As Maine Goes . . .
When President Bush recently visited his summer home in Kennebunkport, Me., he lamented the devastation an Atlantic storm had wreaked on his property and his neighbors.</br></br>Had he returned four days later, he could have heard of the terrible damage wrought by the unrelenting recession that has struck the state he knows so well. "I see it every day," said one Mainer, "in the faces of friends and neighbors, whether it is the fear of a businessman who has never faced unemployment before, the mill worker resigned to the fate suffered by co-workers or the hopelessness of those who continue their fruitless search for a job."</br></br>This was not Bush's least-loved Mainer, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, speaking to some partisan Democratic crowd. It was Maine's Republican governor and loyal Bush supporter, John R. (Jock) McKernan Jr., explaining on Nov. 6 why he was proposing drastic cutbacks in government services - the layoff of one-fifth of state employees, a $50 million cut in aid to localities, elimination of the general assistance welfare program and abolition of 35 state agencies, including the Office of Volunteerism, which coordinates Maine's version of Bush's favorite "Thousand Points of Light" program.</br></br>All this in a desperate effort to close a budget shortfall that has emerged just since July, when McKernan furloughed all state employees for half the month in order to force through what he then hoped would be a solution.</br></br>The only consolation the governor could offer his beleaguered constituents is that similarly painful scenes are being enacted across the country from New England to California.