We have been, and still are, taking a wait and see attitude with our new governor. As we do every time we have a new chief executive, we hold out hope they will succeed beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.
To date we have been impressed with Gov. LePage’s willingness to make decisions, for better or for worse. Especially compared to his milquetoast predecessor, LePage’s ‘this is where the bear goes through the buckwheat’ approach is downright refreshing.
We are less than impressed with some of the substance of his actions.
By our count, this latest flap regarding the murals in the Dept. of Labor is the fourth such to-do of his young administration, counting the hiring of his daughter, his infamous and inappropriate response to the NAACP’s breakfast invitation and his laughably inane women with beards comment.
To some extent these stumbles are to be expected from a graduate of the School of Hard Knocks who hasn’t spent his career preparing for public service, but at this rate he is averaging better than one public relations fiasco a month.
We may be in for a long four years.
More serious, but perhaps less attention grabbing was the governor’s attempt to shield his alleged business advisory councils from Maine’s Open Meetings Law. Those Freedom of Access laws are there to protect all of us, Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike and it should set off alarm bells anytime someone in power tries to avoid doing the public’s business in public.
All this is to say that the governor’s willingness to put his foot in it obscures the big picture, which is the mess this state is in: the one he was elected to clean up. We fear LePage may well expend all of his political capital on these side issues and have precious little left to do the real heavy lifting required.
We wish the governor well and urge him to use a little more restraint because the slim majority that elected him may quickly tire of these antics and cut short his time at the top.
