"POLITICS AND OTHER MISTAKES"
Stars are blind
By Al Diamon
Nor with compliance/Take any test.
Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit/A social science.
- W. H. Auden
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have confirmed they can see Christian Potholm's giant ego.
"It's visible to the naked eye," said a NASA scientist. "You could spot that sucker from Mars."
Just kidding.
The ego of the Bowdoin College professor, political pollster and author of several dreary books on Maine elections can't be seen more than a mile or two away. Except at night, when it glows - sometimes red, sometimes blue, depending on Potholm's partisan slant of the moment - at which times, it becomes a hazard to navigation and alters the migratory patterns of birds.
Recently, Potholm has been criticized for putting his inflated self-esteem ahead of his ethics. On July 21, the Times Record in Brunswick carried his op-ed piece attacking Republican gubernatorial nominee Chandler Woodcock as "an arch-conservative with a radical and out-of-the-mainstream agenda."
While that assertion isn't far from the truth, it's also somewhat disingenuous, in that Potholm is a paid consultant for Democratic Gov. John Baldacci's campaign. He neglected to mention that to the newspaper when he submitted his article, instead identifying himself as "a life-long Republican."
After some Woodcock partisans pointed out this discrepancy, Potholm apologized. Sort of. What he actually said was he was never asked if he was working for anybody running for governor and didn't feel it was necessary to offer the information unsolicited.
"I thought my opinion was more important than a campaign or candidate," he told the Portland Press Herald.
"Candidates come and go," he proclaimed in the Bangor Daily News, "causes come and go, but a professor who has written four books on politics knows more than the day-to-day stuff. A candidate is not as important as the history of Maine. I guess that's the way I should have put it. My knowledge of the history of Maine is significantly larger than a lot of people who think they know a lot about Maine."
Included in Potholm's vast "knowledge" of the state's history, as documented in his books, are such factoids as the repeal of the Uniform Property Tax in 1997, although many less egotistical historians labor under the impression it actually occurred about three decades earlier.
Then, there's his prediction that Green Independent Party gubernatorial candidate Jonathan Carter would attract 20 percent of the vote in 2002. Carter got less than 9 percent. And what about the "formidable" campaign he foresaw for Democrat Bob Dunfey for the U.S. Senate in '02. If you don't recall that one, it could be because Dunfey dropped out of the race in March, without ever making much of an impression on anyone. Except Potholm.
But back to ethics. The Times Record - and reporters at lots of other media outlets, who regularly quote Potholm as a supposedly unbiased observer - should have been aware of his penchant for hidden motives. The Lewiston Sun Journal dropped his monthly column on Maine politics in 2004, after several instances in which he wrote about campaigns he'd been hired to work on, without revealing his affiliations. He also heaped praise on certain political ads, but neglected to mention they were produced by his son's company.
"This came up two or three times, and it became uncomfortable to continue," said Rex Rhoades, the Sun Journal's executive editor. "He just never saw conflict of interest the same way newspaper people see it. He just had a blind spot."
He's not the only one. A few days after Potholm's ethical lapse made headlines, most Maine news outlets got snookered again, although this time it was their own fault. On July 31, Patrick Murphy, the president of the polling firm Strategic Marketing Services and a Democratic Party insider, released a survey showing Baldacci doing surprisingly well in his bid for re-election, and Woodcock struggling to achieve name recognition.
The Associated Press, Bangor Daily News and Maine Public Radio all ran stories that failed to mention Strategic Marketing's connection to Baldacci, a connection that was noted in the material released with the poll. Only the Sun Journal's David Farmer pointed out that Murphy's firm had received $13,500 from the governor's campaign for polling conducted before the June primary. In a later AP story, Murphy claimed the new survey was "totally independent," even though it showed Baldacci enjoying an approval rating at least 15 points higher than in any other poll released this year.
Is Baldacci buying up all the pollsters in the state to make sure he'll always have favorable numbers to feed the news media? Or is the governor purchasing the loyalty of every survey firm in order to feature them in a low-budget cinematic thriller?
It'll be called "Snakes on a Campaign."
Deflate my ego by e-mailing your comments to ishmaelia@gwi.net.
