Hispanic activist to announce mayoral bid
Filed under: Articles about Ralph Carmona, Campaign Trail
First published June 28, 2011, in Portland Daily Sun
By Casey Conley
– THE PORTLAND DAILY SUN
Ralph Carmona, a longtime political activist and former Bank of America lobbyist, is holding a press conference tomorrow announcing his candidacy for Portland mayor.
The event will include speeches from Carmona and several supporters and the unveiling of his campaign theme, “Portland on the Rise.” It will be held in Room 5 in Portland Public Library at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday.
Carmona, who moved to Portland last year from Sacramento, says he’ll focus his campaign on fostering a sustainable local economy, improving quality of life for city residents and maintaining responsive, and open government.
“We need a mayor who listens, and who can get things done,” said Carmona, who is currently the Portland President of the League of United Latino American Citizens and vice chair of the city’s Democratic Committee.
Carmona says he has a long history of bringing people together and fighting for specific causes, including civil rights issues and immigration reform.
Although he hasn’t yet registered with the city as a candidate, Carmona, 60, says he will file paperwork after the press conference.
According to the city, 15 people have already registered as candidates for the race, which will be decided on Nov. 8.
Carmona and his wife, Vana, moved to Portland last year from California, where he worked as a teacher, activist and an executive and lobbyist for companies like Sacremento Municipal Utility District and Bank of America.
If elected as Portland’s mayor, he says he’ll become its “chief lobbyist” in Augusta and Washington, D.C.
Carmona has also worked for Hispanic organizations such as the Sacremento Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and served on various state boards, including the University of California Board of Regents.
He has lectured in political science at various institutions, including the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at University of Southern California, his alma mater, and the Osher Center for Lifelong Learning, at University of Southern Maine.
Carmona’s wife, Vana, is from the Portland area, and he said they chose to move to Portland last year because they believed they could “make a difference.” Carmona says he had no intention of running for mayor before moving here.
“We chose (Portland) because we love the city and because we want to make a difference,” he said in an interview. He added, “This is our home for the rest of our lives.”
Carmona notes that substantial percentage of Portland’s 66,000 residents are from away, a fact he says could help him in this fall’s election. Residency history aside, he believes his message of bringing people together will resonate equally with longtime Mainers and newcomers.
“If you have been around long enough, you are able to see things and understand things and do things quickly. And people have seen that,” he said. “You will see people who have lived in Maine all their lives who will be more concerned with, ‘What is this person going to do for me?’ and ‘What is this person going to do for Portland?’”
The November mayoral election will be Portland’s first in nearly 80 years. Voters last fall approved changes to the city charter that converted the one-year, largely ceremonial mayoral post into a four-year elected position with more authority, including veto power over the budget.
The new position also comes with a significant pay increase: The person who is elected mayor will earn about $66,000, compared to about $7,200 now.
Although he’s an officer with the city Democratic Party, Carmona says he’s getting no support from the local party establishment.
Indeed, he joins a race loaded with high-profile Democrats, including Mayor Nick Mavodones, Councilor Jill Duson and former state Senate Majority Leader Mike Brennan.
Others who have registered as a candidate for mayor include: Councilor Dave Marshall, Charles Bragdon, Erick Bennett, Zouhair Bouzrara, Jed Rathband, Jodie Lapchick, Christopher Vail, Peter Bryant, Markos Miller, Paul Schafer, Richard Dodge, and Hamza Haadoow.
Registering with the city allows candidates to form committees and raise money. Candidate petitions, which require between 350 and 500 signatures, are available July 1.
Democrats embrace ‘LePage referendum’ election
Filed under: Articles about Ralph Carmona
By Curtis Robinson – THE PORTLAND DAILY SUN
May 14, 2011
It would be easy to over-simplify the meaning of last Tuesday’s lopsided Democratic victory in the special election for state senate District 7 – so let’s get at it.
Some background: In the blue Democratic corner was state Rep. Cynthia Dill, maybe the most vocal opponent of Gov. Paul LePage, including launching that online “recall petition” that has no legal weight but is still a way to vent some anger. In civilian life, she’s a civil rights lawyer.
In the red Republican corner was Louis Maietta Jr., a former SoPo councilman and former state rep himself. His day job is his family’s construction business.
The race was seen as some – okay, especially in the media – as a referendum on the governor in the wake of his several gaffes, like the mural controversy or the kiss-my-butt controversy or the women and little beards controversy or whatever the heck he did this week controversy.
