Sean Faircloth After political hiatus, Bangor Democrat brings grass-roots approach to six-way campaign

Balancing a few crackers and a hunk of Gouda with a stack of his political literature, congressional candidate Sean Faircloth plunks down into his cluttered Subaru and back onto the campaign trail.

Locked in a six-way battle for his party’s nomination, the Bangor Democrat isn’t taking much time to grab dinner.

“I’m going,” he reassures a clock-watching aide as darkness falls and the candidate shakes a final hand on his way out the door of the Blue Hill Country Farm Inn, where about 50 Hancock County Democrats came to hear him speak.

Tonight, Faircloth and his aide still have to drive the 275 miles to Madawaska from this coastal town where the former state senator just delivered one of his carefully crafted speeches, a polished mix of history and liberal idealism.

But after bidding a final farewell to the evening’s hosts, Faircloth emerges a subdued, more relaxed version of the candidate who earlier in the day expounded on the issues driving his campaign.

“I feel it’s anybody’s race, but we’re doing everything we’re supposed to do,” Faircloth, 41, said on his afternoon trip to the coast. “We’ve been planning for a long time, and I’m working as hard as I can … talking about the issues.”

Because no candidate has a strong claim on

the coastal county, it could prove a battleground in the June primary, where a mere 20 percent could easily earn the winner a spot on the November ballot.

At the Blue Hill event, Faircloth concentrated on a progressive agenda: civil rights, labor rights, education and the environment.

Resurfacing in Democratic circles last year after a five-year political hiatus, Faircloth is no stranger to the campaign trail.

In 1996, the former federal prosecutor challenged four rivals – including two-time Gov. Joseph E. Brennan – for the party’s nomination to the open U.S. Senate seat. Faircloth earned a respectable 25 percent but finished a distant second to Brennan’s 56 percent.

Faircloth prefers to liken this year’s race to the 1994 June primary, when fellow Bangor Democrat John Baldacci won the party’s nomination with 27 percent of the vote over six competitors. Upon Baldacci’s eventual victory in November, Faircloth replaced him in the State House, a feat he’s hoping to repeat on the national level.

But it was Faircloth’s upbeat U.S. Senate campaign that won over some party faithful, particularly in his hometown of Bangor, where, with 65 percent of the vote, he rolled over the then-formidable Brennan machine.

In that race, Faircloth also handily took Ellsworth, where he recently talked with the editorial board of a local weekly newspaper.About five minutes into the candidate’s introduction, Ellsworth American managing editor Stephen Faye silently stopped Faircloth cold with a “timeout” sign.

“Washington County,” he interjected, looking for the candidate’s thoughts on how to revive the state’s poorest county, where unemployment hovers at 17 percent and the median income of $25,997 is 38 percent below that of families in Cumberland County, Maine’s wealthiest.

Faircloth quickly launched into the importance of restoring the freight rail line to Eastport, one of the East Coat’s deepest – but largely inaccessible – ports.

The answer, delivered with ease, elicited nods – and a few more questions – from the venerable paper’s editors, who eventually switched gears and asked the candidate about his much ballyhooed endorsement from best-selling author Stephen King and his well-known wife, Tabitha.

Faircloth earlier explained his frequent references to the endorsement.

“They’re real Mainers and they care about what happens here,” said Faircloth, a California native who moved to Maine about 20 years ago. “I think they have credibility in the community and they hold core Democratic values.”

Indeed, it was the Kings who donated nearly $1 million to Bangor’s Maine Discovery Museum, a $4.5 million project that Faircloth initiated during his political hiatus.

Faircloth often points to the downtown children’s museum as an example of his success in the private sector and his ability to organize grass-roots support for an idea.

The grass-roots style is one inspired by former U.S. Sens. Edmund Muskie and George Mitchell, Faircloth told the Blue Hill crowd.

But Faircloth, who carefully describes himself as the youngest candidate with legislative experience (rival Lori Handrahan, a political newcomer, is nearly 10 years his junior), is equally careful not to claim to be the equal of the popular and powerful Maine lawmakers.

Not yet.

Shunning some of his rivals’ promises of self-imposed term limits, Faircloth pledged just the opposite. Only with time, he said, can a lawmaker from a small state wield the influence of his political heroes.

“I believe in relentlessness,” he said.

On the Net: www.seanfaircloth.com