This is circa, well, pre-re-demise of the Portland Phoenix (June 17 - 23, 2005). There are three "pages" plus a boxed code on the BRAC. Some of this is useful. Some not, though it will be in the general.

Bad news for Baldacci
Opinion polls have him below a 50-percent approval rating for the first time. Will his spaghetti-supper campaigning skills be enough for him to reconnect with voters?
BY LANCE TAPLEY

Suddenly, John Baldacci’s political fate is on the line. Two recent opinion polls show his public support to have declined dramatically. For the first time, more people think our first-term Democratic governor is doing a bad than a good job. The numbers have plunged from 60- to 70-percent-plus job approval to around 40 percent. He is most unpopular in the northern part of the state, his home stomping grounds.

Across the political spectrum, a rough consensus exists on why Baldacci is politically wounded. A consensus also exists that it is premature to count him out, since he doesn’t face voters in his bid for re-election (which he has already announced) for well over a year, and he is a good campaigner. But Republicans have been politically energized by what they consider to be the governor’s mistakes.

Some State House observers believe Baldacci’s future may be determined in the next few days as the legislative session comes to an end — or by the outcome of referendum efforts to reverse controversial legislation that he has championed.

Ask State Representative Sawin Millett, one of the more bipartisan and sober legislators, why Baldacci’s support in the polls has fallen, and the Waterford Republican replies like the methodical state finance and administration commissioner he used to be.

"There are five issues," he says quietly:

First, Baldacci’s $250-million property-tax-relief plan — LD 1, passed by the Legislature in January — is "not materializing" benefits for the average property owner, he says. (LD 1 had a "dead-cat bounce," is the way Peter Mills, a Republican state senator from Somerset County and a potential 2006 gubernatorial challenger, makes the same point.)

"Second, there is a major backlash," Millet says, against the $447 million in borrowing to cover the state’s budget shortfall that Baldacci signed into law in April after his party’s majority rammed it through the Legislature. Republicans are mounting a signature-collection effort (led by Mills) to force a people’s veto at the November election to try to cancel the borrowing. In response to the backlash, embarassed and politically threatened Democrats may rescind the borrowing in the last days of the legislative session; it appeared they would replace it with cuts to state services and a hike in the cigarette tax.

Third, Millet says, Baldacci’s gay-rights legislation, signed by the governor March 31, "is alienating a segment of the population," especially because it did not require passage in a referendum to take effect. Christian groups have defeated two previous gay-rights bills at the polls, and they are now collecting signatures for another people’s veto referendum at November’s election.

"Fourth, there are the bond downgrades." Three national credit-rating agencies have lowered the status of state-government bonds because of the continuing gap between tax revenues and state expenditures and Baldacci’s way of dealing with the gap, which is to sell off parts of the state’s revenue stream to investors. In 2003, the state sold its lucrative wholesale liquor franchise, and this year’s planned $447 million in borrowing pledges the receipts from the state lottery as well as other pieces of state income. The change in credit status could cost the state a lot of money in extra interest it pays to bondholders.

Fifth, and more generally, says Sawin Millet about Baldacci, "there is a lack of confidence in his ability to put forth a comprehensive vision."

Other legislators list the contentious borrowing plan as item number one of Baldacci’s problems. It is universally considered to be unpopular.

"There are a lot of little things people are upset about," says Representative Arthur Lerman, an Augusta Democrat who like Millet is on the Appropriations Committee, "but the borrowing was the last straw."

That comment comes from someone who voted for it. Lerman reflects the view of a number of Democratic legislators: Baldacci "put us all in a terrible box," he says, by refusing to raise taxes to fill the revenue hole and instead turning to the unpopular borrowing plan.

"And it’s a somewhat hollow box," Lerman adds. The governor has successfully pushed to raise a number of state fees and has proposed raising more while insisting on no hike in what he calls "broad-based" taxes. Some proposals, like a canoe and kayak registration fee, a fee simply to go walking in the woods, and huge fines for not using seatbelts, proved so unpopular that they were swiftly abandoned. Equally disliked and swiftly gunned down was Baldacci’s proposal to allow Sunday hunting in some parts of the state with the aim of more hunting license sales.

