Every Presidential election I caution people not to turn the television on after Labor Day to avoid seeing what is going on the campaign trail.
Neither the ads run by the candidates nor the super pacs are good for the faint hearted.
This is particularly true this year as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump enter the final lap of the election cycle post Labor Day. There will be nothing that they won’t blame on each other going back to the biblical plagues and do it in thirty second segments.
I do have to confess to getting an early surprise this year when I turned on the television before Labor Day and was confronted with the situations that Maine Governor Paul LePage and former Congressman Anthony Weiner found themselves embroiled in on the same day.
LePage, a Tea Party Republican, is in his second term as Governor of Maine. Mercifully, he can’t run or a third term.
Throughout his six years in this position he has repeatedly made racially charged comments about the causes of crime and drug trafficking in the state. He claimed that ninety-percent of the drug dealers from other states were African-American or Hispanic and came to Maine to get “young white girls” pregnant. He went on to state that he kept a three ring binder with the photos of the drug dealers to back up his claim.
FBI statistics show that 7.4 percent of those arrested for drug sales in Maine were African-American. The Bureau does not keep statistics regarding Hispanic origin.
When LePage’s remarks were challenged as racially insensitive by a Democratic state legislator, LePage left a profanity laced telephone message on the legislator’s answering machine and told him he was “coming after him.” He later said he’d like to duel with the legislator with pistols.
In the past, LePage has said he’d like to tell President Obama to “go to hell” and said that the President “doesn’t like white people.”
After hinting that he might resign his office in the uproar that followed his remarks, he decided that he would finish out his term.
What the future holds for the Governor is uncertain but Donald Trump has stated there would be a place for LePage in a Trump Administration.
Secretary of State LePage? Secretary of Defense LePage? Chairman of the United States Civil Rights Commission?
The mind boggles at the possibilities.
Anthony Weiner, of course, needs no introduction. He resigned from Congress in 2011 after sending a sexually suggestive picture to a twenty-one year old woman in Seattle, Washington.
In 2013 Weiner ran for Mayor of New York but in the middle of the primary campaign, he was unmasked as “Carlos Danger” who had sent more sexually suggestive photos and “sexted” with a twenty-two year old woman and admitted to the same conduct with three other women.
One might have expected that the angriest person would have been his wife, Huma Abedin, who, to her credit chose to stay and work on their marriage.
I suspect that the truly angriest person was former Governor Eliot Spitzer who was attempting a political comeback in the primary election for City Comptroller after having resigned as Governor when it was discovered he was visiting prostitutes. The last thing Spitzer needed was “Carlos Danger” dredging up memories of both of their sexual escapades. Both he and the would-be Mayor would defeated in their races.
On August 28 of this year, we learned that Weiner was sexting again. He sent a sexually suggestive photo to another woman in 2015
. Just two weeks before the magazine Vogue ran a profile of Huma Abedin in which she praised Weiner for being a full-time stay at home father who gave her the freedom to devote herself to the Clinton campaign. Needless to say, this left Weiner with too much idle time on his hands. Abedin understandably announced that they were separating.
What does the future hold for Anthony Weiner?
Well, he clearly loves politics and the limelight.
Maybe he could get on a future Presidential ticket with Paul LePage.
They could run on the slogan “Giving new meaning to Show and Tell.”