That idea made some sense because the last race was recall-close. It turned out that state Sen. Larry Bliss, the SoPo Democrat won the squeaker over Joe Palmieri, who was well known as a local radio host, former TV journalist and small business owner (he has the wildly good Chicago Dogs franchise in Scarborough).
Bliss got 9,163 votes, Palmieri’s 9,097.
But Bliss moved to a new job out of state, thus the special election.
So Tuesday, when Dill won, the victory was widely reported as a 2-to-1 trouncing. She notched 5,056 votes in the district, which includes South Portland, Cape Elizabeth and a part of Scarborough. Maietta had 2,405 votes.
No less than Bill Nemitz, the Portland Press-Herald columnist and a leading LePage critic, surmised that “officially, the good citizens of Cape Elizabeth, South Portland and a slice of Scarborough elected themselves a new state senator this week… Unofficially, they also sent a message.”
Well … maybe.
Certainly the election got big-game hot toward the end, with Republicans portraying Dill as a liberal establishment figure and Democrats firing back with attacks on Maietta’s family business. So one message, since the Republican campaign was seen as more brutal, is that attack-dog politics work less and less in smaller and smaller communities.
Or, the message might be that in state senate races which often come down to “how many hands did you shake,” taking time off in the home stretch is risky. Because Maietta went to his daughter’s “destination wedding” in the critical weeks before the election. In a way, that did fit his theme of “family first” but did cut into hand-shaking efforts.
But I think the real message from Tuesday’s vote is echoed in comments like those by Ralph Carmona, who leads the state’s chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens of Maine known as LULAC. He’s also vice-chair of the Portland Democrats and one of the few on the left who have had personal meetings with the governor (they largely “agreed to disagree” he says).
Asked about the Tuesday win, Carmona said it illustrates that “… there’s clearly a sense of energy among Democrats” and predicted it was “a real harbinger of things to come.”
But he also said that “… there’s no social institution that can respond to the “extremism in the state… other than the Democratic Party.”
Quick translation: Stand down, Green Party.
And that remains the Big Question of 2012. Sure, the governor has united the progressive left in a way usually reserved for presidential visits or First Friday’s free-wine art openings.
But remember your history: Paul LePage was elected with 38 percent of the vote; Eliot Cutler was just under 10,000 short with around 37 percent, and Democrat Libby Mitchell had 19 percent.
Does anyone think the sound and fury from Augusta has seriously eaten into the governor’s 38 percent? How would Tuesday’s race have turned out with a left-leaning third candidate, Green Party or not? Who knows?
But it will be a long, long time before the Cutler and Mitchell voters forget the split-vote election of 2010. Many in each camp called for the other to step aside in the final weeks as Cutler surged. And if it seems like a majority of Mainers are against the Gov, well remember that a majority of Mainers voted for somebody else.
So until the Next Time, the real impact from Tuesday’s special election is that Ms. Dill, one of the more assertive critics of the governor, just doubled her credibility and upgraded her megaphone.
Another lesson of recent history: she will have plenty of opportunity to use it.
(Curtis Robinson is founding editor of The Portland Daily Sun. Contact him at curtis@portlanddailysun.me.)
Former Gov. John Baldacci honored at Truman Dinner
Filed under: Articles about Ralph Carmona
Speakers at the event draw sharp contrasts between Baldacci and his successor.
By Meredith Goad mgoad@mainetoday.com
May 14, 2011 – THE PORTLAND PRESS HERALD
Baldacci and Master of Ceremonies Dr. Ralph Carmona listened as former Portland legislator Herb Adams presented a copy of the book “Bold Vision” Friday at the annual Truman Dinner hosted by the Portland Democratic City Committee. (Press Herald photo by Gordon Chibroski)
“Apparently there’s nothing like honoring a former governor to really increase turnout,” said Jill Barkley, chair of the committee, as she welcomed a room full of Democratic dignitaries that included U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, Portland Mayor Nick Mavodones, former Maine Attorney General Steve Rowe, numerous city councilors and state legislators, and well-known lawyer F. Lee Bailey, who lives in Yarmouth.
“… and there’s nothing like our current governor to increase turnout,” Barkley continued to laughs and applause.
Baldacci himself would not rate his successor’s performance in a brief interview.
“I think I had my turn, and I think it’s now his turn,” Baldacci said. “You just hope and wish that things are on track and moving ahead, and the state is going to be better. That’s all we can do.”
The rest of the politicians in the room were not as diplomatic, criticizing Republican Gov. Paul LePage’s positions on health care, the environment, reproductive rights and other issues.
“I’m just going to say there’s probably a little buyers’ remorse going on right now with our current governor,” said Sen. Justin Alfond, D-Portland, who thanked Baldacci for “eight incredible years.”