"The theme of this administration has been misguided politically and not in the best interests of the state," Lerman says, referring to Baldacci’s constant argument that prosperity will come by keeping taxes low and attracting businesses to Maine to provide jobs. Lerman would like to see more words by the governor on state spending as legitimate investments in the future. He expressed unhappiness with some of Baldacci’s cuts to state-agency budgets, which have hit social-service agencies especially hard.

By promising prosperity through holding the line on taxes, Baldacci "is reaping what he sows" politically when prosperity doesn’t arrive, Lerman suggests.

Other liberals feel the same way. "He’s not responding to the needs of the people of the state and the people know it. He has no plan," says, acerbically, Kathleen McGee. She is the chief tax-reform lobbyist for the Maine Citizen Leadership Fund, the state’s leading progressive reform organization. McGee, who thinks a Republican has a good chance of winning the next gubernatorial election because of Baldacci’s missteps, has a poll that shows the state’s citizens overwhelmingly support a penny increase in the sales tax, a widening of the sales-tax base, or a hike in the income tax on the wealthy. "But when we talk about this inside this building [the State House] people look at us like we’re speaking Martian," she says.

Liberals like McGee cite many of the same elements Millet lists as contributing to Baldacci’s decline in popularity, and they sometimes include their frustration with Baldacci’s much-ballyhooed Dirigo Health insurance plan to solve the problem of the state’s more than 130,000 uninsured people. Although figures have not been officially released by the administration, the Portland Press Herald quoted a senior official in the insurance industry, who spoke at a public forum, that Dirigo Health has covered only about 2000 of the uninsured after two years of implementation. Another 4000-plus have been drawn to Dirigo from other insurance plans.

LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES IN ACCORD

But liberals are hardly the only folks disappointed with the governor. Although Baldacci is a conservative Democrat, conservatives increasingly cut him less slack than they did. At the beginning of his tenure, State House Republicans often had kind words about him. But now Paul Davis, the Republican Senate minority leader from Piscataquis County, ticks off many of the same items that Millet does to illustrate Baldacci’s failures. He adds to them the regulatory delay in the start-up of the racino operation (combining a racetrack and a gambling casino) in Bangor, and he derides Baldacci’s recently announced income-tax-relief proposal that, as Davis describes it, provides a half-of-one-percent cut for the middle class but, since it eliminates tax brackets indexed for inflation, it results in a tax increase. Like many recent Baldacci initiatives, this proposal seems dead in the legislative swamps.

For Davis, Dirigo Health is "a hugely expensive boondoggle" when so few people are covered. He says Baldacci told him that it would cost $30 million just to continue Dirigo for a year. Moreover, under the Dirigo Health legislation, insurance companies soon will be taxed to support it in order to compensate the state for the alleged savings to them because fewer of the uninsured will be getting free care at hospitals — the costs of which are passed on to the insured in hospital fees. But insurance companies, Davis says, include self-insurers such as Moosehead Manufacturing, a wood-furniture company in Monson and Dover-Foxcroft, which he says with exasperation will have to cough up $30,000 to Dirigo Health in the coming year.

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evin Raye, a former Republican Second District congressional candidate and now a state senator from Washington County, seems barely to contain his anger when speaking of Baldacci’s opposition to a racino proposed by the Passamaquoddy Tribe for the Eastport area.

"There’s a very real disconnect between the governor and the people of Maine," he says, "and he seems not to recognize it."

Raye believes the 2003 statewide referendum vote against the Sanford casino proposal was against that specific plan and did not mean that Maine people in the majority are opposed to gambling.

"Washington County was always strong for him," Raye says of Baldacci, but because of the governor’s opposition to the racino (he recently vetoed the bill that would have allowed it), support for him down east "absolutely just plummeted."

He also cites Baldacci’s $447-million borrowing plan as another example of a disconnect: "At a fundamental level people get it. You don’t put your light bill and your groceries on your Visa card."

