Wait — what?:
Asked at a town hall meeting on Wednesday night what his administration was doing to combat the state’s drug issues, [Maine governor] LePage referenced new legislation aimed at traffickers, then delivered his roiling explanation.
“These aren’t the people who take drugs,” LePage said, in comments first picked up by the Portland Press Herald. “These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty. These type of guys. They come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we’ve got to deal with down the road.” [via CNN]
As the kids say: *facepalm*
And because it’s LePage — who is known for being, to put it mildly, a character — even his backpedaling is proving controversial:
“I made one slip-up,” LePage conceded [at a Friday news conference]. “I may have made many slip-ups. I was going impromptu in my brain, didn’t catch up to my mouth. Instead of saying, ‘Maine women,’ I said, ‘White women.’ I’m not going to apologize to the Maine women for that because if you go to Maine you will see we are essentially 95 percent white.”
Later he clarified, “If I slipped up and used the wrong word, then I apologize to all the Maine women.”
LePage has an engrossing personal story, and he has done important things to reform welfare and to curb drug abuse in Maine. But it’s fairly clear that he said what he meant, and the racial insinuation is disappointing.