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Washington Post Editorial Calls for LePage to Resign

Elise Amendola
/
The Associated Press
Gov. Paul LePage speaks during a Boston conference of New England's governors and eastern Canada's premiers in August.

The editorial board of one of the nation's largest daily newspapers is calling on Gov. Paul LePage to resign.

The Washington Post's editorial board zeroed in on the governor's false assertions about the racial makeup of drug traffickers in Maine, as well as his binder of mug shots that he wrongly claimed proved his point. 

The Post wrote that the review of the binder "exposed the three-ring circus of unhinged racism and ravings" of Maine's governor.

The editorial then detailed LePage's array of controversies and racially-charged comments. It said LePage's remarks threatened to transform the state's image from a place of natural beauty to "a hotbed of hatred."

LePage recently claimed "90-plus percent" of people arrested in Maine for drug trafficking are black or Hispanic. He later asserted, “Black people come up the highway and they kill Mainers.”

FBI statistics from 2014 show that just 14 percent of people arrested in Maine for drug offenses were black. Of the 93 mug shots collected by the governor's staff, 37 appear to be either black or Hispanic — about 40 percent of all the photos. The other 60 percent appear white.

Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor for the Washington Post, says he could not remember the last time the paper called for a governor's resignation.

"I can’t remember another such resignation call — doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened, but certainly not in recent memory," he says.

Journalist Steve Mistler is Maine Public’s chief politics and government correspondent. He is based at the State House.