As John Baldacci prepares this week to raise his hand to take the oath of office for a second time, it’s an occasion to see what path has been followed by other Maine governors who have had this opportunity.

If the past is any indication, Maine has reason to believe that Baldacci’s second term will be more eventful than his first. Such signature achievements of Angus King’s tenure as junior high laptop computers, state-backed plans to lower prescription drugs, and the community college system, for example, all occurred in the final four years of his tenure.

The unprecedented l7-day government shutdown over an intense partisan impasse on workers’ comp and state budget issues was one that occurred on the second of John McKernan’s two-term gubernatorial watch. Making Maine’s labor and business laws more hospitable to attracting economic development was also a feature of McKernan’s final years in office.

The only governor of the last 50-years who subsequently went on to achieve fame as a major national public figure, Ed Muskie, might well have been a gubernatorial non-entity had it not been for programs enacted in his final term as governor. Innovations such as state guarantees of private business loans under the Maine Industrial Building Authority and the Sinclair or “SAD” school consolidation act both occurred in the last half of the future U.S. Secretary of State’s tenure. The only major tax hike in the dozen years between l95l and l963 was also passed in the second term of Rumford’s most illustrious native son, a sales tax increase from2 to 3 cents.

Another Muskie second term enactment was a l957 constitutional amendment that made Maine only the second state in New England to extend governors’ terms from two years to four. The same amendment – our 84th – also made us the first in New England to impose a limit of two consecutive terms on our chief executives. It’s a restriction that legally guarantees us a new governor four years from now. Among those in the six-state region it’s one we now share only with Rhode Island.

For some stimulating reflections on the dynamics of a second term, this columnist recently spoke with two of our living former governors, Joseph Brennan and John Reed. To describe the way he felt upon his l978 election to the Blaine House, Brennan invoked John F. Kennedy’s initial reaction to winning the presidency, “What do we do now?” It’s a question Brennan believes described his personal uncertainty at the start of his own first administration.

Despite his eight years in the Maine Legislature and four as attorney general before assuming the reins of state government, Brennan believes that he, like any new governor, was handicapped both by the difficulty of putting together a new management team and the constraints of the budget process. Though as a legislator one can “advocate all sorts of things without thinking of the price tag” as governor one has to consider such constraints.

By the outset of a second term, however, Brennan feels that “the department heads that weren’t any good have been winnowed out,” and that a second term such as that which Baldacci now faces is one where you are “more confident about what you’re talking about.”

Unlike the experiences of most of our recent former governors, however, it was a first rather than a second term crisis that Brennan pointed to as being one of the more eventful of his tenure. That was the three month lockdown of the Maine State Prison in l980, necessary to restore state control over what had been perceived as a prisoner dominated institution. Though Brennan recently recalled that the warden himself had opposed the measure, Brennan, himself a former prosecutor, believed that the state could not regain control by mere incremental measures. Today, Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States.

If anyone knows firsthand how different the start of a second can be from that of a first term it’s Maine’s oldest living former governor, John Reed. It was Reed who came to office upon the most abrupt circumstances of them all, the unexpected death of his predecessor, Clinton Clauson, at the end of l959. Reached at his Washington, D.C., winter home by this columnist shortly before Christmas, the 85-year old Reed recalled that he felt the office seemed “all new at the start.”

Reed praised Governor Baldacci as a “straightforward person” and sees a second term as a chance to “move the state ahead.”

Though Reed’s second term afforded him the privilege of greater confidence than the first, it was to a second term event that Reed pointed when asked by this columnist to name the most memorable crisis of his time in Augusta. This was the controversy surrounding the ouster of Frank Rodway as superintendent of Maine Maritime Academy in l964. In an unusual instance of gubernatorial interest in the personnel appointments of an academic institution, Reed’s unrelenting pursuit of Rodway’s removal eventually led to the resignation of most MMA trustees and Rodway’s dismissal by the board Reed appointed to take their place. “It was quite an emotional issue” and a “very nettlesome problem at the time,” Reed recently recalled.

The episode was so celebrated it was commemorated at the time by a Jud Strunk number, “Give My Regards to Rodway, Remember Me to Old Castine,” a song whose lyrics Strunk sang to the music of “Give My Regards to Broadway.”

An outcome of the constitutional limit barring three consecutive terms is that all five of our living former governors could be eligible to run again in the next election even though the man who now holds the job will not be. More on some of the eventful features of their second terms and what might befall them in a third in a future column.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].