In the interest of full disclosure before I continue, it should be noted that I am a paid opinion columnist for the Bangor Daily News, which is of course not owned by Maine Today Media. None the less, BDN and MTM’s largest paper the Portland Press Herald, are the two most important daily newspapers in the state and compete for influence (PPH’s circulation is 49,587 copies and BDN’s is 48,726 copies, and of course BDN covers a much larger geographic area of the state), so I thought it was worth mentioning.

Connor also resigned as CEO of Impressions Media, which owns the Times Leader newspaper in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.  In the statement announcing his resignation from MTM, Connor gave the following rationale:

“Now the company needs to leverage the new foundation into the next phase,” he said. “After four years of work with a schedule that has been around the clock … it’s time for change for me personally, my family, and for the company. I remain a significant individual investor in the company and I believe in its future.”

Naturally, much like when a politician says he is resigning to “spend more time with his family”, the given excuse doesn’t really hold water.  Highly ambitious people who pour their lives into work do not (typically) have sudden epiphanies about the amount of time they spend working on their particular labor of love, reconsidering just how much they’ve neglected the rest of their lives.  People like Connor live their lives in their work.

It didn’t take long to peek under the curtain and find out some of the particulars about what was really happening here.  Al Diamon was first on the scene, and easily with the most information.  According to Diamon:

According to informed sources, Connor’s investors and partners have been questioning him about expenses he’s charged to the company and the way those costs have been allocated between MaineToday and Impressions Media. (The two companies are separate entities, but share some board members.)

Diamon goes on to say that his sources say that the board was also losing patience with certain excesses that were becoming apparent, such as Connor’s recent trip to Italy, which was charged mostly to Maine Today Media.  It seems that Connor had developed a habit of questionable reimbursements/charges on the MTM tab, and that the board was more than a little irritated.  Given the wave of recent layoffs, having a CEO that is seemingly enjoying the benefits of the good life while employees were being given the pink slip, newsstand prices for the paper were going up, and other austerity measures, was simply not a good idea.

Those I have spoken to about this suggest that the other investors, particularly Bob Monks, were displeased with the direction of the Press Herald – and indeed the entire MTM suite of papers – under his guidance.  Despite a marginal increase in circulation (of about 500 subscriptions) which Connor bragged about on the way out, there was apparently deep concern that there was no overall strategic plan for the future.

Indeed, the paper’s focus has changed a great deal under Connor’s guidance, and many have criticized the resulting product as being substantially less focused on quality journalism, and more aimed at cheap, superficial bait for readers.

Recall, for instance, Colin Woodard’s excellent piece (full disclosure, Colin quoted me in it) on Connor from July of last year, “We don’t sell news“, which contained this gem from Connor:

“I can’t be anything other than candid with you: Scoops don’t matter to me,” he says, seated in the paper’s new digs at Portland’s One City Center. “The day of the scoop is long gone in my opinion because of the Internet, all-the-news-all-the-time, real 24/7 breaking news. If we spent all our time worrying about what the Forecaster or the Bangor Daily News does, that’s going to take us off our game.” Breaking stories, he says, is “passé” and a poor barometer of “the quality of our journalism.”

Connor was obviously befuddled by the rise of digital journalism in the last five years, and had no idea how to respond to it.  His plan was to, apparently, turn a trusted news source into a lifestyle journal that kept a chronicle of already established news stories and viewed breaking original news as an afterthought.

I have been pretty critical of this approach, as I think it fails to understand the evolving nature of news collection and delivery.  Last May, with a bemused smile I watched (part 1 and part 2) a collection of news dinosaurs sitting around a table, discussing why the asteroid hurtling toward earth was nothing to worry about.

So thorough was their lack of understanding about what was happening to the industry they were in charge of shepherding into the information age that I couldn’t help but shake my head and laugh.  Interestingly, Connor seemed to have the most respect for bloggers (though to my chagrin, he couldn’t recall a certain blogger’s name who had scooped his paper ::cough::), but even he was clearly out of his element talking about the future of news and how it would adapt to the growth of digital.

For their part, it seems that the local union representing most MTM employees – The Portland Newspaper Guild – “gets it” more than Connor did.  While thanking him for his leadership, they wasted no time suggesting that the digital frontier was the key to the future existence of the MTM papers:

But that is not enough. We must build on that success and deliver news and services on platforms other than newspapers, and we now need a digital-savvy leader who can take us to the next level. The owners of the company are committed to providing that new leadership.

