Maine Gov. LePage considers resigning

Amid the fallout from an obscenity-laced voicemail he left for a state lawmaker, Maine Gov. Paul LePage said Tuesday that he is considering resigning.

LePage has been no stranger to controversy throughout his tenure as Maine’s governor, and his most recent brush with bad publicity came last week when a state lawmaker called him a racist. LePage responded with a voicemail in which he called the lawmaker a socialist, a son of a bitch and other, unprintable vulgarities.


With his name once again in the headlines for the wrong reasons, LePage told Bangor, Maine, talk radio station WVOM that he was uncertain whether he would finish out his second term.

“I’m looking at all options,” LePage said in the interview, which was first reported by the Portland Press-Herald. “I think some things I’ve been asked to do are beyond my ability. I’m not going to say that I’m not going to finish it. I’m not saying that I am going to finish it.”

“If I’ve lost my ability to help Maine people, maybe it’s time to move on,” he added.

But later on Tuesday, LePage backed away from his earlier suggestion that he might resign before his term as governor is up. In a post to his Twitter account, the Maine governor wrote that, “regarding rumors of resignation, to paraphrase Mark Twain: ‘The reports of my political demise are greatly exaggerated.’”

The state lawmaker’s accusation of racism came after LePage, discussing Maine’s struggle to deal with a growing drug problem, said he maintained a three-ring binder of arrested drug dealers in the state and that the vast majority of those in the book were Hispanic or African-American. The governor said being called a racist was “like calling a black man the ‘N’ word or a woman the ‘C’ word. It just absolutely knocked me off my feet.”

“When I was called a racist, I just lost it, and there’s no excuse,” he said. “It’s unacceptable. It’s totally my fault.”

LePage said that in the wake of his most recent controversy, even state legislators from his own party have begun to turn on him. The governor said he met with GOP leaders from Maine’s House of Representatives and Senate and added that he would speak with his staff before announcing any future plans.

“It’s not about me. It’s about making sure that we can move the state forward,” LePage said. “It’s one thing to have one party behind [you], it’s another thing to not have any party behind you.”