Good news -- Democrats hoping to retain political power and elected office in the state of Maine will have a powerful force on their side in the coming years: the state's former Republican Governor.
Former Governor Paul LePage -- a man who somehow got elected in years prior -- has announced that he's challenging Governor Janet Mills.
But first he'll have to move there.
LePage says this weekend, he's coming back to Maine from Florida and will become a Maine resident again.
The former governor says he's worried about the way things are being handled when it comes to reopening our state.
Former Maine Governor, Paul LePage, said, "I am going to challenge Janet Mills or the Democratic Party in 2022, because in 2022, the state is going to be worse off than it was when I took over in 2010, and I do believe that I have the skill set to fix it."
Paul LePage's skill set is that he has no skill set. He's the kind of vanity candidate that Americans glibly vote for when they grow tired of things like normal life and functioning Democracy. He's basically Trump on a smaller scale.
It's probably true that Maine will be worse off in 2020 than it was in 2010, but that will also be true of most if not every state following the first global pandemic in the last century. But that's exactly why I don't think LePage can win again. Things are far too serious for too many people now to elect a racist court jester.
LePage's offenses are almost limitless. He once openly fantasized about executing drug dealers named "Smoothie and D-Money." He compared public campaign financing to giving his wife a blank check. He refused to expand Medicaid even after the state's residents voted for it. He said the only way to make Maine's national forests "great again" was to open them up for mining. He tried and failed to stop the state's Democratic legislature from passing any bills by shutting down the government.
One could hardly forget the time LePage went on a lengthy diatribe about how "people of color" are "the enemy" that should be shot.
“Look, a bad guy is a bad guy, I don’t care what color it is. When you go to war, if you know the enemy, the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, you shoot at red, don’t you?” he said. “You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy. And the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority right now coming in are people of color or people of Hispanic origin. I can’t help that. I just can’t help it. Those are the facts.”
I am at least a little skeptical that LePage will actually move back to Maine and run, but he claims he will.