Gov. Paul LePage was praising Democrats at the county caucus Saturday.
It’s true!
Our conservative Republican governor called former Democratic Gov. Ed Muskie “a phenomenal politician and a phenomenal man.”
LePage called three other Democrats – two of his predecessors, Ken Curtis and Joe Brennan, and U.S. Sen. George Mitchell – “a series of great people” whose influence shifted Maine from a Republican to a Democratic state.
Of course, there were plenty of barbs from LePage and other Republicans for their current colleagues in the Democratic Party.
But we are going to focus on the positive here.
What if every politician, in every campaign speech, said something positive about the opposition?
We think we would see the present divisiveness melt away pretty quickly.
Sadly, leaders of both parties know the most effective way to unify their followers is in hatred for the leaders of the other party and their followers. No, we don’t think hatred is too strong a word in the present environment.
Let’s have a campaign about issues, rather than people or personalities.
Let’s figure out how we can keep more young people in Maine, or attract them back to Maine, after college.
Let’s figure out how we can grow our workforce to fill jobs in health care and the trades.
These are big issues without simple solutions.
Any time we spend on attacks on one another detracts from time we could spend at work to solve these issues.
We want to hear more positivity from our politicians this year.
And while we’re making unrealistic demands, enough with the dishonest mailers!
People in our communities know the legislative candidates.
We know they are not secretly Bond henchmen or Sith lords out to topple democracy and crush the elderly in their iron grip. Give us a break.
Each side has the option in each campaign to be civil and treat the other side with respect, and each side invariably chooses to sink as low as they think possible without the attack backfiring.
We often hear that the parties and political action committees are responsible for the worst attacks, rather than the candidates, as if the parties and political action committees run themselves without any human guidance.
While bots seem to have a growing role in our national political discourse, Maine’s PACs and parties are still human-run to the best of our knowledge.
The members of the parties – more Maine voters are unenrolled than belong to either party, and we can hardly blame them – have the power to change those institutions. Candidates have the power to publicly condemn attacks by their parties, but rarely do.
No excuses this year! Let’s behave like grown-ups and work together to do the right thing for Maine.
