The Independent
CAN A POLITICIAN WIN OFFICE WITHOUT BE ing a Democrat or Republican? Former Senator Paul Tsongas '62 thinks a third party is inevitable unless the two big ones get their act together. "Whether I remain a Democrat or whatever, there will be a third party because people will demand a certain kind of politics," he says. Tsongas's partner in the deficit busting Concord Coalition, former Senator Warren Rudman. disagrees: "It's very difficult fora party to get started."
King supported Tsongas's bid for the Presidency, and it was Tsongas's defeat that propelled King to consider his own candidacy as an Independent, according to Dennis Bailey, King's communications director. King acknowledges that he evolved from "a traditional liberal of the sixties" into a "fiscal conservative and social moderate...a compassionate pragmiatist." He was active in campus politics at Dartmouth, where he was president of the Undergraduate Council and a Barrett Cup winner. A native of Alexandria, Virginia, and a graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, he came to Maine to join Pine Tree Legal Assistance in 1969. He dates his political evolution to the moment a college professor asked the staff: "If you're Such a good poverty lawyer that you can keep tenants in apartments even if they don't pay their rent because you can tie the landlord up., .and the ultimate result is that people get out of the landlord business and you end up with a shortage of apartments...have you served your clients?" While his colleagues blasted the query as reactionary, "I kept my mouth shut, because, to be honest, his question made me nervous," King wrote in Maying a Difference, a book he wrote for his gubernatorial campaign.
Over the years, King said recently, he concluded that "the best way to achieve the social : goals that I saw as positive back 25 years ago is through a vigorous free enterprise economy. The best way to achieve economic justice is to have lots of jobs....My goals haven't changed, but my perception of the way to achieve those goals has changed." Some Democrats say King opted to run as an Independent because he feared he couldn't beat former Maine Governor Joseph Brennan in last spring's crowded Democratic primary. But King wrote in his book that "parties have themselves become part of the problem. So while GOP and Democratic candidates duked it out in primary campaigns, King got an early start on the general election by blanketing television with ads defining his message and ending with the teaser,"coming to a polling place near you."
As his politics moderated, so did his career path—from poverty lawyer to Senate aide to private practice lawyer to founder of an energy-conservation company. As host of a weekly television publicaffairs program for 18 years, he honed communication skills that served him well in the election race. (So did the $1 million he pumped into it from the $8 million he netted in the sale of his company last year.) He made good on his neutral politics with his nominations for cabinet posts. They have spanned the political spectrum, including registered Democrats. Republicans—and his fellow Independents.
Maine's Angus King is governor sui generis.
