The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Who is the worst governor?
What’s that noise coming from Maine?
Why it’s the cry of the loon! Specifically, Vacationland’s cuckoo bird ex-governor Paul LePage, who wants to get back in the game.
LePage was Trump-crazy before Trump-crazy was cool. He expressed enthusiasm for bombing the offices of the Portland Herald, for reviving the guillotine, and for shooting one of his political foes right between the eyes in a duel.
He said the IRS was not quite the same as the Holocaust “... yet.” He invited the NAACP to “kiss my butt” when they invited him to a Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. thing.
He threatened to shoot an editorial cartoonist, which I realize is a misdemeanor, but still.
Here in Connecticut we will always remember him for his frequent descriptions of the source of Maine’s drug problems: “The traffickers ... these are guys by the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty. These type of guys that come from Connecticut, New York. They come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is the real sad thing because then we have another issue we gotta deal with down the road.”
Obviously, he never heard D-Money, Smoothie and Shifty’s (a/k/a Moose Tang Clan) EP, “Straight Outta Caribou.” Those brothers were all about repping the 207.
I mention LePage because he has filed papers to run again for governor after leaving office at the end of 2018 and watching his hand-picked successor be defeated by a reasonably sane ham sandwich with extra pickles.
He moved to Florida but then came back to Maine to work — you can’t make this up — as a bartender at McSeagull’s restaurant in Boothbay. He was, this summer, registered to vote in both Florida and Maine, to which I say: Stop the steal! Or maybe: Stop the seal!
He has been endorsed by Sen. Susan Collins in one of those periodic reminders that Susan Collins has learned nothing about anything and never will.
It’s difficult to say who is currently the worst governor in America because if you say, “We’re only considering governors who have bungled the pandemic and gotten a lot of people killed,” you haven’t really thinned out the herd that much.
I mention the above because there is kind of an opening at the bottom of the U.S. governors ladder. Andrew Cuomo, who was horrible but not crazy, is gone.
It’s difficult to say who is currently the worst governor in America because if you say, “We’re only considering governors who have bungled the pandemic and gotten a lot of people killed,” you haven’t really thinned out the herd that much.
Or maybe you have. Maybe it really comes down to Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Texas’ Greg Abbott and South Dakota’s Kristi Noem. They have — give or take a Mississippi’s Tate Reeves — emerged as the Three Musketeers of unfettered disease spread. Or, to steal an old Letterman joke, Two Musketeers and a Guy with a Hacking Cough.
They all spew a standard Republican line about personal freedoms while allowing very few. Schools and businesses in their states have not been free to impose sensible infection controls.
All three are sizing up White House runs in 2024, and it will be interesting to see whether they think it’s enough to act like the next Trump or whether, somehow, the rule book has been rejiggered so that they have to find some abysses, unspelunked by Trump himself, that even more fully embrace cynicism, incompetence and pure death.
One out of every 422 South Dakotans has died from COVID-related causes. How do you run on that?
I can’t help but be grateful for Edward Miner Lamont. He hasn’t done a perfect job, but he’s done a good one. In fact, not being perfect was maybe even part of his plan. He’s thrown the business community just enough bones so that he didn’t get defined as an epidemiological prig.
I’ve actually never experienced a stupid or crazy Connecticut governor. John Rowland was the worst of the lot, but he was just corrupt — far more comprehensively than most people realize. He wasn’t stupid or crazy, and I suspect he would have done a decent job with the virus. Maybe not quite Larry Hogan (Maryland), Charlie Baker (Massachusetts) or Mike DeWine (Ohio), but bubbling just underneath them.
Remember, Rowland always loved Pfizer. People remember the Kelo case, in which a homeowner tried to fight off an attempt to use eminent domain to take her little pink house away. People forget that the development, known as Fort Trumbull, was drawn up by the Rowland administration as a way to thank Pfizer for all the happiness precipitated by Viagra.
Think about all of this next year. It really matters who your governor is. I may not even cover the election because of my friendship with Republican contender Themis Klarides and her husband. But I’m here to tell you: this is not an election you skip because there’s no sexy presidential choice.
Let us end by considering another way in which the bar has moved.
Jim Justice, the Republican governor of West Virginia, has been flipping out lately against the “vile action” taken by certain horrible people. What did they do? They voted against letting him coach the Greenbrier East High School boys’ varsity basketball team. Which he really, really, really wants to do. While he is still governor. Even though his state has some pretty big problems. And even though he could not really attend practices. The movie version would be “Whosiers.”
West Virginia has the lowest vaccination rate in the nation, despite Justice’s “Do It for Babydog” campaign, named after his English bulldog.
But he needs to coach basketball this instant.
I don’t understand anymore. I’m meeting D-Money in the parking lot of McSeagull’s, and when he asks me if I want “the lobster pot,” I’m not even going to ask which kind he means.
Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Thursday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.