Pants afire in Swanville, spitting match in Bowdoinham

Most people driving through Swanville early this week probably gave little notice to the many small signs along Route 141 saying “Vote for Marsden.” Few could have missed the several large signs shouting “Marsden is a liar.”

The occasion for all this signage – a recall election – is an infrequent event in small towns. The tone – insulting, uninformative and, with First Selectman Richard Mardsen kept in office by a 2-to-1 vote, an accusation that apparently was itself a lie – is something you’d better get used to.

In Bowdoinham this week, Selectman Bill Berry resigned. Then he sent a letter to everyone in town telling them why – he was a candidate for the Legislature and on Election Day his two daughters were cursed at, shoved, even spat upon as they greeted voters at the polls. After that kind of treatment, spending a couple of evenings a month down at the town office paying bills, listening to gripes and writing budgets would make one feel like a chump.

Welcome to Maine politics post-Election 2002, where the leftovers are even less appetizing than that picked-over carcass in your refrigerator. The high-profile campaigns for high office ended weeks ago. The ads – the opposing candidates portrayed in unflattering poses and colors, with their records selectively edited to cause maximum confusion and their words twisted beyond recognition – that just a few weeks ago were everywhere now are clogging landfills. The hotshot consultants, the hired guns, the know-it-all whizbangs from away who blew into Maine last summer to run these campaigns have split, leaving no forwarding addresses.

Trouble is, they made a mess and they left it behind. If we allow the ugly and destructive elements that make up a negative campaign to be used in campaigns for such elevated offices as Congress and governor, we should not be surprised when they show up at the selectman’s level. The trouble with that is that the consultants can pitch negative campaigns knowing well that they will split; there is little chance of ever coming face-to-face with the opposing candidates they trashed. Nobody in Swanville or Bowdoinham is going anywhere – expect some rather uncomfortable moments in the checkout line at the grocery store.

In fairness to whizbangs from away, their conduct this past election is not solely, or probably even largely, to blame for the galloping decay of civility in Maine politics. The rot was quite apparent in Election 2000 and it was pretty much homemade, the work of the political action committees of Maine’s own legislative leaders – poisonous ads and mailings that Maine’s rank-and-file legislators had no role in creating but that they tacitly endorsed by re-electing to leadership positions the leaders who did. The ads and mailings of these leadership PACs were even more offensive in 2002 – the dirty work done on candidate Berry’s behalf but without his consent by the House Republican PAC is what got some of his neighbors spitting mad. What your mother always told you about dirty socks, dishes, bath tubs and everything else you grubbied up not cleaning themselves and, in fact, getting dirtier if neglected applies to politics as well. If your mother were a political scientist, she’d call it entropy, the tendency of a society or system to deteriorate.

Plenty of voters, or people who would have been voters had they not been too depressed to vote, expressed dismay at the conduct of these campaigns. So did plenty of candidates. They were quick to cry foul at ads run against them. When it was shown that an ad against the opponent was untrue, they were quick to defend what they could as “substantially true” and blame the rest on the party or a special-interest group that did the ad on their behalf and over which they had no control – an odd way to demonstrate the leadership qualities they claim to possess. All candidates for Congress and governor sign the Margaret Chase Smith election ethics pledge requiring them to reject negative ads done by supporters, yet they never do. A few candidates for the Legislature have denounced the tactics of their party’s leadership PACs – it doesn’t count, though, if you wait until after you lost the election to speak up. Maybe we need a pledge not to make pledges there is no intention of keeping.

The wages of this sin against civility is not just a vague disgruntlement among the public or general damage to the reputations of candidates, winner and losers, who are far better people than the ads made them appear. The ripped social fabric in Swanville and Bowdoinham is real and hurtful. It will affect daily life in small communities where people really need each other. It could happen in your small community.

An amazing thing about politics is the sheer ingenuity that goes into cheapening the process; things get degraded in ways most of us never thought possible. Consider, for example, a case heard this week by the state’s Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices.

A complaint to the commission was brought by Rep. John Patrick, Democrat of Rumford. During the campaign, he approached a landowner, Kenneth Bridgette of West Peru, about placing a sign on Mr. Bridgette’s highly visible road frontage. Fine, said the landowner – the fee would be a fifth of whisky, same as he was charging a Republican Senate candidate, Robert Cameron.

That whiskey was provided by a supporter of Mr. Cameron’s, which would not have been a problem had not Mr. Cameron run a taxpayer-funded campaign under Maine’s Clean Elections Law which prohibits outside expenditures. The commission ruled, then, that Mr. Cameron had to list this contribution as an expenditure. You probably never thought the taxpayers of Maine would be buying whisky for landowners in West Peru.

Of course, you probably never thought they’d be spitting on each other in Bowdoinham, either.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.