If it is true that the Maine Today board was displeased with Connor’s vision of the future of news, than perhaps the board gets it as well.  At least I hope they do.

Let’s cut to the chase: Connor did some important things at Maine Today.  He took a paper that was on fire, and at least managed to put the fire out.  He got it on better financial footing, and may have arrested the eroding circulation numbers.  There were many positive changes that he enacted at the paper, and criticize it as I may, superficialities may be more attuned to the readership, and selling papers is the business of news.

But make no mistake, while he certainly was capable of breathing some new life in the paper, I don’t believe he was capable of leading it toward the future and adapting to the modern news industry in a way that would have allowed for Maine Today’s papers to grow and prosper.  There are major changes that need to be made, and it will take somebody who understands how the landscape is changing and what to do about it.

That person was not Richard Connor.

In February 2009, CNBC business news editor Rick Santelli stood on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and launched into a fuming tirade over the government’s plan to refinance mortgages for consumers upside-down on their homes.

As he raged about the government subsidizing failure and bailing out the irresponsible, Santelli fired the first shot in what would become a major political force in this country: “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing,” he said.

And thus the tea party movement was born.

It was born of the sense that good, decent, responsible people who did the right thing were now on the hook for other people’s irresponsibility. We bailed out the people who risked too much and made stupid decisions, and the people who were asked to pay for it were the ones who acted responsibly.

Our government acted just as irresponsibly, spending money we didn’t have on things we didn’t need and leaving our kids to pay the bill all while giving themselves more power and more bills to pay. More than anything, the tea party was angry that the government has too much power and has abused it.

But now there is a new kid on the block. A fresh group of incensed residents, this time mostly from the left, called Occupy Wall Street has been making an increasingly large amount of noise recently. In Maine, a local group affiliated with the movement called Occupy Maine has been rattling its sabers as well.

The focus of this group’s rage is not the government but corporate greed. It is their belief that ordinary residents are getting hosed because bankers, corporate tycoons and greedy capitalists have engorged their own wallets at the expense of average Americans. A mirror of the tea party, the Occupy Wall Street crowd is angry that large corporations have too much power and have abused it.

But if I may make a supposition, I would suggest that they’re both right, and wrong. The problem isn’t that the government has too much power or that greedy corporations have too much power. The problem is that they both have too much power and are in bed with each other. The problem is the convergence of their power and how each benefits from the other having more of it.

Corporations, especially big ones, love the government having more authority. Setting rules means that those rules can be manipulated to help them and hurt their competition, and the big boys have the money to lobby for the best deal while smaller businesses have no such access.

The government begins to selectively protect certain corporations or economic sectors and markets get distorted. Companies that have no business growing and succeeding end up doing so. This creates phony value and perverted incentive.

The government, in turn, loves to use economic malaise to demand new authority, supposedly so it can fix what is broken. Big business is more than willing to support the imposition of new governmental powers, so long as the resulting rules and regulations are favorable to it.

It seems obvious to me that the biggest threat to our economy is neither the government nor the corporations. It is instead the unholy alliance of the two, working together. This helps no one, save politicians who want more power and corporations who want more profits. The incestuous relationship that the convergence of big government and big business has created is what has to be stopped.

The solution is not, as Occupy Wall Street believes, to give the government more power to punish the rich and attack corporations. That might make them feel better, but will only exacerbate the problem.

Let’s break up the government-business cartel. Power corrupts, and it only attracts those with influence and money who will abuse that power. If that power is weakened, the incentive for trying to buy that power goes dramatically down.

Take the teeth out of the government to play favorites and manipulate free markets, and the corporate parasites who feed off that power will wither and die. That’s something that both the right and left can cheer.

If you flip the number 61 upside down, you get 19, the total percentage of the vote received by Democrat Libby Mitchell in that same election. But I digress.

You can imagine I’m not much of a fan of this group. There are several problems with Maine’s 61 percenters, but a couple of big ones come to mind right away.

For starters, they seem to be under the mistaken impression that the 61 percent of people who did not vote for Gov. LePage are a single, unified block opposed to the governor’s policies. I hate to be the one to break it to them, but that isn’t the case, and that 61 percent doesn’t exist. It is entirely possible to vote for one candidate and also be pleased with another one winning. I myself supported LePage, but were Eliot Cutler to have won I would have been mostly satisfied.

In reality, the share of the vote that didn’t go to LePage was split between radically divergent candidates, several of whom shared an awful lot in common with the winner.