“The contrast couldn’t be any greater,” Alfond said. “Gov. Baldacci is someone who is professional, someone who took his job seriously, who cared. … I feel like right now what we have up there is someone telling both parties what to do and not really having the respect of either party.”
Pingree praised Baldacci for his work on health care and said the former governor had taken “an amazing stand on marriage equality.” She said Baldacci respected the legislative process and understood “how it’s supposed to work.”
Justin Costa, a member of Portland’s school board, urged the audience to reject the politics of cynicism.
“I know these are challenging times,” he said, “but we need to remind ourselves what it is that we’ve done. Think of everything that we Democrats have accomplished these past five years: The governor stood up for equality, a woman became speaker of the U.S. House. A black man rose to the highest office in the nation.”
Baldacci said in an interview that he misses Maine but is enjoying his new job in the Department of Defense, where he is working on military health care reform. Some Republicans have criticized the new position as duplicative and wasteful.
“You know, going to Walter Reed and seeing the young men and women, our wounded warriors, you just get energized to go out and do all you can to be helpful to them,” Baldacci said. “My dad used to say, ‘It’s not about you being comfortable, John, it’s about making sure that (other) people are comfortable.”
Baldacci struck the same notes in his speech at the dinner, saying that, “at the end of the day, it isn’t about what we’re doing and what we have, but it’s what we’re leaving the future generations. Can we say we did everything that was necessary? Did we try?”
The Portland Democratic City Committee holds the Truman dinner every year to honor Maine Democrats who have contributed statewide to the party. At the end of the evening, former Portland legislator Herb Adams presented Baldacci with a copy of “Bold Vision,” a book about Portland parks and the city of Portland, that had been signed by most of the people in the room.
Baldacci: ‘Portland has the wind at its back’
Filed under: Articles about Ralph Carmona
By David Carkhuff – THE PORTLAND DAILY SUN
May 13, 2011
Former Democratic governor John E. Baldacci, while withholding comment on his controversial successor, emphasized his efforts to build bipartisanship during his two terms in the Blaine House.
Baldacci is being honored at the annual Portland Democratic City Committee Truman Dinner, tonight at 5:30 p.m. at the Italian Heritage Center. He spoke with The Portland Daily Sun Thursday about the city’s upcoming mayoral election, developments he championed from Augusta and the state of politics in Maine.
New Republican Gov. Paul LePage has riled his critics with a more blunt governing style, but Baldacci refrained from saying anything about the current governor. He preferred to praise Portland Democratic Chair Jill Barkley and Vice Chair Ralph Carmona for revitalizing the party, saying he’s looking to the city’s fall election of a voter-approved mayor.
“You have an important election coming up in Portland for mayor, that’s the largest city in Maine, a big economic engine for the state,” Baldacci said.
He said he wants to help make sure that “turnout is high, good candidates come forward and focus on jobs and the economy.”
The Democratic Party is in the minority in the Maine Legislature, but Baldacci credited the Portland Democrats for building up enthusiasm.
“I come back and forth and try to stay in touch with people, and I’m really excited about seeing Ralph and Jill and appreciate their support and the work they’ve done,” he said.
“I was proud that in the state of Maine in the most difficult times we were able to strike bipartisanship agreements,” he said.
Baldacci was elected governor in 2002 and reelected in 2006, and one of the accomplishments he singled out was helping to bring a deep-water pier, or megaberth, to Portland Harbor. The future is bright for the Port City, he said.
“Portland has the wind at its back,” Baldacci said.
Tourism development and waterfront improvements came to mind as projects he supported as governor.
“I just enjoyed working with the community and its leadership in trying to realize — especially coming out of the worst recession since the Great Depression — there are opportunities to expand the megaberth so you can take in more than one ship at a time … That was huge, I worked with them on that, we certainly worked on redevelopment of the Maine State Pier and the cargo container port so you could make improvements there so you have a working waterfront,” Baldacci said.
“We’ve worked a lot in Portland to build up the megaberth for tourism, I”ve been so pleased with the development, you can’t look at the Food Channel and not see the chefs of Portland showing up,” he said.
Today, Baldacci is working on military health care reform at the U.S. Department of Defense. Overseeing the National Guard in Maine was a training ground for military health care reform in the Obama administration, he said.
“A lot of things that we did — we tried to bend the curve longterm — are ths same issues that we have to face as a country,” Baldacci said.
Asked if he had any advice for LePage, Baldacci said he didn’t, at least not to share.
“I had my turn, and I think that this is his turn,” Baldacci said.
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