Profane Phone Message Has Gov. Paul LePage of Maine in Hot Water Again
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Version 0 of 2. Paul R. LePage, the ever-combative Republican governor of Maine, refused on Friday to apologize to a Democratic state lawmaker for leaving a threatening and expletive-studded voicemail message that was criticized by some state Republicans and left top Democrats suggesting that Mr. LePage should resign. It was the latest political conflagration for the second-term governor, who has survived a series of controversies over comments perceived by observers to be offensive and racially charged. On Friday, officials with Maine’s Republican Party said they had no comment, but the state Senate president, Michael Thibodeau — a Republican who, like his colleagues, is up for re-election this fall — urged Mr. LePage to apologize. “I have heard from many members of my caucus regarding their dismay over the inappropriate comments made this week by Governor LePage,” Mr. Thibodeau said in a statement. “He should apologize immediately.” Mr. LePage did apologize in a statement Friday to the state for his choice of words in the voicemail message, but in a 35-minute news conference he said he was not apologizing directly to the Democratic state representative who was the target of his wrath, Drew Gattine. The governor said he was offended because he believed Mr. Gattine had called him a racist. “I am enormously angry,” Mr. LePage said at his news conference, suggesting — perhaps not seriously — that he would step down if Mr. Gattine did as well. “I’m not shying away from what I called him.” Precisely what Mr. LePage called Mr. Gattine is unprintable here, but, suffice to say, the profanity-laced voicemail message, which Mr. LePage left on Thursday and Mr. Gattine provided to The Portland Press Herald, was incendiary even by Mr. LePage’s uninhibited standards. “Prove that I’m a racist. I’ve spend my life helping black people,” Mr. LePage said in the message. “I’m after you. Thank you.” After leaving the message Thursday, Mr. LePage told reporters from The Press Herald and the television station WMTW that he would like to have a duel with Mr. Gattine, saying he would point a gun directly between Mr. Gattine’s eyes. In his statement Friday, Mr. LePage said he had been speaking metaphorically and “meant no physical harm” to Mr. Gattine. Still, state Democratic leaders said Mr. LePage needed an intervention — or to step down. “We strongly and regretfully feel that he is unfit to serve as governor of the state of Maine right now,” Sarah Gideon, the assistant majority leader of Maine’s House, said at a news conference Friday with Mr. Gattine. The episode grew out of a town-hall-style meeting on Wednesday, where, according to The Portland Press Herald, Mr. LePage told an audience member that he kept a three-ring binder of photographs of arrested drug dealers in the state, which is in the grips of a heroin crisis, and that 90 percent of them were black or Hispanic. Mr. Gattine said he believed Mr. LePage’s comments were racially charged, but he denied calling the governor a racist. In his blistering news conference on Friday, Mr. LePage — with the three-ring binder in hand — defended his comments. “And if you look in the heroin, they’re black,” he said, adding, “I didn’t make these pictures up.” Mr. LePage brushed off a reporter’s question about whether minorities had been disproportionately targeted for drug-dealing arrests, and seemed to compare the struggle against drug dealers to a war, when “you shoot at the enemy.” “The enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of color, or people of Hispanic origin,” Mr. LePage said, adding that he was offended about being called a racist because he had been made fun of as a child by people of Irish and Italian origin because of his French heritage. Political observers did not expect the week’s events to damage Mr. LePage, who cannot run for re-election in 2018 because of term limits and who has curried favor with a base that seems drawn to his unfiltered statements and imperviousness to criticism. “I don’t know if I want to call him Teflon Paul LePage, but certainly nothing seems to stick,” said Mark D. Brewer, a political scientist at the University of Maine. “He just does not care.” |