Gov. Paul LePage has managed to insult and offend countless people during his six years in office. Amid all the distasteful remarks, there has been a unifying theme — blaming others for Maine’s problems, and particularly immigrants and people of color.
LePage takes this blame to the extreme, but he is simply building off a longstanding political playbook in this country that has helped countless politicians win office by blaming others — those who are different — for the country’s problems.
LePage has been unhinged in recent days. He declared last week that 90 percent of the drug dealers arrested in Maine are black or Hispanic — and that he had a notebook full of pictures to prove it. When a Democratic lawmaker, Rep. Drew Gattine of Westbrook, suggested such comments were racially charged, LePage became enraged and left Gattine an obscenity-laden voicemail that itself contained a homophobic epithet. The governor later said he wished he could challenge Gattine to a duel and shoot him between the eyes.
LePage this week apologized for the voicemail, saying it was inappropriate, but not before he had doubled down on his racially charged comments. “Black people come up the highway and they kill Mainers,” he said Thursday. The next day, he added, “you shoot at the enemy … and the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of color or people of Hispanic origin.”
LePage’s demonization of people of color, immigrants and the LGBT community is appalling and disgraceful, and it’s not based in fact. But his remarks don’t come from nowhere. Convincing voters to be afraid of people who are different has long been a staple of American politics, and politicians such as LePage and Donald Trump have taken Republican politics of the last five decades to their logical, uncoded extreme.
The GOP has stoked fear of immigrants in elections across the country, even in Maine, where immigrants make up a tiny fraction of the population. In Maine’s 2014 gubernatorial election, the Republican Governors Association produced an ad saying Democrat Mike Michaud would force Maine taxpayers to foot the bill to fund benefits for “illegal immigrants.” The ad showed dark, sinister-looking images supposedly of people who crossed the border illegally and came to Maine.
These kinds of ads are common in elections across the country because they work.
“It is so easy to stir sentiment against people who are different,” former Waterville high school social studies teacher Alan Haley wrote in an August 2014 BDN column. “All across the country there are elected officials who owe their seat to distrust and fear of the newest immigrants, so it is not in their interest to solve a problem that continues to get them re-elected.”
This propensity to use immigrants as political pawns can be traced all the way back to the nation’s earliest elections when Federalists unsuccessfully used Thomas Jefferson’s pro-France stance against him. Successive waves of immigrants — Irish, Chinese, Franco-American — were blamed for taking jobs, selling drugs and scaring American women, spawning new cycles of fear and oppression. “Campaign literature from 1845 from the anti-newcomer Know-Nothing Party could pass for that aimed at Latino immigrants today,” Haley wrote.
Fast forward to today, and we routinely hear comments such as these from LePage: Asylum seekers are the “ biggest problem in our state,” and they pose a public health threat by bringing hepatitis C, tuberculosis, AIDS, HIV and “the ziki fly” to Maine. LePage made both assertions at a town hall meeting in Freeport in February. LePage has made similar claims several times but there is no evidence to support them — and the ziki fly doesn’t exist.
More recently, LePage jumped on the revelation that an Iranian refugee who lived in Maine was killed in Lebanon while fighting for ISIS to bolster his arguments tying immigrants to terrorism. LePage’s assertions closely mirror the rhetoric that forms the basis of Trump’s presidential bid.
The danger lies in accepting such remarks as a normal part of U.S. and Maine politics. Lawmakers in Augusta are split over how to handle LePage’s latest outburst. They have focused more so far on LePage’s crude voicemail for Gattine than on the governor’s false claims about blacks, Hispanics and immigrants.
LePage’s temperament certainly hinders his ability to effectively lead Maine. So do his false and racist claims about minorities and new Americans, which risks making the future of Maine and the state’s politics one of hate.
