I see that Mary Mayhew thinks Attorney General Janet Mills and Treasurer Terry Hayes should quit their jobs while they run for governor (April 20).
I don’t think Mayhew, former head of the state Department of Health and Human Services, should offer her opinion about anything, much less run for governor. Sooner or later she is going to have to explain how she deliberately and disastrously decimated DHHS so that its few remaining employees could not do their jobs: looking after the most vulnerable among us.
She’s also an eager partner of Gov. Paul LePage; they have sacrificed lives to their inhumane, right-wing “small-government” policies, although both also have cost the state millions of dollars with their reckless incompetence.
How can she even hold her head up when 133 disabled people died on her watch without her doing anything about it? Why didn’t she investigate their deaths, a show of indifference that brought the wrath of the federal government down on her?
Why did she allow the drug overdose deaths of an average of one Mainer per day while she sat on a big pile of money earmarked for their treatment? How could she sleep at night knowing that Maine has the third-worst rate in the country of hungry households while LePage sits on a surplus?
Why did she decimate a department that, if fully staffed, might have saved the lives of two little girls? Don’t let her say it didn’t happen on her watch. LePage says “everybody” messed up – everybody except him. Even while the deaths are being investigated, he has vetoed a child abuse prevention program he doesn’t like.
He’s also vetoed a bill that would make naloxone more easily available to overdose victims, who will die without it. Why? Because drug users are drug users, hardly worth saving in his eyes.
Most Mainers, when they see the vulnerable stumble and fall, pick them up and get help for them. Not LePage and Mayhew. They delight in trampling on our values. They have no remorse for any of their failures. Their answer to every misfortune to beset the poor and vulnerable is “not our problem.”
So, Mainers, when you go to the polls to choose a governor, keep this in mind: It is possible to get a worse governor than Paul LePage, and she looks an awful lot like Mary Mayhew.
Donna Halvorsen
South Portland
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