No pain in Maine tops recall

The pain in Maine is plain: It has been raining off and on seemingly forever, mold is threatening to take over your basement, Aroostook County potato farmers are getting edgy about the possibility of late blight ruining their crop, and the mosquitoes – the state’s secret weapons of mass destruction – are trying their damnedest to tag us all with the dreaded and debilitating West Nile virus.

Plus, the Waldo-Hancock bridge is fraying around the edges and has become somewhat unusable for motorists driving anything heavier than a Ford Pinto, raising hell with summertime traffic bound for Down East; the trash left along the local highways by the motorcade-stalled hordes approaching the recent Phish Phestival at the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone was enough to make grown men cry; and your property taxes ain’t going anywhere but up, politicians’ promises to the contrary notwithstanding.

Still, we count our blessings. And chief among them this morning is that we don’t live in California and have to contend with the absurdity that is the pending recall of Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat with all the charisma of your average fence post. The man’s major malpractice seems to be that he has presided over a budget deficit the size of something you’d more likely find in Congress.

If Davis is recalled on Oct. 7, the election to replace him will be a go. Candidates include seemingly every known publicity-seeking life form that exists in Lala Land. Movie stars and porn flick stars, including one who would make lap-dance expenditures tax-deductible.

A stand-up comic who smashes melons with a sledgehammer, a guy who bills himself as “the smut peddler who cares,” a former baseball commissioner gone to seed.

Pettifoggers and pecksniffs, bimbos and bozos, shysters and streetwalkers. Conservatives turned liberal, liberals turned conservative. Turned-off taxpayers and turned-on political junkies. Sinners born again, and those born right the first time. All colors, all sizes, all creeds.

By Thursday there were 135 of them. Major qualifications for getting their names on The Ballot From Hell appeared to be an ability to attract 65 signatures of support on nomination papers, and being numb enough to pay the state $3,500 for the privilege. The somewhat pricey entry fee, which one supposes was designed to weed out the riff-raff, appears from afar not to have worked all that well.

Theoretically, each candidate should receive at least one vote – his or her own. We are, after all, not in high school any more, Toto. There, as I recall, it was considered low-class and lacking in chivalry to vote for oneself for student council president, say, or captain of the basketball team. To get caught in violation of that unwritten code was to guarantee a slow roasting in Hell upon final checkout from this sorry vale of tears. In the real world, which is considered by most to include even California, only a certified dope would vote for the competition.

In order that candidates whose surnames are high in the alphabetical pecking order might not have an advantage by being placed near the top of the impossibly lengthy ballot, a televised drawing was held to determine the order of placement, by letter. A sort of alphabet soup resulted, whereby a candidate whose surname begins with the letter “A,” for example, might be listed in the middle of the field, or lower. Thus, it would do no good for a candidate to follow the lead of an old boy from the Portland area who once changed his name – from Bartholomew Sullivan to Sullivan Bartholomew, if memory serves – so he could be listed near the top of the ballot in his run for election to the Legislature.

If Davis is actually recalled and Part Two of the farce is set in motion, it will be interesting to see how long it takes to complete the vote, how long it takes to drive the ballot clerks nuts and how long before the first loser charges he got hosed by the system.

The leader of the 135-candidate pack at the moment is said to be actor Arnold Schwarzenegger alias Conan, The Barbarian and/or Terminators I, II and III. A Republican married to a staunch Democrat from the Kennedy dynasty, the square-jawed Austrian bodybuilder with an accent heavy enough to mangle a perfectly good sentence into docile submission supposedly leads by virtue of his high-profile public persona.

Maybe so. But if I were consigned to live in California, my vote would probably go to the sledgehammer-wielding melon smasher. Pretty hard to resist a straightforward platform such as that.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.