Bad news for Baldacci Opinion polls have him below a 50-percent approval rating for the first time. Will his spaghetti-supper campaigning skills be enough for him to reconnect with voters? BY LANCE TAPLEY

Suddenly, John Baldacci’s political fate is on the line. Two recent opinion polls show his public support to have declined dramatically. For the first time, more people think our first-term Democratic governor is doing a bad than a good job. The numbers have plunged from 60- to 70-percent-plus job approval to around 40 percent. He is most unpopular in the northern part of the state, his home stomping grounds.

Across the political spectrum, a rough consensus exists on why Baldacci is politically wounded. A consensus also exists that it is premature to count him out, since he doesn’t face voters in his bid for re-election (which he has already announced) for well over a year, and he is a good campaigner. But Republicans have been politically energized by what they consider to be the governor’s mistakes.

Some State House observers believe Baldacci’s future may be determined in the next few days as the legislative session comes to an end — or by the outcome of referendum efforts to reverse controversial legislation that he has championed.

Ask State Representative Sawin Millett, one of the more bipartisan and sober legislators, why Baldacci’s support in the polls has fallen, and the Waterford Republican replies like the methodical state finance and administration commissioner he used to be.

"There are five issues," he says quietly:

First, Baldacci’s $250-million property-tax-relief plan — LD 1, passed by the Legislature in January — is "not materializing" benefits for the average property owner, he says. (LD 1 had a "dead-cat bounce," is the way Peter Mills, a Republican state senator from Somerset County and a potential 2006 gubernatorial challenger, makes the same point.)

"Second, there is a major backlash," Millet says, against the $447 million in borrowing to cover the state’s budget shortfall that Baldacci signed into law in April after his party’s majority rammed it through the Legislature. Republicans are mounting a signature-collection effort (led by Mills) to force a people’s veto at the November election to try to cancel the borrowing. In response to the backlash, embarassed and politically threatened Democrats may rescind the borrowing in the last days of the legislative session; it appeared they would replace it with cuts to state services and a hike in the cigarette tax.

Third, Millet says, Baldacci’s gay-rights legislation, signed by the governor March 31, "is alienating a segment of the population," especially because it did not require passage in a referendum to take effect. Christian groups have defeated two previous gay-rights bills at the polls, and they are now collecting signatures for another people’s veto referendum at November’s election.

"Fourth, there are the bond downgrades." Three national credit-rating agencies have lowered the status of state-government bonds because of the continuing gap between tax revenues and state expenditures and Baldacci’s way of dealing with the gap, which is to sell off parts of the state’s revenue stream to investors. In 2003, the state sold its lucrative wholesale liquor franchise, and this year’s planned $447 million in borrowing pledges the receipts from the state lottery as well as other pieces of state income. The change in credit status could cost the state a lot of money in extra interest it pays to bondholders.

Fifth, and more generally, says Sawin Millet about Baldacci, "there is a lack of confidence in his ability to put forth a comprehensive vision."

Other legislators list the contentious borrowing plan as item number one of Baldacci’s problems. It is universally considered to be unpopular.

"There are a lot of little things people are upset about," says Representative Arthur Lerman, an Augusta Democrat who like Millet is on the Appropriations Committee, "but the borrowing was the last straw."

That comment comes from someone who voted for it. Lerman reflects the view of a number of Democratic legislators: Baldacci "put us all in a terrible box," he says, by refusing to raise taxes to fill the revenue hole and instead turning to the unpopular borrowing plan.

"And it’s a somewhat hollow box," Lerman adds. The governor has successfully pushed to raise a number of state fees and has proposed raising more while insisting on no hike in what he calls "broad-based" taxes. Some proposals, like a canoe and kayak registration fee, a fee simply to go walking in the woods, and huge fines for not using seatbelts, proved so unpopular that they were swiftly abandoned. Equally disliked and swiftly gunned down was Baldacci’s proposal to allow Sunday hunting in some parts of the state with the aim of more hunting license sales.

"The theme of this administration has been misguided politically and not in the best interests of the state," Lerman says, referring to Baldacci’s constant argument that prosperity will come by keeping taxes low and attracting businesses to Maine to provide jobs. Lerman would like to see more words by the governor on state spending as legitimate investments in the future. He expressed unhappiness with some of Baldacci’s cuts to state-agency budgets, which have hit social-service agencies especially hard.

By promising prosperity through holding the line on taxes, Baldacci "is reaping what he sows" politically when prosperity doesn’t arrive, Lerman suggests.

Other liberals feel the same way. "He’s not responding to the needs of the people of the state and the people know it. He has no plan," says, acerbically, Kathleen McGee. She is the chief tax-reform lobbyist for the Maine Citizen Leadership Fund, the state’s leading progressive reform organization. McGee, who thinks a Republican has a good chance of winning the next gubernatorial election because of Baldacci’s missteps, has a poll that shows the state’s citizens overwhelmingly support a penny increase in the sales tax, a widening of the sales-tax base, or a hike in the income tax on the wealthy. "But when we talk about this inside this building [the State House] people look at us like we’re speaking Martian," she says.

Liberals like McGee cite many of the same elements Millet lists as contributing to Baldacci’s decline in popularity, and they sometimes include their frustration with Baldacci’s much-ballyhooed Dirigo Health insurance plan to solve the problem of the state’s more than 130,000 uninsured people. Although figures have not been officially released by the administration, the Portland Press Herald quoted a senior official in the insurance industry, who spoke at a public forum, that Dirigo Health has covered only about 2000 of the uninsured after two years of implementation. Another 4000-plus have been drawn to Dirigo from other insurance plans.

LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES IN ACCORD

But liberals are hardly the only folks disappointed with the governor. Although Baldacci is a conservative Democrat, conservatives increasingly cut him less slack than they did. At the beginning of his tenure, State House Republicans often had kind words about him. But now Paul Davis, the Republican Senate minority leader from Piscataquis County, ticks off many of the same items that Millet does to illustrate Baldacci’s failures. He adds to them the regulatory delay in the start-up of the racino operation (combining a racetrack and a gambling casino) in Bangor, and he derides Baldacci’s recently announced income-tax-relief proposal that, as Davis describes it, provides a half-of-one-percent cut for the middle class but, since it eliminates tax brackets indexed for inflation, it results in a tax increase. Like many recent Baldacci initiatives, this proposal seems dead in the legislative swamps.

For Davis, Dirigo Health is "a hugely expensive boondoggle" when so few people are covered. He says Baldacci told him that it would cost $30 million just to continue Dirigo for a year. Moreover, under the Dirigo Health legislation, insurance companies soon will be taxed to support it in order to compensate the state for the alleged savings to them because fewer of the uninsured will be getting free care at hospitals — the costs of which are passed on to the insured in hospital fees. But insurance companies, Davis says, include self-insurers such as Moosehead Manufacturing, a wood-furniture company in Monson and Dover-Foxcroft, which he says with exasperation will have to cough up $30,000 to Dirigo Health in the coming year.