Alan Caron (submitted photo)

By the age when most people graduate from high school, Alan Caron was a ninth-grade dropout, married with two children, loading tractor-trailers on the night shift to scrape by.

It’s not exactly the typical background for someone vying to serve as the next governor of Maine.

But Caron, a Freeport resident who created Envision Maine, said his working-class roots and personal odyssey help him understand that Maine needs “big change from the bottom up.”

Caron is the second independent to leap into the hotly contested race to succeed two-term Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican who is barred from seeking re-election by Maine’s term limits law. Both the Republicans and Democrats have a slew of candidates hoping to win primaries next June putting them on the November 2018 ballot.

Caron said the major parties offer chaos, stalemate and inaction while he is in a position to put together a bipartisan movement “to build a better future” for Maine.

“The time is right and I’m ready,” he said during a recent visit to Lewiston.
Caron said that as a young man who played in a rock ‘n’ roll band and worked a variety of odd jobs, he put himself at the bottom of a very deep hole. Looking up, he said, he could only see a sliver of sunlight offering the brighter future he hoped for.

He grew up in Waterville in a working-class French-American family — his grandparents lived in Lewiston and he remembers fondly Christmas services at the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul — that had pictures of Jesus and John F. Kennedy hanging on the wall.

“I’ve been inspired by both of them,” Caron said.

For Caron, school “wasn’t working for me. I wanted more. I needed more. I was hellbent to get out and experience the world.”

By his mid-20s, Caron opened his first small business, a printing and design firm in Portland, and began working to organize in his neighborhood — an effort that proved so successful the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University accepted him into its master’s program despite his lack of a high school diploma and a college degree.

He’d somehow climbed out of that deep hole. Caron said he felt determined to pull others up along with him.

In the years since, he’s formed two statewide organizations, Envision Maine and GrowSmart Maine, co-authored a couple of books on how to revitalize the state, written a newspaper column and started another business that focuses on advising companies, nonprofits and others about how best to tell their stories and meet their goals.

In that time, Caron said, he’s dealt with “a dizzying array of issues” in a quest to convince Maine to refocus its policies to bolster small business.

He said Maine “has enormous potential to build a new economy” but it has to come to grips with the reality that “the mills are not coming back.”

Caron called the state’s decades of effort to bolster big business “a dismal failure” and insisted that tossing hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits away annually is “just throwing money at big promises” instead of getting results.

“We have to pivot to the future,” Caron said, with government leaders putting aside “the partisan back and forth” in favor of “a Team Maine” approach.

He said the machinery of government should be promoting “the innovators and the doers” who will create jobs and lay the foundation for a stronger economy.

Another change he said he would like to see is for the state to find a way to make the first two years of college free and easily available, basically extending the years of public education for an era that requires more skills and knowledge.

Caron, who volunteered to help LePage with his transition, said the governor has done well in improving the state government’s efficiency and fixing its pension funds. But LePage has failed at much more, he said, because “he gets in his own way too much” nursing grudges and issuing insults.

“His approach and his style were all wrong,” Caron said. “It’s been an era of food fights.”

That has to change, he said, offering U.S. Sens. Angus King, an independent, and Susan Collins, Republican, as models of how he would try to approach governing.

A Democrat for most of his life, Caron said his politics haven’t changed much but the party has become such an agent of the status quo that he no longer feels a part of it. The Republicans, he said, have drifted to the right, leaving the GOP in Maine in the hands of angry hardliners such as LePage.

He said there may be a big opportunity for a middle-of-the-road independent to capture votes if the parties wind up supporting candidates who cater to their extremes.

Caron, who divorced his first wife and has since remarried, has three children, the first two graduates of Bowdoin College, the other still in school at age 12.

Among the other candidates seeking election as governor are Republicans Mary Mayhew, Garrett Mason and Ken Fredette, Democrats Mark Eves, Janet Mills and Adam Cote, and independent Terry Hayes. Unlike Hayes, Caron does not plan to participate in the Maine Clean Elections program to fund his campaign.

Independents have a history of success in Maine. Since Lewiston’s James Longley took office as governor in 1975, the first independent to win Maine’s top office, the state has had six men hold the job, two Democrats, two Republicans and two affiliated with neither party.

scollins@sunjournal.com