Ralph Benko served as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House and worked closely with the George W. Bush administration as a contractor in its domestic policy initiative to find and rescue human trafficking victims. He lives in Maryland.
“As Maine goes, so goes the nation” was, for about a century, a political maxim. Recently, the political junkies in the capital were obsessing about the Platner vs. Collins race.
Wrong race!
Understandable, for those card-carrying members of the Columnist Party. The U.S. Senate majority, a very big deal, may hinge on that race. And that race was spiced up by the salacious and unseemly stories about the winner of the Democratic primary.
With that said, hey, junkies? Platner vs. Collins always was the wrong race to put on the marquee of your political theater. The real bellwether race is the governor’s contest between Bobby Charles and Hannah Pingree.
The political dynamics that have emerged or are emerging is less Republican vs. Democrat and more establishment insiders (Hannah Pingree, former speaker of the Maine House, whose family name has been a prominent fixture in Maine politics for over 30 years) vs. popular insurgents (Bobby Charles, on his first electoral foray).
Charles is fashioning his affordability program via a classic center-right Republican free market platform. Pingree is fashioning her affordability solution via a classic center-left Democratic public works and pro-regulatory platform.
Full disclosure, as chairman of the 190,000-Facebook follower Capitalist League, I lean center-right. My own preferences revealed, there is more to this race than programmatic preferences.
The Charles vs. Pingree race is the perfect microcosm of the national political culture.
I was a lifelong Democrat until the sensible Democratic Party left me for left field. And there they go again. The progressive Mills-Pingree-Platner party ghosts the FDR/JFK/Bill Clinton Democrats.
Bobby Charles — who worked in the Reagan White House and later directly for Colin Powell — is a modern Reaganesque figure, aligning himself with the sensible Maine population, including independents and traditional Democrats, offering common-sense policies.
Charles is running on the Republican line. Yet he has the kind of “man of the people” values that FDR embodied and Middle America embodies.
Yes, there is a lot of crazy going on in the GOP now. Charles, however, embodies classical Republican radical pragmatism. He’s not an ideologue, and is exempt from the fanaticism that so plagues our politics today. Charles is neither a zealot nor a moderate. He’s simply … capable.
Meanwhile the Democrats now, wholesale, are nominating “democratic socialists.” Wait, what? History has repeatedly shown that socialism doesn’t work, locally or nationally.
The further left you move, the more it never works. Remember Jimmy Carter’s misery index? (That’s what forced me out of my once beloved Democratic Party.)
Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different outcomes. Let’s do sane for a change.
Hannah Pingree presents as an honorable and capable public servant. That said, she will, if elected, be badly constrained by the romantic-but-dysfunctional emerging narrative of her party, now in thrall to its fanatical base, listing so far to portside that it is about to capsize the ship of state.
Maine is one of the states most guided by common sense. Its voters will embrace the candidate with a proven agenda for affordability and security rather than a member of the party who is admittedly charming but impractically romantic (Bernie, AOC, Zohran, etc).
While the nation scratched its head at Maine’s oddly out of sync “oyster farmer” there was, and is, a more meaningful race afoot. Many who have known Bobby Charles for decades and watched him serve his country unflinchingly think he, considered a dark horse, is the odds-on favorite to pull an upset and bring common sense and real management skills to Maine’s governance.
So, political junkies? Now that Platner vs. Collins has ended, please turn your attention to the true marquee Maine race, Charles vs. Pingree. For as Maine goes, so goes the nation.