The Maine Economic Research Institute (MERI) recently held a symposium here in Bangor. MERI’s board is composed of Maine business people from all-sized companies, and they are pledged to improve the economy of Maine. They do this by following economic trends, by tracking legislation with potential economic impact (which is just about anything), and by assigning ratings to legislator performance.

MERI uses a 100-point scale. Fifty-five and above is “favorable” (90+ makes you a MERI “Star”), 55 and below gets you a red flag.

This group, and their invited guests, did an outstanding job of stating what most folks already know: Maine’s economy has hit rock bottom and started digging. They showed about a hundred different indices of economic activity. Maine is dead last (or getting there) in the nation on all the good indexes and first in the nation on all the bad ones (or getting there, too). It was, to put it gently, pretty grim.

The MERI idea is not unheard of. Many groups give out ratings of legislators, then try to publicize those ratings in an effort to influence elections, or influence the behavior of sitting legislators. And just like other groups, MERI’s perfect world would be one in which politicians feared a low MERI rating, or at least one in which voters recoiled at the thought of pulling the lever for a 55-and-under-rated politico.

There’s no small amount of irony in that, for all their emphasis on the political process and all their qualitative evaluation of elected representatives, MERI swears up-and-down it is entirely nonpartisan and apolitical, with a board and advisors from across the political spectrum. And there’s no reason to believe this is not so.

But for a non-partisan group, their ratings look more than a little skewed: in the Maine Senate, no Democrat is rated favorably and no Republican is rated unfavorably. In the House, no Republican is rated unfavorably, and of the just four Democrats who managed a favorable rating, not one has a score higher than the 60s.

Is it unreasonable to think that the thrust of MERI’s message really is that the health of our state’s economy is predicated on the removal of Democratic legislators? The MERI types bristle at this kind of talk. “We only rate (voting) behavior” they roundly affirm, “not party affiliation.” And again, there is no reason to think this isn’t so, but this turns out to be a distinction without a difference.

There is broad agreement that the state’s economy needs fixing. And MERI members can certainly rate legislators on whatever criteria it likes (they say it is on issues that matter most to actual Maine business people). But instead of becoming a broadly accepted scorecard, MERI runs a real risk of their ratings being dismissed as partisan, because they are in fact very partisan – whether or not that is their intention.

Really, with the ratings as they are, do the low-rated legislators (a.k.a. Democrats) care about their MERI scores? Does George W. Bush care about a low rating from the Sierra Club?

To buy into the MERI ratings is to believe that if you are Democratic candidate or legislator, you are almost certainly an opponent of economic progress. The good news is that you needn’t change your party affiliation, only your “behavior.” You see, the MERI club is not just for elephants. They will take any animal with a trunk.

Paul Tormey is a resident of Orrington.