Indeed, while Cutler and LePage differ on some areas of social policy, they are quite similar on fiscal issues. They both ran on a “fiscal honesty” theme, talked about confronting hard realities, cutting spending, creating a state with a better business environment and bringing unfunded liabilities under control. They both believe in school choice, and neither has much love for liberal voting laws.

What about Shawn Moody, who was an everyman populist with a right-leaning twist? Are his voters really in the same family as the 19 percent who pulled the lever for Libby Mitchell? No, they’re not. The point is, there is plenty of crossover appeal and the 61 percent isn’t really 61 percent.

More importantly, this group ignores Maine political history and pretends like their little club is even remotely unique. The truth is that Maine has a chronic habit of electing governors who the majority did not vote for.

From 1974 through today, Maine has conducted a gubernatorial election a total of ten times, and only twice — 1980 and 1998 — has it given the victor an overall majority of the votes.

I’ll be kind and round the number down, but if a group like this formed every time a governor won with a plurality instead of a majority, we’d have had a lot of very obnoxious bumper stickers to look at.

In 1974, those who didn’t vote for Gov. Longley would have formed the 60 percenters. In 1978, those who didn’t vote for Gov. Brennan would have formed the 52 percenters. In 1986 those who didn’t vote for Gov. McKernan would have formed the 60 percenters; in his 1990 re-election campaign, the 53 percenters.

Angus King — the most popular modern governor of the state — would have had to deal with a group calling themselves the 64 percenters in 1994. Gov. Baldacci would have seen the 52 percenters in his first term, and the 61 percenters in his second.

Only in the re-election campaigns of Gov. Brennan and Gov. King did a majority of Mainers deliver a real mandate. The rest of the time there could have been some kind of silly percentage group lurking around and being snarky and acting morally superior. But there wasn’t.

It isn’t really all that endearing to be a sore loser, and up until now people seemed to understand that and be humble in defeat. Elections have consequences and whether the winner gets a plurality or a majority, they still won and got more Mainers to vote for them than anyone else.

If that bothers the 61 percenters, maybe next time they should throw their 61 percent behind a single candidate. Of course, we all know that they can’t, and since they can’t I’d prefer to be spared the self-righteous superiority complex.

—

This column originally appeared in the Bangor Daily News, where Gagnon servers as a conservative columnist.  His columns appear every Friday.

Republicans caved on redistricting and abandoned their ambitious, if controversial, “Western Maine” plan. The new congressional lines will look an awful lot like the old congressional lines with only a bit of lipstick applied to make the 2nd District a tad more attractive to the GOP. For all that talk about forcing through the change with a simple majority vote, at the end of the day a compromise was reached, a showdown was avoided and it seems everyone is happy. Hooray bipartisanship.

Well, I’m not all that happy. I like bold and confrontational — maybe sometimes even (gasp) controversial — leadership, and I was really hoping to see the map altered substantially. But this is Maine where compromise and congeniality rule, so a deal was made and little was changed.

What bothers me the most about this capitulation is that I simply can’t make heads or tails out of what kind of lawmakers are in Maine’s new Republican majority. Ask me one week and I will tell you that they are bold, visionary libertarian reformers set to reverse the course of 40 years of creeping statism in Augusta. Ask me the next, and I’ll tell you they are soft allodoxaphobes (they fear opinion, for those without a dictionary nearby) who defer to consensus and the status quo rather than fight for radically needed changes.

Maine Republicans aggressively spearheaded the fight to reform the health care industry in Maine and risked a lot to do it. They dealt head-on with entitlements like welfare, and in one session managed to deal with the lurking budgetary nuclear bomb that was the unfunded pension liability, showing no fear.

They crafted a visionary budget which actually lowered taxes — in Maine! — and soberly dealt with the structural problems that the state faced. They even raised the speed limit on I-95 between Old Town and Houlton and killed off the fireworks ban, two actions that were both needed but took political courage to do given the cries of apocalypse from the nanny-staters. And of course, they took an incredible risk by deleting the words “same” and “day” before “voter registration” in Maine law.

Yet just as often, the GOP lions have roared loudly only to later meagerly squeak out a meow.

Take Gov. Paul LePage’s defiant declaration that Maine Republicans were “going after right-to-work” and that the Wisconsin labor protests would come to Maine. This one piece of legislation could have done more for job creators in the state than almost any other law, yet after relatively minor protestations and almost no fight at all, the bill was put on the shelf to be “considered later.”

