Don't get mad, get even. That's what State House Democrats allied with Governor John Baldacci have done in seizing control of the state's leading liberal-but-nonpartisan lobbying group —as retribution for its opposition to Baldacci's tax plans, or so a team of lobbyists who were unceremoniously booted into the street believes.
In last year's legislative session, the Maine Citizen Leadership Fund's public-interest lobbyists butted heads with the more-conservative Democratic leaders in Augusta, including Governor Baldacci and House Speaker John Richardson. The lobbyists were trying to get the politicos to support comprehensive tax reform. They failed.
But as this year’s legislative session gets under way, top State House Democrats are unlikely to have problems with the MCLF. The group’s new director, Joanne D’Arcangelo, is Speaker Richardson’s former chief aide. Her first act, even before starting work last month, was to fire the entire lobbyist staff.
The fund’s lobbyists have a history of successful reforms, like pushing for and then acting as the unofficial nonpartisan monitor of the Clean Election Act, which in 1996 established public funding of legislative and gubernatorial campaigns. They also successfully defended the Maine Rx low-cost prescription-drug program all the way to the United States Supreme Court, against a siege from the pharmaceutical companies.
Those who were fired, and their supporters, see the dismissals as a payback for their aggressiveness on the tax reform issue. They call it a purge, and they see D’Arcangelo’s hiring as orchestrated by people on the MCLF board and on the board of its sister organization, the Dirigo Alliance, who are lobbyists dependent on favors from Baldacci and Richardson.
In these developments, they also see the hand of an MCLF and Dirigo Alliance financer, the Massachusetts-based Proteus Fund. Recently, Proteus has dangled the promise of extra money in front of Maine’s liberal groups—perhaps millions of dollars over the next few years in an organization-strengthening operation it calls the "Blueprint Project." Some activists believe Proteus distrusted MCLF’s work because the Democratic Party did not control it. They note that D’Arcangelo is a paid consultant to Proteus.
MCLF’s longtime director, Arn Pearson, also has left the group. He lost his bid to keep the top job but had hoped to stay on in a policy role. But he wouldn’t work with D’Arcangelo, he says, because he sees her putting a Democratic spin on MCLF’s role. Under federal tax laws, the group officially must be nonpartisan—it cannot support a political party.
But a partisan spin now would seem hard to avoid. D’Arcangelo, a veteran lobbyist and Democratic Party warhorse, also has taken over the top job at the Dirigo Alliance in a consolidation of the two groups. Dirigo’s role is to support liberal candidates for state office—overwhelmingly, they have been Democrats. George Christie, Dirigo’s director for many years, quit last summer.
The three MCLF lobbyist-"organizers" who were dismissed outright—Kathleen McGee, Rob Brown, and Douglas Clopp—were part of a five-person staff under Pearson. The two not fired were the office manager and the public relations person. Clopp, said by friends to be afraid of being blackballed by liberal groups, was the only former employee who would not comment publicly on what happened to them.
