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Angus S. King, Jr. (born March 31, 1944) served two terms as an Independent Governor of Maine from 1995 to 2003. After leaving office, he became a distinguished lecturer at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine and annually teaches a semester-long undergraduate course on leadership. He also became employed at a law firm and a consulting firm in Portland, Maine. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College in the class of 1966.
Election as Governor
Before being elected Governor, King was well-known statewide as a television host on Maine PBS and a successful businessman. King was first elected in 1994, defeating both former Democratic Governor Joseph Brennan and Republican Susan Collins.
The key to the King strategy was a large investment in television advertising during Maine's unusually early June primary, allowing him to emerge from the primary season on an equal footing with his partisan rivals. Collins, a protege of U.S. Senator and future Secretary of Defense William Cohen, was relatively unknown in Maine but benefited from a chaotic eight-candidate Republican primary by winning with fewer than a quarter of the votes. Brennan was in his fifth campaign for governor - two successful - and beat back three challengers in the Democratic primary. In the end, the candidacy of Green Party nominee Jonathan Carter proved decisive when he took 6 percent of the vote statewide and 10 percent in the Democratic stronghold of Portland, much of it from Brennan.
As Governor, King's bipartisan ways proved extremely popular: in 1998, he was reelected with 59 percent of the vote to 19 percent for Republican Jim Longley Jr. (the son of the former Governor) and 12 percent for Democrat Thomas Connolly. King's election was less a rarity in Maine politics, where Independent James B. Longley had been elected twenty years prior. During his tenure, he was one of only two Governors nationwide not affiliated with either of the two major parties, the other being Jesse Ventura of Minnesota (both King and Ventura endorsed John Kerry for President in 2004).
Term as Governor
While in office, Governor King launched an initiative to provide laptops for every public middle school student in the state of Maine. A first of its kind in the nation. It met with considerable resistance due to costs, but was enacted by the Maine Legislature. On September 5, 2002 the state began the program with a four-year, $37.2 million contract with Apple Computers to equip all seventh- and eighth-grade students and teachers in the state with laptops. "I think we're going to demonstrate the power of one-to-one computer access that's going to transform education," said Governor Angus King in a Wired Magazine interview. "The economic future will belong to the technologically adept." While ushering in the program, King quipped "We've still got fish but we're heavily into the chips," in reference to the State of Maine's fishing industry and the new laptop initiative.
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 as 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.) No less than 57 teachers from across the state took a principled and public stand against the fingerprinting bill and resigned. The Maine State 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 bear the costs of the measure. The first year the program cost the taxpayers of Maine over 3.5 million dollars to conduct.
Post-Governor
The day after he left office in 2003, King, his wife, Mary Herman, and their two children–Ben, 14, and Molly, 10–hit the road in a 40-foot motorhome to see America. Over the next six months, the family traveled 15,000 miles, visited 34 states before returning home June 2003.
Based on his experience, King offered some advice. "Get on the road!" said King. "See the country. Do it with the kids. It was one of the greatest experiences I've ever had in my life."
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1944 births | Dartmouth College alumni | Living people | Governors of Maine
"Angus King"