The beleaguered, term-limited chief executive of Maine desperately trying against all apparent odds to get a job promotion is using a mysterious claim to find her footing.
“I have stood up to bullies my entire life,” is the canned line being recycled day after day by a woman who has had taxpayer-financed jobs her “entire life,” if you’ll excuse the plagiarizing.
Janet Mills, who polls show losing big-time to a Democrat U.S. Senate primary opponent, came out earlier this week with her campaign “policy platform.”
The 20-page binder is allegedly Janet’s blueprint for what she hopes will be a term as a U.S. senator.
But beyond the typical boilerplate disposable political stuff about government reform, improving the economy and expanding healthcare access is the threat she uses to try to bring women to her side.
Mills, 78, will need women to win a primary election June 9 against bearded, barrel-chested Nazi-tattooed, oyster connoisseur Graham Platner, who is 41.
The problem she has is the polls show older women – a key Democrat primary demographic – just love Graham, and every day he is found to have said something even more offensive than the day before, they seem to love him even more.
So Janet needs a hook to reel in women and her weapon of choice is the line she keeps repeating about having “stood up to bullies my entire life.”
But curiously the first – and only – alleged bullies she mentions are two men who have had a presence in her life in only the past 20 years – Paul LePage and Donald Trump.
LePage was governor when Mills was attorney general and now that Janet has made it into the state’s corner office her favorite nemesis is the man in the Oval Office.
But Mills’ claim that she’s been bullied her “entire life” would suggest that she was the victim of bullying going back 60 years before she ever met Paul LePage.
So the question for Janet Mills is whether she can provide a list of the other “bullies” she encountered through her first 60 years of life.
Beyond just continually claiming that she’s suffered a lifetime of being bullied, Mills actually cynically disrespects the very meaning of the word bully every time she uses it as a political weapon.
Bullying is no joke and some real victims of it have actually taken their own lives due to the trauma it causes.
“Bullying” in all its vicious, life-threatening incarnations is nothing to be trifled with.
So Maine’s governor, who has actually lived an “entire life” of pure (white) privilege, ought to knock it off when it comes to claiming she’s been the victim of bullying – whether for all her 78 years or just the last 20.