Although the Maine State Chamber of Commerce’s president, Dana Conners, has worked closely with Baldacci, its lobbyist, Chris Hall, asks, in explanation of why Baldacci has sunk in the polls, "Is it because expectations have been disappointed?" He says the business community feels it is not getting from state government what it wants, such as lower taxes and lower health-care costs: "They’re saying ‘Where’s the beef?’"

At first, Hall says, he thought the budget-and-taxes snarl tying up state government was "insider baseball," but now he speculates that the public may be blaming it on the person at the top. Echoing other critics, he agrees Baldacci may be reaping what he has sown by suggesting his economic policies will bring prosperity.

Peter Mills, the Republican state senator, has another reap-what-you-sow figure of speech: "He who lives by the sword," he says, raising his eyebrows, meaning that such a person metaphorically also dies by the sword. Although Mills cites what he believes are specific failures in Baldacci’s leadership, he conjectures that Baldacci also may be falling on his own rhetorical sword.

If he were governor, Mills says, "I would never claim responsibility for the economy" — unlike Baldacci with his tax pledge and other fiscal policies that he promises will attract corporate investment — since so much of Maine’s economic health depends on national and international trends.

Inevitably, of course, a governor will have to bear political consequences if a state falls on hard times, whether he has had anything to do with it or not. And now, with the huge economic threats looming over Maine of military base closings, Baldacci may be facing, Mills says, "his own version of the ice storm [see sidebar, this page]."

WHAT EXACTLY DO THOSE POLLS SAY?

Tony Buxton, a Portland lawyer, lobbyist, and Democratic Party warhorse, illustrates his view of some of the governor’s troubles with a story from ancient political history. When his wife was going door-to-door in a gubernatorial campaign for Kenneth Curtis (a Democrat who served as governor from 1967 to 1975), she once encountered, he relates, a woman who told her, "Yeah, I’ll vote for him. The fish are running."

"I’m not excusing Baldacci," Buxton observes, but "the fish are running backwards" — Maine people are not feeling good about the state’s economy.

That factor heavily contributes to Baldacci’s increased unpopularity, says MaryEllen Fitzgerald, head of Critical Insights in Portland, one of the polling firms that saw the governor’s numbers dive.

"The economy is what’s driving that erosion of support," she believes, at a time when people "aren’t wowed with his performance" and when he’s the man "out front." Moreover, she sees "almost a perfect storm" of negative events hitting Baldacci, many self-created: the controversial borrowing plan, his cuts to state services, the continuing news about the state’s enduring budget gap, the state’s rating drop by the bond agencies, and others.

FitzGerald has a very recent poll that quantifies Maine people’s pessimism about the economy. In an "all-time high" for a Critical Insights survey on this question, of 600 people polled 51 percent said they believed the economy will get worse over the next 12 months. Soon after Baldacci took office, in the spring of 2003, only 25 percent were as pessimistic.

The Critical Insights poll on Baldacci himself, taken in mid-May, found 37 percent of 600 Mainers surveyed (with a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points) had an unfavorable opinion of the governor. Twenty-nine percent had a favorable opinion, and 34 percent were undecided. In the northern part of the state, the unfavorable number was up to 47 percent. In the Second Congressional District, which Baldacci used to represent in Congress (he’s from Bangor), those inclined to see him unfavorably were at 43 percent compared to 30 percent in the First District. The Second District has suffered much more economically in recent years than Southern Maine’s First District.

On the survey’s Baldacci job-performance question, respondents split, with 45 percent disapproving, 43 approving, and 12 percent undecided. But here’s the big contrast: Baldacci’s job-performance numbers in three previous Critical Insights polls dating back to late 2003 had averaged 62 percent approval, with a high of 72 percent in the fall of 2003.

These previous numbers are in line with other Maine polling firms’ published results. For example, two polls in 2003 by Market Decisions gave Baldacci an average 62 percent job-performance approval, and Strategic Marketing Services had Baldacci as recently as this January at 67 percent job approval.