Then there was the “voter ID” law, arguably a much more important and popular election reform than the same-day registration repeal. Despite having a much better rhetorical case for its passage, Republicans decided to shy away from a voter ID law, putting it on hold. This was always more than a little curious, especially considering voter fraud was supposedly the big concern in Augusta.

There are, of course, a number of other examples of the new Maine Republican majority backing down and turning over on their own ideas and instead groping for a “middle way” to appease the weak and disorganized Maine Democratic minority.

I suppose one bit of good news in all this compromise and watering down of audacious, radical reform ideas is that the logic behind Eliot Cutler’s “OneMaine” group has been completely obliterated in the process. I’ve had all I can stomach of sanctimonious nonpartisan belly-aching, myself.

But for Maine Republicans I have a message: decide. Either be radical reformers or conciliatory collaborators. Pick one.

I say be bold. Stop being afraid of governing. Stop acting like you are still the minority party in Augusta. Be visionary. Risk. Lead.

If you do, you might lose everything you have gained, but in the process you can make some long-lasting, important and needed changes to the state you love. And you know what? By being weak and surrendering to an even weaker minority, you’re probably going to lose everything anyway. Mainers like guts. Prove that you have them and maybe you might just stick around for a while.

—

This column originally appeared in the Bangor Daily News, where Gagnon servers as a conservative columnist.  His columns appear every Friday.

Elections were held in Maine in September, and the party that won the governorship would go on to win the White House two months later nearly every time from 1840 through 1932.

But Maine didn’t much like Franklin Roosevelt — it was one of only two states that never voted for FDR — and would later move its elections to November with the rest of the country. The phrase was no longer true and became something of a joke.

But this year Maine is proving that it might have a little juice left yet, and that it still knows how to be ahead of the curve.

The state of Pennsylvania — and indeed a few states in the rust belt — are considering changing how they allocate their electoral votes in presidential elections, and they are following the Maine model.

The Constitution outlines the process by which we choose our president. States are allocated a number of “electors” equal to the number of senators and members of Congress they possess, and the election is determined by which candidate wins a majority of those electors.

But the Constitution does not specify how states allocate their electors. Forty-eight states have chosen a “winner take all” system, whereby the candidate who wins the popular vote in their state is entitled to all of the state’s electors. Win California in 2012 and you will receive 55 electoral votes. Win Texas and you will get 38.

Maine and Nebraska, however, go with a different method. These states award two votes to the winner of the state’s popular vote and then award the rest based on which candidate won each individual congressional district. This is an entirely different, and in my mind much more appropriate, way of expressing the will of a state.

It is unfortunate that so many conservative voters in deeply Democratic states such as California or Massachusetts have no ability to make their voices heard in the electoral college. It is equally unfortunate that so many liberal voters in deeply Republican states such as Texas and Georgia do not have that voice either.

In Pennsylvania, there has been a deep tension about presidential politics for decades. There is an enormous disconnect between the population centers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and the rest of the state. The cities, based on their population and deep partisan lean, end up deciding all the elections and speaking for the rest of the state, and a lot of Pennsylvanians have resented that for a long time.

Their solution is to adopt the Maine and Nebraska model. This would preserve the voice of the cities — the people inside them are represented in multiple congressional districts and thus exert a powerful influence — but it would also give a voice to the rest of the state and allow them to register their choice for who they want.

There is no question that the move, dreamed up by Pennsylvania Republicans, is a partisan one designed to help elect a Republican president. But that doesn’t make it wrong, and were this system implemented in all 50 states, the Democrats would benefit just as much as the Republicans.

Right now, presidential candidates spend nearly all of their time in half a dozen “battleground states,” overwhelm them with money and volunteers and ignore the rest of the country.

Making a change like this nationally would give an incentive for Republican candidates to show up in New York, Washington, Oregon, California or any of the other solidly blue states.

It would give similar incentive for Democrats to show up in the Deep South, the Midwest and many of the solidly red states.

Candidates of both parties have been writing off entire states and indeed entire areas of the country for decades. Campaigning nationwide and fighting for votes in more than just a handful of states would benefit both. It might give future presidents some perspective about how the other half of the country that their party has been ignoring all these years actually lives.

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This column originally appeared in the Bangor Daily News, where Gagnon servers as a conservative columnist.  His columns appear every Friday.

People in government often feel they need to justify their own existence by finding a problem and then legislating a solution for it. Like parents disciplining their children, enterprising legislators have a penchant for codifying behavioral rules.

Motorcyclists die when they crash without a helmet? Mandate helmets! Motorists die because they don’t wear their seat belt? Mandate wearing seat belts! Too many fat people in the world? Ban trans fats!

