Maine Democratic Party

Ben's Blog

1/25/12 - State of the State Reax: the Dog that Didn’t Bark

The Governor gave an odd but effective State of the State speech last night. Nothing was odd in the usual LePage way – no insults or gaffes – but rather, the speech came off mostly like a recital of his favorite talking points from the last year. My immediate reactions was that it curiously lacked the usual laundry list of proposals that he wanted to see introduced and enacted in the coming session (see the President’s SOTU by comparison…”If you send me that bill tomorrow, I will sign it right away.”). I don’t think we advanced any understanding of how LePage wants to continue working on energy costs or MaineCare cuts.

Waking up this morning, though, it occurred to me what else was strange about the speech. The first year of the LePage agenda had two signature pieces: the large tax cut, for which he took himself on a huge victory lap last night, and the health insurance “reform” bill, about which he said…absolutely nothing last night. Zip, zero, nada. How could that be after so much political capital spent on ramming it through the Legislature, and with how captive they are to MHPC?

I think they know they’ve stepped in it with this “reform.” A tax increase, plus ballooning costs in rural Maine is not what they thought would happen. We’re not going to let people forget…

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Krystal
Posts: 1

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Reply #1 on : Tue January 31, 2012, 16:58:05

You keep it up now, undretsand? Really good to know.