Baldacci spokesman Lee Umphrey dismisses the extent of the governor’s drop in popularity found by Critical Insights by calling FitzGerald a Republican pollster (though this charge doesn’t explain why her polling had given Baldacci high numbers for years). Umphrey also notes that the bad news about the possible military base closings came out in the middle of the polling period. A venerable Republican pollster, Chris Potholm of Command Research, also has doubts about the extent of the Baldacci drop because the recent Critical Insights poll rates Tom Allen, the First District Democratic congressman, unaccountably low, he believes, when compared with his own findings.

Potholm thinks Baldacci has come down only 10 to 15 points in job performance and favorability ratings — though he says he hasn’t polled on these questions recently — largely because of the negative impact of his gay-rights stand with Franco-American Catholic Democrats in the Second District and some "slippage among Republicans and independents over the budget" and borrowing issues, rather than the 20-points-plus plunge found in the Critical Insights survey.

However, a 600-person "bullet" poll of Mainers done in early May for two Maine TV stations by a national firm, SurveyUSA, bears out the Critical Insights results. It found that 55 disapproved of Baldacci’s job performance, 37 percent approved, and 9 percent were unsure. Some polling professionals criticize bullet polls, which rely on a computerized telephone survey. On the other hand, SurveyUSA’s poll was done before the announcements about the base closings, so there could have been no skewing by that negative development. In SurveyUSA’s results, slightly more Democrats disapproved of Baldacci’s job performance than approved; Republicans overwhelmingly disapproved.

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THE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS

"If you see a governor with poll numbers like that, the Republicans previously might have thought of a token candidate, but now there’s a good chance of a three-to-four-person primary race with quality people," says the Chamber of Commerce’s Chris Hall, "and people could run as independents."

"The Republicans are seeing a lot of open options for running a strong candidate," says Representative Millet.

Says Senator Davis: "The Republicans will put on a vigorous campaign. They will work very hard. It will be a close election."

Will he be a candidate? "We’ll see."

Besides Davis and Peter Mills, Baldacci’s 2002 challenger Peter Cianchette, former US Representative David Emery, former State Senate president Rick Bennett, and businessmen Les Otten, Kevin Hancock, and Joe Boulos are mentioned by legislators and pollsters as Republican possibilities. Representative Lerman says "there is talk about the possibility of presenting a challenger" in the Democratic primary, but "there are no names yet." The Green Independent party will field an entry. Also on the left, activist Nancy Oden is already running as an independent. Re-election seemed a shoo-in for Baldacci a year ago; now potential opponents have been animated. He seems vulnerable.

But a year from now? That’s a famously long time in politics.

"It’s inevitable as you govern you lose some people," says, philosophically, lobbyist Jim Mitchell, a staunch Baldacci supporter.

"Given the state of the economy, clearly he’s got some real challenges," Mitchell admits, but he sees Baldacci’s recent decline in popularity largely due to the political wear and tear of a rough legislative session, and he expects the governor to recover.

It’s true that Baldacci’s popularity as registered in the polls declined during previous legislative sessions. In April 2003, Market Decisions had Baldacci at a 59 percent job approval. In the spring of 2004, Critical Insights had him at 54 percent. These numbers were down from highs in other seasons of those years in the 60s and 70s. Still, to be now in the 40-percent neighborhood, if true, is an unusually steep decline. A rule of thumb in politics is that you need at least 50 percent in your job-approval rating to be re-elected.

Baldacci’s aide Lee Umphrey doesn’t deny that the governor has suffered politically, and Baldacci, he says, is "not pleased he appears to have dropped so much."

The governor thinks, he adds, that the polls are reflective of the tough budget decisions in this legislative session as well as tough economic times. "And it rained every day in May," Umphrey jokes.

After the session, Baldacci plans to tour the state to reconnect with people, and "by Halloween he’ll be back up," Umphrey promises.

No one doubts that the governor — he of the famous campaign spaghetti suppers — has considerable ability to reconnect. "It’s a little premature to count Baldacci out," says liberal lobbyist Christopher St. John of the Maine Center for Economic Policy. Although Senator Raye feels "there’s definitely an opportunity for the Republicans to elect a governor in 2006," he feels Baldacci’s "strength is not in governing but in campaigning."

