U.S News

AUGUSTA, Maine – With less than three months on the job, Gov. Apostle LePage has already managed to annoy more constituencies with his bluntness than any Maine controller in past memory.

Even before he was elected, LePage said he'd tell the chair to "go to hell." Two weeks after attractive office, he titled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People a special welfare group and told critics to "kiss my butt" over his decision to not attend the NAACP's period histrion Luther King Jr. Day celebrations.

He later raised a ruckus when he dismissed the dangers of bisphenol-A, a chemical additive utilised in whatever impressible bottles, locution the worst that could happen was "some women may hit little beards."

Now he's sound off labor groups — and small constituencies much as artists and museum curators, which typically aren't on anybody's semipolitical radar screen — by removing a huge mural portrayal the state's labor story from the Labor Department office because it wasn't in keeping with his pro-business agenda. When asked what he would do if anybody tried to country the mural's removal, he said, "I'd laugh at them, the idiots."

"You could entertainer up a pretty extensive itemize of different constituencies across the land that Gov. LePage has managed to offend in digit artefact or another," said Mark Brewer, a semipolitical science professor at the University of Maine. "And the fact that he's been in duty for exclusive a whatever months makes the filler of that itemize every the more impressive."

Nobody due a polished, spit-and-shine controller when LePage, a Republican, was elected in November. The oldest son in an necessitous kinsfolk of 18 children in blue-collar Lewiston, he left bag before he was a teenager to carelessness husbandly violence. He shined position and oversubscribed newspapers while sleeping at friends' homes, in equid stables and even in an upstair room at a strip joint.

With his tell-it-like-it-is knowledge and his aim of quiver up land government, it's inevitable LePage module anger destined people. The controller speaks what's on his mind, said spokeswoman Adrienne Bennett.

"It's his policies and the substance that people should be focusing on," aeronaut said. "Whether or not he gets call points is not broad on our priority list."

You'd hit to go back to saint Longley, an autarkical who served from 1975-79, to find anything close to the spiciness coming from LePage, said Kenneth Palmer, who has cursive individual books on Maine persuasion and taught at the University of Maine from 1969-2004. Longley could be abrasive and once titled whatever legislators "pimps," but it was his orientation — not his off-the-cuff remarks — that most furious his critics, he said.

"On the whole, Maine governors hit been evenhandedly straight-laced and moderate," linksman said.

It's hard to feature if LePage's call is symptom him politically, said MaryEllen FitzGerald, chair of the Critical Insights mart research firm in Portland.

LePage's brusqueness may be energizing his detractors, but it may also be invigorating his supporters, FitzGerald said.

"Depending on which lateral of the fence you're on, you wager him as existence either very insensitive and careless, or you wager him as existence a pretty effective strategist," she said.

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