Explaining Paul LePage to the wider world in The Guardian

This has been a particularly wild week in Maine politics on account of the cascading, racially-charged and occasionally violent outbursts of our governor, Paul Lepage. National networks have sent teams to the State House in Augusta, my Portland Press Herald colleagues have been interviewed by everyone from the Washington Post to MSNBC to the NBC Nightly News.

Everyone it seems wants to know who this LePage guy is and why he behaves as he does.

My contribution for the day was this explainer-meets-news update for The Guardian, which ran this morning. The paper's subhead: "Who is Governor Paul Lepage, the Donald Trump supporter mulling resignation after racist comments and an obscenity-laced voicemail to a legislator?"

If you're looking for more context, here's a piece I did for Politico in the wee hours after the 2014 election, explaining how he got re-elected; another Politico story from the summer of 2015, which will catch you up on the last time he seriously went off the rails and, for the real scholars out there, my two-part, 10,000-word biography of the governor, which ran in the Portland Phoenix in January 2012. (Thanks to the Fund for Investigative Journalism for supporting that project.)

A reporting collaboration with The Guardian

My story in today's Portland Press Herald explored a proposal by the conservative Maine Heritage Policy Center revive the economy of Maine's poorest county by exempting it from state income and sales taxes.

The story was part of a collaboration with the Guardian, the London-based international news organization, which had acquired internal documents from the State Policy Network, a conservative organization for which Maine Heritage and dozens of other state-level think tanks serve as franchises. The Guardian today wrote about the national strategy the documents revealed -- a follow-up to their stories yesterday and Monday on the closely-affiliated American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) which SPN, Maine Heritage, and several Maine legislators are members of. The Texas Observer also filed this story on an SPN-related initiative in that state.

The Guardian version of my story can be found here, and even includes some of my photography - something I haven't done as much of since dialing back my foreign correspondent work a few years back.

The collaboration was an enjoyable experience -- the intersection of a local and national story -- which I hope we will find occasion to repeat.