Under the rules of the National Association of Political Pundits, Commentators, Bloggers and Blowhards, I’m required to devote this week’s column to expressing moral outrage over the recent revelations that Republican Gov. Paul LePage had a series of meetings last year with a group of certified kooks. Otherwise, I could be brought before the NAPPCBB’s Disciplinary Committee (NAPPCBBDC) on charges of failing to foment public discontent over trivial matters.
Rather than risk losing my license to blather, I’m belatedly joining the howling pack of quasi-journalists demanding some unspecified thing be done about this affront to all that is good and just.
I’m on the record as thoroughly miffed.
In a logy, midsummer sort of way.
It’d be a lot easier to work up a good, old-fashioned, frothing-at-the-mouth rant about LePage getting cozy with a few nuts – who think the U.S. Constitution gives them the right to serve notice on elected officials demanding their resignations for allegedly treasonous acts, after which the loonies are legally entitled to lynch the offenders – if it was in any way important.
But it’s not.
LePage showed poor judgment in meeting with these fruitcakes. But barely a week goes by in which the governor doesn’t display poor judgment, often in regard to matters considerably more serious than humoring the twisted delusions of political fringe dwellers. Such as:
Last month’s poorly worded news release from LePage that appeared to claim Social Security and Medicare were forms of welfare.
Wasting half a million bucks on a consultant’s report on Maine’s welfare system that turned out to be plagiarized from other research the state could have accessed for free.
Getting into an unnecessary test of wills with Maine’s largest municipalities over whether the state would reimburse them for general assistance payments made to aliens seeking asylum.
The list goes on and on: his botched effort to boost funding for nursing homes, the questionable legality and effectiveness of his requirement that food stamp recipients have photos on their Electronic Benefits Transfer cards, his failure to take firm action concerning the document-shredding scandal at the Maine Center for Disease Control.
Unlike getting together for a few laughs with a congenial assortment of delusional clunkheads, LePage’s actions – or lack thereof – in each of the aforementioned incidents speaks to a more important issue, namely that the state Department of Health and Human Services is an unmanageable nightmare that his administration has proved incapable of sorting out.
Hey, I’m starting to feel something like genuine moral outrage. I hope the NAPPCBBDC will take that into account at my trial.
I’m told by reliable sources that LePage has begun to formulate a plan for dealing with the massive ineptitude at DHHS. This proposal, to be implemented in his second term, is still in its early stages, but calls for breaking the agency into more manageable parts, one each for mental health, welfare, children and families, and elders. If that’s accurate, it’s a sensible step toward improving services and saving money.
What’s puzzling is that if LePage really is prepared to make that sort of unprecedented change, why isn’t he campaigning on the issue. If he has a comprehensive blueprint for upgrading the administration and delivery of human services, it would help counteract his opponents’ claims that his only interest in welfare programs is to reduce their cost regardless of the consequences, while vilifying the poor.
Getting out in front on the issue of breaking up DHHS would also give LePage another edge over those aforementioned opponents. Neither Democrat Mike Michaud nor independent Eliot Cutler has even hinted at undertaking such a bold initiative. When it comes to changes in the welfare system, neither seems willing to commit to any strategy that might alienate liberal voters in southern Maine by suggesting there’s waste and inefficiency in those programs. Rather than risk proposing real reform, both prefer to make LePage’s bumbling the issue.
I could probably manage a little outrage about their silence, in case anybody from the NAPPCBBDC is reading this.
With billions of taxpayer dollars at stake, fixing all that’s wrong with DHHS has the potential to be a game changer, not just for LePage, but for the department’s commissioner, Mary Mayhew, who – in spite of having done almost nothing right in the last three years – is reportedly harboring gubernatorial ambitions of her own in 2018. If Mayhew turned out to be a key player in restructuring the human-services mess, she might actually have a powerful platform for her Blaine House bid, one so transformative that her past transgressions would be forgotten.
If that happens, it would be too bad for me, because I’d previously belched out some heartfelt outrage over those mistakes.
I doubt anybody at the NAPPCBBDC remembers that.
Outrageous comments may be emailed to me at aldiamon@herniahill.net.
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