Hubris, Angus King, and me

I finally got my allotted 15 minutes of fame this week, but this isn’t really about me. It’s about the hubris that so often consumes politicians who come to believe that established rules of conduct do not apply to them.

First, a bit of background. The Maine Sunday Telegram, a newspaper for which I once worked, ran a lengthy profile on Sept. 23 of Angus King, a popular former Maine governor who is now running for the U.S. Senate. I covered King during his years as governor, and when the reporter who was writing the profile asked me to share some observations about the King years, a couple of things that I told him ended up in the story.

One was that the always upbeat King “made Mainers feel good about being Mainers” during his eight years as governor, from 1995 through 2002. The other was that King "could be thin-skinned and controlling behind the scenes, but the public didn’t see that side of him, so it didn’t figure into voters’ attitudes.”

After the Telegram ran the profile, King posted the story on his campaign’s web site. Sort of. It turns out there was some amazing legerdemain involved. Without any acknowledgement of what it was doing, the campaign axed entire chunks of the article, including my quote about King being thin-skinned, to produce a sanitized and badly butchered profile that was more to King’s liking.

This wasn’t just a case of snipping a word here and a phrase there, which would have been bad enough. All told, the campaign shortened or killed more than two dozen paragraphs, including references to the fact that King originally is from Virginia. The campaign’s explanation? The story was too long.

Now, this is not at all analogous to a movie trailer that quotes one sentence from a review, or a blurb on a book jacket that does the same thing. In both of those cases, it’s clear that the quotes are just that - individual quotes pulled from a longer document. No one watching a trailer or reading a book jacket will be deceived into believing he’s looking at the full movie review or book review.

Yet that’s precisely the trick that the King campaign pulled. Or tried to. The campaign redacted a large portion of the profile and then posted what was left as if it was the original story. The truth quickly came to light when the news media exposed what King had done, which made him look not only slippery but . . . thin-skinned and controlling.

All of which offers yet another reminder that any pol who spends enough time in the limelight runs the risk of being infected with an insidious disease for which there is no known cure: chutzpah.