The list of paternalistic, statist ideas is endless, because there is no end to preventable problems that lawmakers can find and propose a law to “solve.”

The latest — and in my mind most ridiculous — proposed law of this kind here in Maine is one which would require paddlers to wear life jackets while out on the water.

Naturally, this comes in response to a problem. A few kayakers have died this summer while not wearing life jackets. Ignorance of the danger, particularly by tourists, is a major factor in the push to legally force people to put on a life jacket. A law would magically fix this, of course.

Legal solutions like these are problematic for several reasons.

To start, their effectiveness is often either nonexistent or highly suspect. Take speed limits, for instance. In the 1970s, cars in the United States were slowed down to an achingly slow 55 miles per hour when the national speed limit was instituted. It was widely believed that slowing down cars on the highway would lead to fewer fatalities in crashes.

Not only do hundreds of thousands of motorists (myself included) flaunt the posted speed limits every day, but the lower speed limit didn’t really have much of an effect on traffic fatalities. Indeed, the state of Montana would later go on to remove speed limits entirely from nonurban areas, and they found that fatalities simply did not rise at all. With no speed limit. Go as fast as you like.

Why is this? People generally aren’t stupid and they don’t want to die. The people who are stupid enough to recklessly speed do it with or without speed limits. Very little changes (other than my bill for speeding tickets).

Other laws, such as outlawing the use of cellphones while driving, are simply not obeyed by anyone.

These laws always fail to deal with context. Not wearing a seat belt for a quarter-mile trip on an abandoned road is hardly more dangerous to you than doing so in the middle of rush hour traffic on the highway, for example. Not wearing a life jacket on a still pond is inherently less dangerous than kayaking rapids without one.

But most troubling is that laws such as these stomp on the freedom of choice by individuals to run their own lives how they see fit, risk and all.

There is a great scene from the movie “Demolition Man” (an otherwise horrible movie), in which Denis Leary’s character launches into a tirade which has become something of an anthem for those of us who hate nanny-state laws:

“I’m the kind of guy who likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder, ‘Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?’ I WANT high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon and butter and BUCKETS of cheese, OK? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the nonsmoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green Jello all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to, OK, pal?”

His point, comically, is that there are harmful things all around us, but legally removing our ability to choose to engage in riskier behavior in the name of “what’s best” for us is, and should be, offensive.

It is one thing to say “you really shouldn’t do that,” but it is an entirely different thing to say “you can’t do that, or we will fine you or put you in prison.”

Are all public safety laws wrong? No, of course not. But when we start legislating people wearing orange flotation devices, I think we’ve gone well beyond a reasonable line.

—

This column originally appeared in the Bangor Daily News, where Gagnon servers as a conservative columnist.  His columns appear every Friday.

Most eyes were on Gov. Rick Perry and former Gov. Mitt Romney, the two front-runners, to see how they would perform. But I was watching the debate for a different reason. There is a war going on inside the Republican Party over science, and I wanted to hear it play out on national television.

The conflict came to most people’s attention a few weeks ago after Gov. Jon Huntsman took a shot at Perry over his views on a couple of hot-button issues. Said Huntsman on Twitter, “To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”

Republicans, of course, tend to discount climate science as quackery, mostly because of the people who believe in it so strongly (Al Gore) and the big government solutions offered by Democrats to combat it (cap and trade).

Afterward, many conservatives were disappointed to hear that Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — a Republican rock star — had acknowledged a belief that the planet was warming and that humans played a role. He was immediately crossed off the list of many who had hoped he would run for president.

But for Huntsman specifically to say such a thing while running for the Republican nomination was brave, and probably foolish. And for Perry to play the ostrich with his head in the sand and expect to attract independents in the general election was just as foolish.

So to say that I was looking forward to seeing the issue discussed by Perry and Huntsman would be an understatement. Sadly, the results were disappointing.

Huntsman’s argument basically boiled down to the following: “Listen, when you make comments that fly in the face of what 98 out of 100 climate scientists have said, when you call into question the science of evolution, all I’m saying is that, in order for the Republican Party to win, we can’t run from science.”

He continued, “We’ve got to win voters.” So he thinks Republicans should accept the Democratic line on climate just to win. Not a compelling argument.

Perry on the other hand, said climate science was unproven and unsettled. “The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet, to me, is just nonsense,” Perry said, also saying, “Galileo got outvoted for a spell.”

