Term limits can be good and bad

The 22nd amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified by Congress on Feb. 27, 1951. It established that no person could be elected to more than two terms as president of the United States. Democrats fully appreciated the law when Ronald Reagan’s second term was ending in 1988, just as Republicans were thankful for it 12 years later as Bill Clinton’s eight years in the White House were coming to a close.

Forty-five years after the passage of the 22nd Amendment, Maine enacted a similar statute, one that confined state lawmakers to no more than four consecutive two-year stints in either branch of the legislature, and likewise restricted the state’s governor to two four-year terms in office.

As Maine’s current governor continues finding ways to simultaneously pander to his base and thumb his nose at the nearly 62 percent of ballot-casting Mainers who didn’t vote for him last November, it’s worth considering a former state leader from a distance.

Angus King garnered just over 35 percent of the vote when he ran for governor as an independent candidate in 1996, but that was enough to win the Blaine House in a four-way contest. Apparently he did a reasonably good job; when he was re-elected four years later he garnered almost 59 percent of the vote, which was nearly double the total of the Democratic and Republican Party candidates combined.

Since he was prohibited from continuing to serve as Maine’s chief executive after 2002, King has moved on to other endeavors. He’s taught courses at Bates and Bowdoin colleges, become a leading advocate for wind power, and has dabbled in solar energy as well. He also writes an occasional column for the “Bowdoin Daily Sun,” an online publication that covers events of interest to the Bowdoin College community. The former governor’s jottings are always provocative and enlightening; it’s too bad more people don’t see them.

His essay on government and taxes, which was published last August, is a good example of the former governor’s ability to blend history, common sense, and his own experiences into cogent thought.

In the column, King credits Ronald Reagan as the most influential political philosopher of our time, crediting him not only for creating a genial and genuinely likeable persona, but for enacting policies that helped “”¦ drive the Soviet economy off the cliff and hasten the end of the Cold War.”

However, he also accurately pointed out the role the Great Communicator (and perhaps not coincidentally, former actor) played in giving rise to the divisive and often counterproductive political atmosphere that exists in the United States today, asserting that two specific bits of Reagan’s legacy have done far more harm than good.

The first is the 40th president’s oft-repeated (and widely misrepresented) contention that “Government isn’t the solution; it’s the problem.” And while Reagan’s role in the undermining of America’s political climate may well have been unintentional, the harm it’s caused cannot be underestimated. King eloquently illustrates his point by listing a variety of ways that government provides protection and/or essential services for its citizens in forms of which an increasingly ill-informed or misinformed electorate is unaware. Just for starters think passable roads, police forces, firefighting equipment and personnel, public education, food safety, and environmental protection.

But perhaps a more damaging part of the Reagan legacy is a second aspect of it: The increasingly widely-held belief that any and all taxes are unfair, too high, or just plain unnecessary. And while King’s compelling thoughts and his writing fluency keep him from stepping over the line from musing and reflecting to preaching and raving, he clearly illustrates this increasingly too-common tendency with a couple of local examples of uninformed (or willfully misinformed) everyday citizens whose blind indignation over taxes and their government’s perceived failings is nearly as great as their sense of entitlement.

King closes his essay with an anecdote about his father, who he describes as the best man he ever knew.

He wrote: “(Dad) never complained about taxes. He had two principles: That paying income taxes was good because it meant that you were making money and, more fundamentally, that paying taxes was a privilege of citizenship. Can you imagine such a quaint idea?

“But I’ve come to think my Dad was closer to the truth than Reagan. Unfortunately, Dad only had me to listen to him while Reagan had the whole country.”

If one of the hallmarks of effective commentary is that it provokes thought, then Angus King is an excellent writer. And given the former governor’s ongoing contributions to society and seemingly boundless energy, not to mention the current one’s continuing boorish behavior and ill-considered policies, one of the insights it conjures up is this: Are term limits really that good an idea?

Sign In: