“If I were a democrat, there would be two to three times the people,” gubernatorial candidate Les Otten said last Tuesday as he surveyed the 20 people assembled in Masterton Hall waiting to hear him speak.
The next day, he was a more philosophical about the turnout.
“The candidates can’t really be picky about the size of the crowd,” he said in a phone interview. “Who knows, the 15 or 20 people that were there could have been the deciding votes.”
Otten, a republican, and former CEO of American Skiing Company and former Vice Chairman and partner of the Boston Red Sox, is among 24 candidates that hope to be elected as Maine’s next governor in November’s election.
Otten doesn’t veer too far from the standard republican ideology when describing his campaign platform: He’s against big government. He’s against heavy taxation. He also said he was against L.D. 1020, the bill passed last Spring giving gay couples the right to marry. “Politicians should not be involved in personal rights,” he said. “That gets settled by the people, not politicians.” The bill was overturned in a referendum vote last November.
Otten was invited to speak by the USM College Republicans, the lone conservative political group on campus headed by Josh Rennie, a sophomore finance major. Rennie said the group doesn’t support any one candidate, and plans to host talks on campus by other conservative candidates.
While Otten offered ideas on how to solve budgetary gaps in K-12 education, he said he had no detailed solution for the continued crises in funding higher education.
“In speaking with your president [Selma Botman], they see a path for providing quality education within the budget constraints that are pushed upon them,” he said last Wednesday.
“We need to spend some real quality time in analyzing how exactly our campuses are delivering our services and how much administration we really need,” he added.
Otten said The University of Maine System should be able to offer quality education without relying heavily on state appropriation.
“I think the fearmongers like to emphasize when money is taken away, education suffers. I don’t believe that those two things are inexorably linked. If they were, GM [General Motors] would be profitable. Brain power, organization and system delivery are much more important than throwing money at something.”
Like Maine’s current governor, John Baldacci, he sees investing in alternative energy sources as a way of boosting a flagging state economy. Maine’s per-capita oil consumption is “gluttonous,” Otten said.
“If we look at the money we’ve allowed to slip through our fingers, we left the farm to steal the bacon,” he said, referring to stimulus dollars he said were wasted. “Maine is not bankrupt, but it has managed itself fiscally, extremely poorly. The creation of industries and jobs is the only way to keep young people in the state of Maine.”