To me, both of these men are wildly off base. Huntsman parroted the Democratic Party line, and Perry exposed his gross ignorance on the subject. Why isn’t there a candidate, any candidate, in this race who is willing to actually give the right answer?

Here is what I’d like to hear Republicans start saying on climate change:

“Look, climate science has its problems, like any kind of science. We can’t know everything and yes people with agendas have played with numbers to make their case more compelling. We have been sold crazy theory as fact quite often.

“Yet the backbone of climate science is sound. It is pretty evident the planet is warming and that we probably have something to do with it. Even the majority of climate change ‘skeptics’ actually do believe that the planet is warming and human beings play a role, they simply disagree on the effects and the scope.

“Even so, there is nothing about believing that the science is sound that says that the way to tackle the problem is the proposed policies from the Democratic Party. Not only are they insanely expensive, they won’t do anything to fix the problem.

“The answer to correcting global warming is to innovate our way out by developing legitimate technologies that produce cleaner energy, and as is the case in all things, the market will be the mechanism for that change.

“So sure, climate science is mostly settled. But fixing that problem won’t be done by capping emissions or funding solar panels and wind farms, and don’t expect me to have any interest in destroying the American economy by chasing that fool’s gold.”

Yes, Virginia, it is possible to believe in science and not turn into Al Gore.

—

This column originally appeared in the Bangor Daily News, where Gagnon servers as a conservative columnist.  His columns appear every Friday.

But here in Maine, there are others who feel that they aren’t being given a fair shake.

Chris Cilliza of the Washington Post recently dismissed Scott D’Amboise as a serious challenger to Sen. Olympia Snowe, citing his inability to raise much money and his propensity for making ridiculous statements. He likewise labeled another Snowe challenger, Andrew Ian Dodge, as equally unsuitable as an alternative because of his atypical lifestyle, calling him a “cyber-punk.”

Naturally, D’Amboise and Dodge believe themselves to be serious candidates. But are they?

The argument from such gadfly candidates usually goes a little something like this: “If only the media would treat me like a serious candidate, cover what I do and stop dismissing me, my campaign would take off. The media is picking winners and losers!”

This kind of argument is made in every election, almost universally by candidates who have not gotten any traction (yet) and are being ignored by the media.

Sometimes they are right. There have been a number of instances where a candidate viewed by the media as on the fringe and unlikely to win has shocked everyone and proven their relevance. One of the best examples of this is Gov. Paul LePage, who many (including yours truly) expected to finish well behind a number of other candidates in the Republican primary last year.

But that almost never happens, and when it does there is usually a very good reason. In LePage’s case, he was an established public figure who had built a very impressive political ground game and was tapping into the mood of the electorate. The handicappers simply didn’t see or understand that like they should have, and made a mistake in their evaluations.

Most of the time, candidates who complain about not being treated seriously by the media don’t deserve to be.

So this does beg the question, what is a serious candidate? Does the media “anointing” someone as a front-runner and ignoring another end up choosing who is to be taken seriously? Is the lack of media coverage responsible for the minor candidate’s inability to break through?

Not really. The media’s ability to decide a race for voters is very much overblown. Candidates who receive overwhelming negative press win all the time, and candidates who are beloved by the media lose all the time. Treatment of a candidate rarely matters.

Winning a political race takes a number of things. First and foremost it takes a candidate who has the ability to actually appeal to voters. Then it takes a message that those voters will respond to. Then it takes enough money to actually introduce yourself to those voters. Then it takes a good campaign operation to do the grunt work of the election such as organizing people and getting them to the polls.

Candidates such as Ron Paul are ignored by the media mostly because they know that a 76-year-old non-interventionist libertarian isn’t going to win Iowa, Florida, Michigan, South Carolina or any of the key states in the 2012 primary, based on who the voters in those states are.

And guess what? Ron Paul thinks so too. He isn’t in the race to win, he’s in it to change the Republican Party. And in any event, if the media was wrong and he could win those states, he could do so without their help.

Candidates such as D’Amboise and Dodge are ignored by the media because thus far, everything needed to win a race is what they lack. No money. No grass-roots army. Thus far, their only hope is Republican distrust of Olympia Snowe, and that isn’t going to be enough.

If either wants to be taken seriously and have a chance at winning, they should complain less about the media and prove that they deserve our attention.

—

This column originally appeared in the Bangor Daily News, where Gagnon servers as a conservative columnist.  His columns appear every Friday.

