To the editor:
If I wanted to write a glowing review of Governor Paul LePage, I could grab the campaign flyer from the kitchen table and list, point by point, the many things he has done for Maine during his term. I could wax rhapsodic about how many jobs have been created, how taxes have decreased, and sing hymns about how Maine is better off now than it was when LePage took office, especially if one happens to be involved in running a hospital. But that’s already been done.
Rather than talk about LePage, let’s talk about us, the voters.
We’re products of the television age, just as the kids now are products of the information age. We want our politicians sparkly and personable, clothes pressed, teeth whitened and glistening like the first snow on Katahdin. We want them to say all the right things, in the right order, in the space of a single commercial ad or news spot.
Instead of voters, we’re conditioned to be casting directors, searching for a particular look or catchphrase that makes us feel good. Elections are about buzz, X-factor, momentum, about hitting a mark and delivering pre-scripted lines that resonate with the focus groups. It’s about small knots of carefully selected supporters, standing behind candidates and clapping, reduced to nothing more than animatronic props.
That’s the legacy of television. The future of our state, and our nation as a whole, is being determined by people who were cast for a role instead of carefully selected to do the very real and very serious work of safeguarding our liberty. And thanks to television and the casting-mentality we’ve adopted, this liberty is steadily eroding away.
I don’t need the candidate with the best speechwriters. I don’t need the candidate with style and lofty promises, and impassioned pleas for saving this or that oppressed class of self-identified victims. I certainly don’t need a candidate sent to us by the Central Casting Department in Washington, D.C.
I don’t want a campaigner. I want someone to govern. I want a candidate who has proven that he will sit down, roll up his sleeves and do the work he was sent to Augusta to do. Because when the campaigning is over, when the press coverage ends and the news cycle shifts its attention to other things, all the catch-phrases and sound-bites will cease to resonate.
Paul LePage might not be perfectly cast for the role of Governor in “Maine: The Motion Picture” but we’re not characters in a screenplay. Our problems aren’t going to vanish in a puff of eloquence. What we need is governor, not a campaigner. Which is why, on November 4, I will once again vote for Governor Paul LePage.
Michael LaReaux
Haynesville
