B O O K   R E V I E W

Just The Facts, Please!

As Maine Went
By Mike Tipping
Tilbury House Publishers
South Thomaston, Maine
159 pages; $12.95

Now available at Maine bookstores, amazon.com and tilburyhouse.com

It’s election season again.

National political news includes Virginia’s governor setting out on an unplanned trip up the river for accepting bribes from a snake oil salesmen. The governor of New York ordered a special commission to look into political corruption, but disbanded it when he discovered he was on that commission’s list. Former Providence, R.I., mayor Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, fresh out of federal prison for a corruption conviction, is running again for mayor. But these are the “same old, same old” of politics. The corruption that sickens American politics today is far more systemic.

Maine journalist Mike Tipping has written a book about current politics. In As Maine Went Tipping focuses for the most part on Maine governor Paul LePage’s 2010 campaign, election and administration. Tipping could have written a typical election year “he said she said” mud-slinging fest. But Tipping’s book is about much more. It is about a particular type of politics – campaign strategy and campaign funding, in particular – in America today.

Focusing on some of LePage’s campaign comments and claims, Tipping uses research and data from recognized sources to compare and contrast with what the governor has said. This is the kind of research good journalists are expected to do—fact-checking before publishing. Whatever the political goals of the governor’s comments, the data is the data. The data was not collected for political reasons, real or implied. Sources include the Maine Center for Economic Policy and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The use of this data is one of the most important things Tipping has done in the book.

Politicians know most people will not know of this data, do the legwork to find it or spend the time to understand it. Tipping describes the effects of disinformation on some voters. He also writes about political maneuvering when an election has a split ticket—seven primary candidates in Maine in 2010. The 2010 gubernatorial election was a three-way race. This meant a candidate could win with much less than 51 percent of the vote. It also meant the less-motivated, under-informed fringe voters became more valuable to the marginal candidate. One influential Maine Republican referred to some of the fringe groups the LePage campaign was aligning itself with as “whack jobs.”

Tipping writes that his book is intended “as a means of acknowledging but looking past the governor’s (bombastic) comments and examining his record as a politician and governor in a more comprehensive way.” Tipping lays this out simply and clearly. This is the kind of political writing that high school students could benefit from reading to get beyond the hypothetical standard civics course, on the way to becoming responsible voters. Informed and empowered voters can hold a democracy together.

A standard election year political pitch is that the public schools are awful, job growth is flat and taxes should be cut. Whether it’s true or not, the average person is going to identify with being a victim of these alleged shortcomings. The implication is—the politician who says this is going to fix it. The LePage campaign declared Maine schools awful. National statistics said, Not so. The corporation interested in making Maine public schools a computer-based distance-learning experiment was a LePage campaign contributor.

The reality is, public schools are not awful everywhere, governments are not meant to create jobs and governments never cuts taxes; they shift the tax burden around. Business experience is touted as a credential, but government is not a business, and vice versa. It does not exist to make money, it exists to spend the people’s money in ways that ideally best serve the most citizens. A government needs a budget, the department of education needs a budget, and so does a family. That doesn’t make any one of them a business.

Tipping, through the use of data and analysis, illustrates how politicians can manipulate and outright ignore facts in effort to serve campaign contributors at taxpayer expense. Making public schools better could begin with an education in how politics really work. As Maine Went is loaded with statistics, graphs and charts that make the facts clear without being overwhelming. While the amorphous Tea Party appears to be a clearinghouse for a flood of campaign money from corporate and other special interest groups, it also seems more a national general-complaint department than an informed-solutions project. Tipping’s data-generated reality check is a long-overdue look at what is really going.

Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, in his 2011 book “Republic Lost,” wrote, in reference to the deregulation of the campaign finance system, of an “ economy of corruption.” He refers to campaign contributions overpowering the will of the many by the will of the few. This corruption Lessig describes as “the banal evil of second-rate minds who can’t make it in the private sector and who therefore turn to the massive wealth directed by our government as the means to securing wealth for themselves.” Recent New York gubernatorial primary candidate and legal scholar Zephyr Teachout campaigned on an anti-corruption platform. She recognized Lessig’s definition of corruption as being the same as the framers of the U.S. Constitution.

As Maine Went looks at Maine and national politics. Corruption is nothing new to politics. But the near-elimination of regulations on campaign finance has dramatically turned the tables on American voters. Buying a candidate, and all of what that means, has never been easier. Tipping highlights how some of the big money players have influenced the smallest states, cities and rural areas in American politics. Big oil and coal barons, thriving in part off federal subsidies, pour money into campaigns under the guise of a range of economic and patriotic-sounding organizations.

As Maine Went is a story from Maine’s backyard, but it holds a lesson for all the backyards in America.