Maine’s former independent governor has jumped into the Maine Senate race, immediately turning the race into something anyone can win. This is something of a nightmare for Democrats who wanted an easy pickup. But what about King’s own beliefs? This makes it seem that his bipartisanship is clearly of the worst-of-all-worlds variety that Washington loves, mixing the most noxious elements of all mainstream strains of political thought:

One of the more controversial initiatives of Governor King was a law requiring all school employees, including volunteers, and contractors working in schools to be fingerprinted by the Maine State Police, and have background checks conducted on them. The program purported to protect children from abuse by potential predators working within the schools, but met with strong resistance from teachers’ unions, who considered it a breach of civil liberties. Supporters of the law claimed the fingerprinting requirement would stop previous offenders from coming to Maine to work in the schools, and if Maine did not have this requirement, it would send a message to previous offenders that they could work in Maine without fear of being identified as a child abuser. Critics of the law maintained that there was no evidence of a problem with child abuse by school employees, and the fingerprinting represented a violation of constitutional guarantees (a claim which was not backed up by Supreme Court rulings on the issue). 57 teachers from across the state resigned in protest of the fingerprinting bill. The Maine Legislature voted to exempt current school employees, but this was vetoed by Gov. King in April 1997. The cost of the requirement was initially to be paid for by the school employees themselves, but the Legislature voted to have the state fund the costs of the measure. [emphasis mine]

Expanding government power to address a problem that isn’t shown to exist, ignoring the actual facts of the situation, and all at the expense of civil liberties. Brilliant. I can already see him cheering on more TSA restrictions and indefinite detention and all the rest from the Senate floor, and getting on the cover of TIME as a heroic superpolitician. Just kill me now.

Also, I question the wisdom of voting for a 67 year old to enter a body where all power is determined by seniority. Dude would only manage a few terms in the best case. Admittedly, I’m always suspicious of ostentatious bipartisanship, but this guy seems like a straight-up dud even by those standards. Maine probably will have an actual candidate whose progressivism extends beyond social issues, and they’d be foolish not to support her (or to let an indy candidacy elect another dreary Tea Partier, as in 2010). We’ll see if they learned the lesson.