We’ve entered the campaign silly season. Undercover audio and video are popping up, super PACs are spending mightily, the campaigns are trading barbs online and in the press over rap lyrics and the glut of TV ads, mail and phone calls is increasing.

That’s predictable and expected, owing to a persistently tight gubernatorial contest.

But one of the primary agitators in the electoral cacophony is rapidly – and unfortunately – transforming itself into little more than an indistinguishable appendage of the Republican Party and Gov. LePage.

The Maine Heritage Policy Center bills itself as a nonpartisan (key word) “research and educational organization whose mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies.” It fulfills its mission “by undertaking accurate and timely research” and then “marketing these findings” to legislators, staff, the media and others.

The mission itself is a worthy one. As a Democrat who believes in the free market and the power of the private sector to help solve some of our most intractable public policy problems, I believe the Maine Heritage Policy Center can play an important role in Maine’s public policy discourse.

But over several years, the think tank has fallen victim to deepening mission creep and lost sight of its primary role as a free-market, smaller-government think tank and advocate.

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This began in earnest in 2010 when the Maine Heritage Policy Center became the de facto administration-in-waiting following Gov. LePage’s election. Its leader chaired Gov. LePage’s transition team, another became commissioner of education and additional staff entered the administration at lower levels. Once in office, the organization became the administration’s policy arm, wielding nearly unchecked influence on the governor and his team.

It may seem natural for a conservative group to hitch its wagon to a newly elected Republican governor, but the depth of that entanglement was so complete as to belie claims to nonpartisanship. What’s more, should the governor lose his re-election bid, the intimacy of that relationship could imperil the organization’s fundraising and influence.

And while politics and elections were always in the Maine Heritage Policy Center’s DNA, most notably when it came to referendum campaigns like Taxpayers Bill of Rights, known as TABOR, the center fully transformed itself into a deeply partisan, campaign-oriented communications outfit after a leadership change in 2011.

The most outward expression of that transformation was the 2011 launch of The Maine Wire, the Maine Heritage Policy Center’s online “news service,” which lightly masquerades as a legitimate media outlet. The site covers all manner of subjects with no relationship to formulating and promoting conservative public policies.

Just last week, The Maine Wire released a much-hyped but ultimately innocuous audio recording of immigrant advocates and progressive groups “conspiring” to write letters to the editor in an effort to rebut stereotypes and factual errors in a Republican Governors Association TV ad.

The recording was obtained by The Maine Wire’s “editor” after dialing into a private conference call, intentionally not announcing himself, recording the conversation and then lying to reporters about the recording’s source – something a journalistic ethics specialist at the Poynter Institute called a self-evident “breach of ethical standards.”

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Even on legitimate public policy issues, such as welfare reform, The Maine Wire’s “reporting” is so aggressively partisan and breathless that it delegitimizes and distracts from some otherwise reasonable policy reforms. Put another way, The Maine Wire actually undermines the very policies the Maine Heritage Policy Center seeks to advance.

Looking at The Maine Wire’s homepage today, you’d be hard pressed to know it’s not owned and operated by the Republican Governors Association or the LePage re-election committee.

All of this begs the questions: How do these actions advance the Maine Heritage Policy Center’s primary mission of formulating and promoting conservative public policies? How do they support the organization’s claims to nonpartisanship? How do they help it maintain credibility with policymakers and the media? How do they position the organization for growth?

They don’t. And the organization is the worse for it.

In fact, even before the launch of The Maine Wire and the organization’s headlong foray into bare-knuckled partisan campaigning, a former Republican state senator noted that the Maine Heritage Policy Center’s research tended to be “oversimplistic and exaggerated.”

But with another new leader taking its helm – its third in four years – there is a new opportunity for the Maine Heritage Policy Center to refocus and return to its core mission. It will take time (likely years) and considerable effort to re-establish the organization as a credible and influential source of policy guidance and information. And the group will need to take pains to brandish its supposed nonpartisan credentials while simultaneously disentangling itself from the current administration.

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Whether Matt Gagnon, the Maine Heritage Policy Center’s new executive director – tellingly, a veteran campaigner and not a policy wonk – can redirect the organization is unclear. If he’s successful, Maine’s public policy discourse will be better for it.

Michael Cuzzi is a former campaign aide to President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and former U.S. Rep. Tom Allen. He manages the Boston and Portland offices of VOX Global, a strategic communications and public affairs firm headquartered in Washington. He can be contacted at:

mjcuzzi@gmail.com

Twitter: @CuzziMJ


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