This is a cautionary tale about people who don’t know what they’re talking about.
No, not members of the Legislature. Or high-ranking officials from the Maine Department of Health and Human Services. Or even Portland city councilors. I figure you’re smart enough to ignore those idiots without my help.
I’m talking about journalists.
Particularly journalists from national media outlets, who come to Maine with preconceived notions about what’s going on, talk only to people who agree with those preconceptions and consider a quick visit to Peaks Island to be a sufficient sampling of the attitudes, opinions and quaint dietary habits of rural Mainers. (“You should have seen it. They were eating lobsters with their hands!”)
Some of these ace reporters have done just enough homework to be dangerous.
“Portland is in the 1st District, and it’s heavily Democratic,” a network TV anchor once told me. “And Lewiston’s in the 2nd District, so it’s Republican.”
Not since the glaciers receded.
“Maine voters are extremely independent,” a syndicated political columnist informed me a few years ago. “Incumbents in this state are always in danger.”
Of growing fat from complacency.
“What happens in Maine sets the trend for the rest of the country,” a prominent New York reporter announced after a few drinks in the Old Port. “It’s a bellwether state.”
Which is how Alf Landon got elected president in 1936.
I suspect most of these people come to Maine during the summers and early falls of election years not because they believe their own hooey about something important going on here, but because it’s a sweet deal. They get some beach time and seafood dinners on the company tab, while putting in the bare minimum of work. (“Yeah, chief, I talked to Governor John Baldacci. He really has a good grasp of what’s going on, politically.”)
In 2002, a reporter for a national magazine I’d never heard of (“We’re like the New Republic, only not so conservative”) called me about the US Senate race between Republican incumbent Susan Collins and Democratic challenger Chellie Pingree. We talked for half an hour, during which he revealed he’d been in Portland and to Pingree’s home on North Haven. Based on that thorough survey of the state, he was convinced the Dem candidate would win.
He wasn’t just surprised when I told him there wasn’t the remotest chance of that happening, he was completely honked off. He stopped just shy of telling me I didn’t know anything about Maine politics. Then, he hung up.
And he left all my comments out of his story, which concluded, “Democrats, progressives and labor types find themselves not just hoping but feeling in their bones that a gust of Maine populism, merging with the corporate accountability zeitgeist, could catch in Chellie’s sails and carry her to Washington.”
Apparently, he was unaware the prevailing coastal winds blow in the opposite direction.
I was reminded of these odd encounters last month when I read a story in the Bangor Daily News filed by Vicki Ekstrom of the Boston University Washington News Service. Ekstrom interviewed Nathan Gonzales, political editor of the Rothenberg Political Report about how he viewed this year’s US Senate race between Collins and Democratic Congressman Tom Allen.
“I don’t think there is any question,” said Gonzales, “that this is one of the most competitive races in the country ... We’re seeing donors from outside the state give because they realize this is a very competitive race, and it’s a seat Republicans need to hold and Democrats have a chance of gaining.”
If the Allen-Collins contest is “one of the most competitive,” there are no competitive match-ups in any other state. Because this one ain’t close. As Ekstrom notes, Collins held a 20-point lead in November. Since then, no reputable poll has put her advantage at less than double-digits. If Allen runs an outstanding campaign (unlikely, based on the screw-ups so far, such as staging an affordable-housing event in which the people getting help turned out to be former Allen staffers) and Collins gets lazy (even more unlikely, because she seems to enjoy accusing her opponents of all sorts of ridiculous transgressions, without much regard for whether those claims are relevant or even true), he still loses by at least 10 points.
I’m guessing Gonzales’s contrary assessment is based less on extensive chats with residents of the state’s 2nd District (“Is that, like, Freeport?”) — where Collins remains popular and Allen is regarded as a yuppie-scum lawyer from Sodom or Gomorrah or Portland — and more on careful analysis.
Of his own writing.
Such as his February 2007 claim that Maine is “an environment that remains toxic for Republicans.”
It’s even worse for clunkheads from away.
Just so nobody gets confused, all quotations in parentheses are complete fiction. All quotes not in parentheses are real. Or as real as the filters of time and alcohol allow. Your assessment is always (well, sometimes) welcome at aldiamon@herniahill.net.
