Location: The law office of Republican state Sen. Roger Katz, overlooking the Kennebec River in downtown Augusta. The former high school basketball player has photos and clippings about the Boston Celtics hanging on the walls.

Time: Summer 2013

Reporter: If you were LePage’s chief of staff, what would you have done differently?

Katz: Be careful what you say and reach out to the other side … I view the Democrats in the Legislature as my opponents, not my enemies. He was able to find common ground with Emily Cain on the issue of domestic violence. There are a lot of things like that … just a number of areas where you can bring coalitions together around a single issue and actually get something done.”

The 66-year-old Katz represents the other side of the GOP from LePage and the tea party — once called Rockefeller Republicans and now sometimes RINOs, Republicans in Name Only.

Katz, though, sees himself as a true Republican, just like his father, Bennett Katz, a former president of the Maine Senate, known as a gentle soul and a gentleman.

His supports LePage’s fiscal policies and he admires his determination: “He’s been like a dog with a bone … getting us a government we can afford.”

But the governor’s mouth has been too much for Katz.

He published an op-ed, endorsed by some fellow moderate Republicans, after the governor called those who protested his removal of a pro-labor mural from the state department of labor “idiots.”

“By demeaning others, the governor also discourages people from taking part in debating the issues of the day — worrying if not only their ideas, but they themselves as people, will be the subject of scorn,” Katz wrote.

But he also recognizes they had much different home lives.

“If I had been brought up the way he was,” said Katz, “the hardscrabble way, I would have been either dead or in jail.”

Katz came into the Legislature with LePage three years ago along with enough other Republicans to take over both branches of government.

Republicans came with a mission — to put their philosophy of government ahead of the other side’s. Their bywords were personal responsibility, accountability, lower taxes, fiscal prudence, private enterprise.

While the moderates in the party might have hoped Mills had been chosen, in 2010 the right was well-organized and the political winds favored them.

LePage —by policy and by style — fit their bill perfectly.

LePage, Katz said, “came in with a formidable zeal to reverse 30 years of liberal Democratic direction and put us on a better track… myself, I was proud to vote for him.”

“I’m like Chris Christie,” LePage said, referring to the New Jersey governor, a popular figure with fiscal conservatives. “He’s blunt, and I’m considered over the top.”

It’s that very style that now threatens the hopes of Republicans and conservative independents.

Al Diamon, a columnist who has been skewering Maine politicians for more than 20 years, called LePage a “boob” whose comments remind him of something you’d say after having “three or four beers in a bar.”

(Although Diamon was not suggesting LePage has a drinking problem, LePage himself said he has heard people are saying that about him. Interviewed in his office, he said the last drink he had was the previous Monday, said he never drinks at the Blaine House unless it is a “glass of wine with my wife,” and has a beer after his weekly round of golf at the Waterville Country Club.)

Diamon also said LePage is one pol who has delivered what he said he would.

“It’s not only what the public wanted, it’s exactly what he promised … He didn’t lie and he didn’t change course, and he deserves credit for that,” Diamon said.

But because of his lack of political skills, he can’t and likely won’t get much more accomplished, Diamon said: “He’s his own worst enemy because style overcomes the substance… He’s stubborn, stubborn.”

His “allies in the Legislature are being tarred with the same brush,” Diamon said, so they distance themselves because they “need cover back home.”

Mills calls LePage’s tenure a time of “lost opportunities,” citing a series of fiscal initiatives such as deeper tax reform that were lost “because style matters … Reagan had style and he got all kinds of things done.”

Independent gubernatorial candidate Eliot Cutler said LePage’s actions have done the opposite of advancing a new conservative agenda: “Democrats are emboldened politically by LePage’s actions.”

Dan Demeritt, LePage’s spokesman for a short time, said he didn’t know LePage well when he started working for him, but it wasn’t long after that he came to appreciate LePage’s ideas and his commitment.

“I would walk in front of train for him,” he said.

He saw a refreshing leader who had “the ability to be transformational.”

But, to Demeritt, that has been lost because LePage approaches the job wrong.

“He would make a great general manager for the state of Maine,” Demeritt said.

To lead, he and others observed, LePage has to “sell his ideas … go to the public and sell them.”

Demeritt recalls that early in LePage’s tenure, they were scheduled to have a news conference on a plan to help Brunswick residents who lost money to a fuel oil business that stopped delivering.

“We had to literally get him to take his suit jacket off the hanger and go,” Demeritt recalled. “His attitude was the staff has done the work and they should get the credit.”

To LePage, his critics just don’t get it.

“They are missing what I’m here for, everyone missed what I’m here for. I’m not here to be a politician — never intended … I’m a turnaround specialist. And we know what needs to happen,” he said. “We just can’t get enough people to buy in.”

Scene 3

Location: The governor’s office.

Date: Late August

Present: LePage, press aides Steele and Adrienne Bennett and a Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting photographer and reporter.

Background: About a week after press reports based on anonymous sources who claimed that, at a fundraiser in Belgrade, LePage had said President Obama hated white people. LePage himself seemed to finally be accepting the reality that, as his wife said at the lunch interview, “Paul LePage has no filter.”

LePage: “I’ve got this big eraser for when I open my mouth.”

He said he never said Obama hates white people. He said his point was that Obama missed a chance to bring the races together.

“He could have said I’m half white and half black. Instead, they called him the first black president. I never said he hated white people. I said, I guess he doesn’t like me.”

But, from now on, he said, he’s going to try to keep a lid on the comments “and talk out of both sides of my mouth like a politician.”

“They (staff) gave me this,” he said, holding up a roll of duct tape, leaning back, laughing, taking pleasure in his rep for shooting before he aims.

“I have what I consider is a decent sense of humor,” he said in the Blaine House interview. “I don’t take myself very seriously and I have found, in Augusta, politics is very serious and I don’t take it seriously because I don’t like it.”

But he added that the Vaseline comment was wrong. “It was a terrible one and I regret it … everything else I’ve said … I still believe them.”

Marty Linsky — a former Republican legislator in Massachusetts, a teacher of public leadership at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and an expert in governing — came to LePage’s defense in a June story in the Portland Press Herald, saying “I think it is a good thing that people in elected office sometimes tell constituents what they believe they need to hear, rather than what they want to hear.”

Linsky and others see LePage’s comments like these as not only refreshing, but deliberate.

“It’s pretty clear he enjoys the reputation and the notoriety he’s generated,” Linsky said. “It feeds his image of himself … he revels in his bluntness” because he reinforces his self-image.

Payne, the Portland businessman, said when LePage makes his extreme comments his supporters say, “Go Paul. Do it again. They’re enthralled by him.”

Epilogue

At the end of the day, public officials have two jobs: run the government and get re-elected.

“I’m from another world” than the political one, Le- Page reflected. “I don’t expect to change the world, I just hope to improve the world.”

With the election one year away, voters will have some time to decide if he has improved their world.

Diamon said LePage was ill-suited for the job – “There’s no way he should be governor.” His accomplishments like fixing the pension and hospital debt “are not bread-and-butter issues to the average person.”

Bennett, the head of the GOP and the man with the task of getting LePage reelected, said, “I don’t think Maine people will deny him re-election based on style points. At the end of the day,” he said, “people generally get it.”

JOHN CHRISTIE is co-founder, publisher and senior reporter for the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting. He has covered politics as a reporter, editor and publisher at newspapers in Maine, Massachusetts and Florida and holds a B.A. in political science from the University of New Hampshire.