Carpetbaggers among us

Political scientist James P. Melcher wanted to know whether political careers in Maine begin not with where you stand on the issues but where you crawl as an infant. Do Maine voters, he wondered in a recent study in The Southern Maine Review, treat candidates who are from away with the same consideration as native Mainers?

By native Mainers he doesn’t mean members, for instance, of the Penobscot or Passamaquoddy tribes. He means your grandfather from St. Stephen, who married your grandmother in Calais, found work in Biddeford and watched your father leave to take a job in Hartford then return with a wife to try to make a life in Lewiston, where you were born. Native to Maine the way potatoes are native.

Professor Melcher, an associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Business at the University of Maine at Farmington, counts up the number of native and non-native Maine legislators in the 2001-’02 session and the governors since the state’s founding. His statistics are these: 67.3 percent of the state is native-born while 68.2 percent of state representatives and 60 percent of senators are native; 24 of 27 Maine governors, however, were born in the state. His conclusion is, “For the most part, being from away is not a large obstacle politically in Maine once one has put in the time to understand the state.”

Not really. I don’t doubt his numbers, but “understand the state” doesn’t mean anything to a political body whose southern members needed bus tours of Maine’s northern half so they would know it at least as well as tourists do. Conversely, the northern Maine legislator might know the southern part as the place with the economic advantages of geography and a frustrating tendency of ignoring the north. Professor Melcher clarifies his comment a little later, saying a political candidate must be “able to match or adapt to Maine’s political culture and sensitivities” to be successful. But the demand is even more specific than that: A candidate must support or at least mimic the majority ideas of voters in his or her district while leaning on a few local hot-button issues, and this takes a flatlander a little while to figure out.

An especially good section of his paper, which is called “Away Game: Implications of Being ‘From Away’ in Maine Politics,” concerns the reasons Maine “might experience tension around the newcomer issue.” Professor Melcher offers four: Maine is a relatively isolated state with, therefore, a relatively distinct culture; the people who move here tend to be different – more education, more likely in the professional classes – from the natives; people from away hold different ideas and “have a more abrasive and confrontational approach to politics than natives”; and natives might resent the economic success and power of the newly arrived.

Money is always a good subject for “from away” discussions (See Sebastian White’s commentary on this page), but the third issue – the clash of native and transplanted ideas – most interests the author apparently because he spends considerable time on it. While doing so he makes an error in one instance that reveals an important point. Reviewing the proposal for a national park around Baxter State Park, he identifies Jonathan Carter, the environmentalist and political candidate, with the organization Restore: The North Woods, referring to him as a “Massachusetts transplant” who, “with the support of Hollywood liberals and other celebrities, is working to preserve forest land and create a Maine Woods National Park.”

Mr. Carter is from Connecticut, but that’s unimportant because he doesn’t run Restore: The North Woods and never has. Jym St. Pierre, a Maine native and former state official, is the Maine director of Restore, and, after its Massachusetts members figured out a decade or more ago their presence here was not helpful to their argument, he has become essentially its lone voice in Maine.

The idea of the national park, however, remains “from away” despite its native champion. It does so because what defines an idea as from away is not who supports it but what native values it threatens. In the example of a park, those values include, in part only, the ability to hunt, trap, fish, drink and generally be left the hell alone to appreciate one’s surroundings without a lot of regulation, particularly regulation that confers permission to do what is already being done.

No state thrives without regular challenges to its accepted order, so the next study for a political scientist might be how Maine learns to adapt ideas from away to make them usefully its own. The largest experiment in reshaping an outside idea must be Dirigo Health, Gov. Baldacci’s ambitious attempt to make health coverage more affordable while raising the quality of medical care. Had the governor and his director of health care financing, Trish Riley, merely attempted to impose subsidized insurance or a single-payer system, they would have lost the fight. Instead they adapted it to Maine and got Dirigo launched.

The study offers a final lesson, based on an unsuccessful idea. In 2001, Rep. Harold Clough of Scarborough wanted to let those who could produce a birth certificate that proved their Maine pedigree obtain a license plate with “Native Mainer” stamped into it. The idea of such a status symbol, Professor Melcher observed, offended the editorial pages of Maine’s largest newspapers, the Portland Press Herald (“Real Mainers don’t need a tag to prove their birthright”) and the Bangor Daily News (“Lawmakers exceed their own outsized reputation for irrelevance”). The Legislature killed the bill.

The lesson in this case may be to know your audience. The professor doesn’t say, but I have a strong suspicion the editorial writers at those newspapers were from away. I’m certain at least one of them was.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.