Cianchette vs. Mills (so far) (continued)
	Peter Mills’s 12-step program for accountable state government (summarized) 1. Human services: Hire more people with business training. Perform cost-benefit analyses of programs. 2. Education: Make accountability work. If students fail assessments, don’t promote them. School year lengthened by a week. School day lengthened for supervised homework, physical exercise, and teacher development. 3. Public pensions: Pensions should be portable. State employees and teachers must be freer to move in and out of other professions and jobs. Let fresh talent in. 4. State debt: To avoid insolvency, issue fewer bonds. Finance capital needs more from appropriations until our debt is reduced — saving a lot in interest. 5. Regular referendums: Let the public decide on: a. Increasing gas taxes to pay for highway improvements. b. Expanding the sales-tax base to reduce income taxes. c. Funding the Land for Maine’s Future conservation program. d. Allowing local sales taxes and local homestead property-tax reductions. 6. Medicaid: To slow rising costs, charge some higher premiums and limit benefits to adults without children, particularly patients who refuse to manage their health. Performance payments for good doctors. 7. Health care: Create a "high risk pool" to revive Maine’s health-insurance market, but continue to require companies to insure all applicants. Instead of extending free insurance through Medicaid, concentrate on extending public-health measures through: a. School-based health clinics. b. Affordable dental clinics, with patients paying part of the cost. c. More rural health centers. d. Removing the threat to rural hospitals by giving them a public-health mission. 8. Tax favoritism: End tax breaks to companies that are here today and gone tomorrow. Focus on help to Maine’s historic economic engines: manufacturing, agriculture, fishing, forestry, and tourism. 9. Duplicated services: Consolidate police, fire, and municipal-administration services. 10. School districts: Small schools are essential, small districts are not. Reduce them from an expensive 286 to 31, one for each labor market. 11. Rural infrastructure: Each year rebuild 100 miles of posted roads. Require cell phone and cable broadband providers to extend service or give up privileges. 12. Quality and independence: Maine state government needs to be nimble and quick. Maine must develop more independence from federal support. Source: "What Maine Must Do: A ‘12-Step’ Program Toward Accountable Government," Peter Mills, August 1, 2005. Edited for space reasons.

While Democrats will be inclined to portray Cianchette as a savage program-slasher, perhaps another indication of the essential moderateness of Maine’s Republicans — especially when compared to their southern and western counterparts who control the United States Congress — is evidenced by in the following paragraph from this 2002 campaign document:

"Some folks think I’m talking about cutting existing programs and slashing current public-private partnerships. Far from it. I’m talking about slowing the growth of state spending. That means fewer new programs, and steady growth in what’s important, like education funding for our classrooms and focusing on programs that help the truly needy."

MILLS THE CHALLENGER

Mills is the man with a plan, and he doesn’t rely on an aide or an academic to write it. "It’s nothing if not specific," he says of his recent 12-point program for restructuring Maine government [see "Peter Mills’s 12-step program for accountable state government (summarized)," this page]. "I could do a paper on every point."

Mills describes it as a "contract with Maine," like the national GOP’s mid-1990s’ Contract with America — although he hastens to add: "It’s not a right-wing phenomenon." Indeed, he has excellent relations with many State House Democrats. "Many people I know here would like to work with" Mills as governor, says a liberal lobbyist speaking off the record so as not to alienate Governor Baldacci, whom this person finds unbearably conservative.

"We need a plan that satisfies independents and disaffected Democrats as well as our fellow Republicans," Mills says in a press release prepared for his August 2 campaign announcement.

Should he be the Republican nominee, Mills will get, for sure, one Democrat’s vote: "I would support my brother," Janet Mills, a state representative from Farmington, says emphatically.

As with Cianchette, Peter Mills comes from a prominent Maine family devoted to public service. His father, Peter Mills, was United States attorney for Maine and a progressive (Teddy Roosevelt-type) Republican legislator back when they played more prominent positions in Augusta politics. Another sister, Dora Mills, a medical doctor, is Baldacci’s bureau of health director.

A Harvard and Maine School of Law graduate, Mills, now 62, served five years in the Navy during the Vietnam War, going to the war zone "many, many times," he says. A trial lawyer in Skowhegan for 23 years, his wife is Superior Court Justice Nancy Mills. Despite term limits, he has served continuously in the Legislature since 1994, bouncing from the Senate to the House and back to the Senate.

One of her brother’s assets, Janet Mills says, is his warmth, his ability to connect with people on the street. He also is someone, she says, who wants results: "When I was five years old he ran the family paper route. He was a hard-working boss."

Most State House observers find him hard to pin down with a label, though generally they see him to Cianchette’s left. What label is he at ease with? "I’ve got 5000 roll-call votes behind me, but I’m not uncomfortable with that. It’ll be up to someone else to figure out the label for me," he replies. He can rest assured they will try.

On social issues, like Cianchette he’s relatively liberal. He’s pro-choice on abortion. He voted for the gay-rights bill, although he believes it was a political mistake not to send it to referendum because now its opponents have been angered and energized.

On economic issues, he is traditionally Republican in wanting to keep down taxes, spending, and debt. On debt and public pensions, he has almost radical proposals. He is not traditional in criticizing the huge tax giveaways to big corporations that most Republican and even many Democratic legislators and Governor Baldacci have been eager to dispense. Probably more than any other Republican legislator, Mills seems independent of corporate-lobbyist pressure.

This independence is seen in his skepticism of BETR, which draws about $75 million a year from the state treasury. He would reduce its benefits and eliminate double-dipping, finding the latter "obscene."

Mills also sees Baldacci’s Pine Tree Zones as "an awkward invitation to deceit." If a business agrees to establish itself in one of these virtually tax-free zones, its executives are required to sign an affidavit that the tax breaks are why they are doing so, he says. But Mills tells a story of a company executive admitting in a public forum — he quotes — "we came for the work force," not the tax breaks. "It’s Jack Cashman’s candy store," he says, speaking of Baldacci’s commissioner of Economic and Community Development.

Mills voted for Dirigo Health, but he thinks it has been badly implemented, giving big subsidies to a small number of people. He has spent 10 years working with the Milbank Foundation studying the health-care system.

Mills foresees down-in-the-polls Baldacci continuing to take his lumps. The imposition on businesses of the "Dirigo offset tax" will incense many people, he predicts. This is a tax on insurance firms and businesses that insure themselves. It will compensate Baldacci’s Dirigo Health Plan for the savings it theoretically brings insurers because it reduces hospital charity care — the costs of which are passed on to the insured. But, so far, after two years, Dirigo only covers a few thousand of the 130,000-plus uninsured.

Mills also sees trouble for Baldacci with ballooning Maine Care/Medicaid expenses. And the governor will take a big political hit if the gay-rights bill goes down to defeat in the November election, he predicts.

Given Cianchette’s frontrunner status, where are Mills’s allies, he is asked? "They come up to me very softly as if we’re in church," he responds. But he can wholly devote himself to a campaign "immediately," he says. He expects to be a Clean Election candidate.