"Incarceration was never an option, because I'm claustrophobic, so crime was out. My only option was to work hard and outsmart my opponents," LePage told Shaffer in 2009. "For me it was a matter of seeing the Haves and the Have Nots, and making a conscious decision to be one of the Haves."
Vernon Moore, associate professor of social work at the University of New England, says LePage's attitudes toward welfare, social services, and impoverished adults are not unusual for people who've become successful after escaping childhood poverty and abuse. "As one who comes from conditions very similar to Gov. LePage, my goal has been to remove luck from the equation, because some of us are very lucky and some of us are very unlucky," he says. "What I've discovered is that those who . . . are unwilling to accept that it was their good luck and the bad luck of others [that explains their success] move in a direction that is much more focused on . . . individual responsibility."
"On one hand he can recognize that he had assistance, but I think he ignores that not all of us are going to have help from the private sector — from friends or family or people in the street who decide to help us through chance encounters," Moore adds, noting that such informal community support is much rarer now than in 1960, when he and LePage were children. "To demonize a system that is there to help people is unfair to the system, to the people who work in it, and the people who go through it."
LePage has also admitted a willingness to bend the rules to get his way. Last year he revisited St. Mary's — now the Lewiston Franco-American Center — and told an audience, grinning with pride, that the only reason he graduated from Lewiston High School was that, on account of alphabetical desk assignments, he sat behind the same girl in many of his classes. "She was the brains, I got through high school," he said. Despite this academic osmosis, he had poor grades, and he has said his verbal score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) was just 300. He had been involved in no extra-curricular activities. A high-school guidance counselor advised him to become a painter, like his father. Then Peter Snowe, who had just won a seat in the state legislature, intervened.
LePage has said Snowe, 24, told him: "you find a college that will accept you, and I will make sure your first year is paid for." LePage claims to have applied to 50 schools, and received 50 rejection letters. But Snowe intervened again, asking the founder of Husson College in Bangor, Chesley Husson, to grant his lanky young mentee an interview. Husson met LePage and agreed to bend the rules, allowing him to take an aptitude test in French. "I did very well and they accepted me," LePage has said, noting he was placed on academic probation "so they could bounce me if I didn't live up to the grade."
"If it wasn't for Peter Snowe, seriously, I would still be in generational poverty," LePage told a Tea Party gathering in January 2010. "I would still be on the streets and I would still be on welfare."
