickers coming into ME with the state’s growing opiate crisis. “To me this epitomizes his ignorance and he owes the people of the cities of Lowell and Lawrence an apology”, Lowell City Councilor and former mayor Rodney Elliott said in a statement. “It’s not something that I’ve ever called anybody”, he said.
LePage, who has previously faced accusations of racism, left the voicemail a day after saying he has a binder documenting the drug dealers arrested in the state and that more than 90 percent of them are black or Hispanic.
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Though LePage, a Republican, has been elected twice, the state of ME has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992. He said he intends to make amends, and he’s scheduled to meet with Gattine on Wednesday. “Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road”.