But will a new round of spaghetti suppers be enough? More substantive actions may be needed — and they are being worked on. Many legislative Democrats think that if they can rescind the unpopular borrowing scheme before this session ends and thereby head off the Republican-backed people’s veto referendum in November, it will be good for Baldacci politically as well as good for their own political futures. Statutorily, the session is supposed to finish June 15, but it can be and usually is extended by at least a few days.

Democrat Michael Brennan of Portland, the Senate majority leader, says flatly that Baldacci will rebound because "we’re going to deal with the borrowing." Put another way, "The best thing [for the Republicans] is for the Democrats in the Legislature not to get their shit together and not get rid of that borrowing," says pollster Potholm, who is also a government professor at Bowdoin College.

It looks now as if Brennan and his Democratic colleagues will get rid of the awkward borrowing plan, but it remains to be seen whether the damage done by it will linger — and if the alternative they come up with will be more palatable.

Potholm thinks Baldacci faces another big risk if the anti-gay-rights people’s veto effort succeeds in putting its question on the ballot in November. Its proponents have until June 28 to collect about 50,000 signatures of registered voters. If a gay-rights question passes in November, it would be a big slap in the governor’s face.

This November, state and federal officials are not up for election, so turnout is likely to be all-important, and the anti-gay-rights side has shown in the past, with those two successful statewide votes under its belt, that it can turn its people out. If the anti-borrowing question is also on the ballot, the two questions might reinforce each other by bringing out droves of conservatives.

In trying to explain his boss’s difficulties, one of the things mentioned by Lee Umphrey is that "the governor has a tendency to try to please everybody — in doing so, the governor’s office may have overextended."

To express this point another way — with a less apologetic view of Baldacci than his aide’s — the governor has appeared to go down his predecessor Angus King’s economically conservative, socially liberal, middle-of-the-road path. This path is nowadays the conventional political wisdom for Maine. Following this trail, independent King wound up with only token Democrat and Republican opposition when he ran for a second term. The entire Maine establishment backed him.

But King benefited greatly from the economic boom of the 1990s. He escaped from office just after the last recession hit the state with full force, and his biggest legacy was a $1-billion state budget shortfall that Baldacci inherited. State government has been in a fiscal crisis since. Meanwhile, the effects of economic globalization — especially the enormous loss of manufacturing jobs — have been harsh on Maine.

Baldacci may be discovering now that there is be a fundamental problem with following the conventional political wisdom in bad times. In such times, such wisdom — invariably, this is the advice of the conservative economic elite, Republican or Democrat, which incidentially provides the money for political campaigns — is not working for most people.

The particular sagesse that says everybody will benefit if a state gives more money to the corporations may be especially dangerous politically when the corporations appear to be bringing the bad times. Voters may ask themselves: Why should we pay tribute to our tormenters? In any case, very few economists would say a governor of a small, out-of-the-way state should trumpet that he can counter the effects of global trends.

In bad times, with the middle path, instead of pleasing everybody you risk pleasing nobody — or, at least, the majority.

"People want to see a broader vision," says Democratic House majority leader Glenn Cummings of Portland, reflecting on Baldacci’s travails. Then he quotes the Bible: "Without vision the people starve."

The exact quote from Proverbs is: "Where there is no vision, the people perish." But Cummings may have got the message right for Maine by accentuating our economic plight.

Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@prexar.com

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The other cloud over Baldacci

There is yet another big risk looming over Baldacci that has little to do with state government: the fallout onto politicians if the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard were to close, the Brunswick Naval Air Station were to be downsized, and the military’s Defense Accounting and Finance Service center in Limestone were to be shut down — as the Pentagon recently recommended and the Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) will determine this year. Historically, 85 percent of the military’s recommendations are upheld by BRAC.

Because thousands of jobs are at stake, big base closures would be, economically, "such an overwhelming disaster for Maine" that the effects would be "cataclysmic," says pollster Chris Potholm, straining for adjectives dark enough that could also describe the political effects.

Although Baldacci appears to have little choice but to be in the front of the protests to the potential closings, as a state officeholder he has no say in what will happen. Nevertheless, should the cuts go through, his visibility on the issue could come back to haunt him politically. The mood of the state’s voters could turn sour toward every high official in sight.