Cummings Baldwin ran for governor on his record – literally.
In 1986, the 32-year-old Auburn resident said he believed his own
life on the streets and three prison terms had given him a unique perspective on Maine – a view that would allow him to try to improve conditions in the Pine Tree State.
“Another candidate hasn’t got enough street education to know what’s going on,” Baldwin said in a newspaper interview 40 years ago.
“How can he have an education on that? Read it out of a book? You can’t read it out of a book.”
Baldwin served a two-year term for burglary, and a year each for drunken driving, theft and accessory to assault.
He was paroled from the Bangor Pre-Release Center.
“I went to junior high as far as the eighth grade,” he said. “Then I started my life on the wrong side of the road.
“But I think living on that side of the road has pointed out a lot to me.”
“We are going down deeper and
deeper and deeper,” he said. “It seems to me as though we’re deterio- rating fast.”
Amazingly Baldwin had the sense to see beyond the horizon, to see into the future, as it were, anticipating Maine’s cultural and political descent.
“If we don’t clean up the streets, I’d say in three or four years they’re going to be too bad to clean,” he said.
Baldwin was a political visionary of his own time, his difficult life schooling him in a way that no modern politician can understand or parlay into improving the human condition.
“We’re getting a big criminal society out there,” he said 40 years ago. “There’s a lot of criminals out there.”
Baldwin’s niece, Sabrina Rose of Presque Isle, recently happened upon the story of his unlikely political dreams as she was researching her life as a foster child.
Rose found an old Lewiston Sun article in which her great-uncle was interviewed about his campaign.
“His mission was to reform the prisons in our state, and he did bring awareness to the issues behind our judicial system,” she said. “Pretty amazing!”
Unfortunately, Rose said, he ended up relapsing, dying of alcoholism before he hit 50.
“No, he never actually got on the ballot” she said. “But he did make some headlines.”
Rose found the timing of her discovering the article as uncanny.
“I am not running for political office, but this week I am being featured on a podcast that’s distributed throughout the prison systems of our nation,” she said. “It’s a topic that is very near and dear to me, as my own father did ten years in the state pen. My father was released, and died within a year, from a fentanyl overdose.”
The podcast is being recorded on March 24th, which so happens to be Rose’s mother Michelle Canu’s birthday – the same mother from whom the state unceremoniously ripped Rose and her two siblings, separating them as toddlers.
Rose has written two memoirs about the state’s troubled foster-care system – the one that ignorantly placed her in a dysfunctional foster home. So she and her great-uncle were fighting for government reform in their own respective ways.
Baldwin seemed to foreshadow the same dystopian, totalitarian, controlling bureaucracy that in its own insensitivity tears siblings from each other, placing them into worse conditions – foster homes with virtually no oversight.
Now, 40 years later, his niece is amid her own journey towards understanding her life as a young child and how she became just a statistic in the state foster-care system, as Maine goes to the polls to elect a governor who hopefully will straighten out the mess in the child-welfare department.
Ex-con Ran For Governor 40 Years Ago, Was The Maine Version Of George Orwell’s Deep-State Warning