Aaron was originally from Skowhegan, and my first encounter with him was at the University of Maine, very early in my academic career.  He was intensely interested in politics, and almost right away involved himself with campus life, specifically the Residents on Campus organization.  Wasn’t long before he had taken over the whole joint.

We first met in 2000, as the famous Bush vs. Gore presidential election had just begun to heat up.  I had become (by default) the Chairman of a very small (three people) chapter of the College Republicans on campus, and Aaron became, as I recall, member number four.  He immediately got to work helping me with the organization, took a leadership role, and helped plan standouts, canvassing, protests, and election day get out the vote efforts.  By the time election day came, we had grown the organization to about 250 members.  There’s no way I could have done that without him.

When President Bush was inaugurated in Washington D.C. in January, Aaron was part of a crew of about fifteen of us who made the trek to the nation’s capital to witness the rather historic occasion.  We (foolishly) stayed in a hotel in Capitol Heights, Maryland that quite literally had a blood stain outside of our door.  When we opened the door to where we were staying, we found three guys playing Nintendo 64, who then bolted.  Didn’t instill confidence, but somehow, it didn’t phase him in the least.

I shared a hotel room with Aaron and a couple others that night (email me if you want a funny story about the other two people).  That night was the first day I became aware of his struggle with Cystic Fibrosis.  For those who aren’t aware of the condition, CF affects (among a number of other problems) a person’s ability to breathe.  People with CF experience clogging of the airways due to mucus build-up, and frequently have to fight off lung infections.

Aaron had a machine to help him breathe as he slept on that trip.  In my experiences with him before this, I heard him cough a great deal, and his voice always seemed to sound as though he was fighting a cold, but I had no idea about his struggle.  Somehow, the next day at the inauguration, Aaron was able to survive and prosper despite the January temperatures, freezing cold rain, and miserable winds.  The weaker among us, such as the entirely healthy Jessica Nickerson (hi Jess!), fell into a deep and prolonged illness for days.  But not Aaron.  He thrived.

I had convinced Aaron to move beyond his involvement on ROC and actually join the University of Maine Student Government by becoming a student Senator shortly thereafter.  I had been involved in the group since I arrived on campus, and in September of 2001 I ended up becoming the President of the Senate when another leader quit.  Little did I know when I recruited him, but Aaron would become the University of Maine’s own “Lion of the Senate”, he spent the rest of his college career involved in Senate in one way or another.

In 2001, I ran for a full term, and Aaron decided to challenge me.  You would think that something like that would put a strain on a friendship, but if you can believe it, spending all that time arguing with each other and campaigning against each other actually made our friendship stronger.  In the end, I beat Aaron by sixteen votes.  Sixteen.  If I hadn’t bribed all those people to vote for me, he’d have won.  (Totally kidding.  I didn’t have enough money back then to bribe anyone.)  Don’t worry though, I made him wait (I ran for a third term also), but Aaron got his chance to do the job once I left the University of Maine.

Instead of getting upset at missing out by such a narrow margin, Aaron simply rededicated himself to service to his fellow students.  And he took it seriously, this wasn’t a resume booster for him.  He actually cared.  This became the hallmark of who he was as a person, sacrificing his own time, effort and money, to help others.  He didn’t disappear, we actually saw him more.  He wasn’t bitter, he was cheerful.  He brightened the lives of everyone in the organization, and never can I recall anyone saying a single bad word about him.

The only time I ever had a bad word to say about Aaron Sterling, was when he was too obtuse to recognize that I was saving a seat for a girl I liked who was in Senate when we went to Pat’s Pizza on Tuesday nights, sitting in it himself.  He actually may be responsible for my never actually asking that girl out.  (I’m glaring at you right now, Aaron)

In 2003, Aaron’s condition forced him to stop attending college.  His lungs were deteriorating quickly, and it became clear that he would not be able to survive unless his dying lungs were replaced.  He and I were in many classes together, and I remember when I would no longer see his face or hear him arguing with his professors.  I learned that Aaron was going to be going through a dangerous, but necessary, lung transplant.  The story of the transplant is a remarkable one, with both his brother Tyler and a friend of his father’s donating.  I was in a class with Tyler at the time, and I still remember his last class before going under the knife.

The lung replacement gave Aaron a new lease on life.  He began to thrive.  He weighed almost nothing, but beefed up significantly as he began to feel healthier.  We were all thrilled that it was such a success, and were very pleased when Aaron was able to return to school in 2004.

