AUGUSTA, Maine — Gov. Paul LePage’s Wednesday assertion that out-of-state drug dealers with street names such as “Dee Money,” “Smoothie” and “Shifty” impregnate young, white women before leaving Maine landed him national headlines on Thursday and Friday.
You wouldn’t have thought that would emerge from a public access channel’s video of the Bridgton town hall meeting: There’s virtual silence after he delivers the remark, except for what sounds like a woman saying, “Huh.”
Murdock MacGregor of Sebago, a LePage supporter who was there to see him in person for the first time, said, “I don’t think that it mattered to the group that was there” and called the Republican governor “a straight-talking malaprop deliverer who has got very sound, good ideas.”
“To me, it was kind of like watching a guy stick his finger in a saw, but it didn’t amount to anything,” he said.
Supporters of LePage — the governor of the nation’s oldest and whitest state — love him for his plain talk, a divisive style that’s at the fore of the Republican presidential campaign with the rise of frontrunner Donald Trump.
Though LePage denied at a Friday news conference that his comments were racially motivated, Democrats and black activists have said it’s little more than playing to historic, racist tropes of sexually aggressive black criminals lusting after white women.
Gerard Talbot of Portland, an influential Maine civil rights figure who became the state’s first black legislator in the 1970s, said the comments were “very disturbing,” laying bare a racial tension that can be often invisible because of Maine’s racial homogeneity.
“We have been scarred before and this puts more scars on us,” he said. “We almost have to accept it because we’re a minority within a minority here.”
That’s sparking a range of responses from Maine Republicans trying to determine their party’s future.
The power of LePage’s style can’t be discounted — it won him two elections and looms over national politics today.
This isn’t the governor’s first time in the news for racial comments. During his first term, attendees of a 2013 Republican event in Belgrade reported that he said President Barack Obama “hates white people” and he told the NAACP in 2011 to “kiss my butt” after criticism.
It didn’t matter: He won re-election in 2014, behind a campaign that accentuated his politically incorrect image — in an ad, former first lady Barbara Bush called him “blunt” and “direct, like me.”
On Friday, the Bangor Daily News talked to many in Bridgton and most were unmoved by LePage’s comments, despite condemnation from many top Democrats, including the campaign of Hillary Clinton, the party’s presidential frontrunner, and U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree of the 1st District, who called the comments “disgraceful and racist.”
But these types of remarks are having a moment at the national level, where Trump has risen to the top of a large Republican presidential field with calls to ban Muslim travel to the U.S. and deport undocumented immigrants en masse. Clinton seized on LePage’s comments as reflective of an intolerant Republican mindset.
LePage has endorsed Gov. Chris Christie, a Trump rival, but he praised the businessman’s style in a Thursday interview, telling conservative radio host Howie Carr that Trump is “saying the right things,” but criticizing him for a lack of “concrete plans.”
A Friday headline in Slate called LePage “the proto-Trump” and Charles Nero, a Bates College professor of rhetoric and African-American studies, said their words can’t be separated.
“The intense growth of Gov. LePage’s rhetoric needs to be understood with this intense growth of populist rhetoric right now,” Nero said.
Black activists see this as clear racism, and Republicans’ responses to the comment indicate that there’s some disagreement on how to treat it.
LePage’s comment went unreported by media outlets who attended the town hall, including WGME and WMTW. It wasn’t made public until after Lance Dutson, a Republican operative who founded Get Right Maine, a group critical of LePage, flagged them for other media.
That caused Maine progressives, almost exclusively white, to erupt, followed soon thereafter by the national media and civil rights groups such as Black Lives Matter.
To Nero, LePage’s words read like the tropes contained in the 1915 film “Birth of a Nation,” a landmark silent picture now controversial for its portrayal of sexually aggressive black men.
LePage said on Friday that he should have said “Maine women” instead of white women and denied knowing the races of the men whose street names he listed.
However, “Dee Money” was a name used by David Marble Jr., a black New York man accused of killing an Augusta couple in a drug-related Christmas shooting. Dionhaywood “Smooth” Blackwell, 31, of New Haven, Connecticut, who is also black, was one of five people arrested on felony drug charges in September after a Bangor heroin bust.
Nero called LePage’s reference to white girls a textbook example of white supremacy: “An American tradition of white, racial purity and the fear of its loss.”
But people like MacGregor don’t see it that way. He said he assumed the governor heard a story about a black drug dealer getting a Maine woman pregnant and leaving her behind, then may have embellished it.
“He mismanages his syntax, but that doesn’t detract, for me, from what he’s trying to say or trying to do,” MacGregor said.
Some see power in that argument: In a comment on a Bangor Daily News story, Rep. Larry Lockman, R-Amherst, one of Maine’s top conservative bomb-throwers, said LePage “is more popular now than he was on election night.”
But Senate President Mike Thibodeau, R-Winterport, immediately shot LePage’s comments down, calling them “inappropriate.” Maine GOP Chairman Rick Bennett called them “ill-chosen,” but praised the governor for his focus on the state’s drug crisis.
Dutson said he spoke out because many Republicans are upset about comments like this, but “there traditionally hasn’t been a lot of motivation to change it,” which has given power to more radical voices.
“They think that race is a motivator and maybe it is with some people,” he said. “But that needs to be rejected. I don’t care if that works.”