Gov. LePage’s opinion piece in the May 8 Maine Sunday Telegram was divisive, rancorous and reprehensible.

If anything, this tirade, along with the governor’s increasing testy and uncivil public behavior, only indicates the downward spiral of bad governance yet to come in the next 31 months of his administration.

What the governor casually addressed, in his criticism of columnist Cynthia Dill and the so-called “liberal elites” of southern Maine, is the grim reality of the Maine Development Foundation’s economic report: While the rest of New England pushes ahead, Maine’s economy is stagnant.

For the governor to blame “40 years of a Democratic stranglehold on Augusta,” while it’s been his watch for the last five, is disingenuous, lacks the personal responsibility for his own ineffective leadership and led this state to where it is today: like a hamster on the wheel, going nowhere fast.

Despite the governor’s repeated calls for “further reducing the income tax … reforming welfare … (and) cutting energy costs” over the past six years, the Legislature has come to regard him as more of a irritating nuisance and less as a helpful aid to Maine’s economy. Give the Legislature credit. It has adapted its approach to governance by passing bipartisan legislation that can easily override a majority of the governor’s vetoes.

LePage’s continued unprofessional, hypercritical and unruly behavior have made him a political pariah, irrelevant and toxic to his own party. His town halls are now sermons to the choir; to political observers, he is a tired sideshow act.

Maine cannot endure this type of “leadership” for much longer before it finds itself ranked among the nation’s poorest of states: Mississippi, West Virginia and Arkansas.

Though it is against his nature to quit, for the good of the state and Maine’s future, it’s time for the governor to resign.

Mike Turcotte

Bangor

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