Aaron and I would both join the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity later in our college careers.  Usually, people join up in either their freshman or sophomore year, but both Aaron and I ended up doing so much later.  This became yet another place where I witnessed his selflessness, his altruism, and his genuine decency.  Always the first to volunteer, always the first to lend a hand, even though he was usually the one who was least able to.

And I still remember when Aaron met Kellie Pelletier, who would end up becoming the love of his life.  Good lord he wouldn’t shut up about her.  I think that a lot of us who called Aaron friend were very thankful that he found somebody who found his particular personality traits charming.  It gave us a break from him giving us a hard time and calling us out on our own stupidity.

Kellie and Aaron showed all of us what true love really is.  Aaron and Kellie not only stayed together in times that would have ripped others apart, but they grew closer.  They provided love and support for one another in the darkest of dark times, and reading her constant updates on Aaron’s condition at the end became heartbreaking.  This morning I read the quiet agony of the woman who loved Aaron, in just a very short status update on Facebook:

Aaron isn’t going to make it through the day and maybe not the next few hours. My heart is breaking into a million little pieces. How do I go on without him?

Do me a favor and think of a person whose immediate and untimely departure from your life would make you fundamentally question your ability to go on.  Did you think of someone?  Hold on to that person for dear life no matter what difficulties there may be in your life, and don’t ever let them go, no matter who it is.

But true love is deeper than who you don’t think you can lose.  True love is devotion.  I think the better question would have been how Aaron could have gone on for as long as he did without the love and support of such a remarkable human being as Kellie.  The hearts of all of Aaron’s friends are breaking right along with Kellie’s, and there is nothing any of us could say that would make things better.

For me, her words struck to the very core of me.  To think of what devotion is, what true love is, and what the realities of life are really about, has been consuming my mind all day.  We spend our days and pour all our energy into so much superficial garbage, and in so doing we miss what life really is.

Everything I have ever thought was “hard” in my life now seems inconsequential in retrospect.  I have complained about moving, losing a job, having to make a difficult decision, being broke, and not getting what I want in a variety of situations.  What childish nonsense.  Thinking about what he faced on just a single day, let alone a lifetime, should make such feelings disappear.

What matters in this life is keeping those you love close to you and not letting people who you care about leave your life.  You always think there will be time, but even if there is, the time you spend apart from those you love is time you miss, and will never get back.

After I left the state of Maine in 2006, I am ashamed to say that I didn’t see Aaron anywhere near as often as I would have liked to.  We kept in touch.  We would email often.  I saw him a number of times.  We talked on the phone from time to time.  I would raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation as often as I could (most hilariously, through Twitter), and he even helped me write in the early days of my blogging.

The last time I saw him was at least a year ago in Union Station as he and Kellie were traveling from North Carolina back home to Maine.  We had a wonderful lunch together, and caught up on life.  Had I known that would be the last time I would have seen him, I would have given him all the money in my bank account to change tickets and stay longer.

To say Aaron had an impact on my life would be one of the biggest understatements I have ever spoken.  He had every reason to hate life, and be cynical.  He, more than anyone, had a reason to act out, give up, play the victim and wallow in depression.  None of us would have blamed him.

But he never did.  Life dealt him an unfair hand, and Aaron beat the house.  In his very short time on this earth, Aaron Sterling inspired me, he made me laugh, he made me think, and he gave me a deep appreciation for the gifts life has given me.  And in death, he has inspired me to deeply consider my life.

I hate platitudes about death, and illness.  People always say that our friends who face terminal conditions are “brave” for facing their illness, but such sentiments have always sounded cheap and fake to me.  They are things that we who grieve say to make ourselves feel better.  The sick have no choice, when they face death, but to face it and try to beat it.  That takes will and maturity, but they have no choice, and bravery is in facing difficult things when you have the ability to take the easy path and not face them.

Well, at the risk of making myself a hypocrite, Aaron Sterling showed me what bravery truly is, and in the end, he won.  He was brave because he faced his own mortality, faced death, and smiled back at him.  He didn’t have to do that.  He won because his disease never broke him.  It never beat him.

He lost the battle, but won the war.  Cystic Fibrosis killed his body, but in his time with us, he has fundamentally changed who we are, and because of that, he will live on.  I will carry with me what he taught me about life, friendship, and love for the rest of my life.  How many of us believe we will have that kind of an effect on those around us when we pass?  Certainly not I.

I can only hope that in the remaining time I have on earth, my life is half as consequential as his.

Breathe easy, my friend.

If you have any financial ability to contribute, anything at all, I would like to recommend a donation to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.