Strange Maine-linked political bedfollows: dual fall from grace

By Ted Cohen

When he was majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Maine's George Mitchell, a Democrat, conned President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, into agreeing to raise taxes even though Bush had campaigned on a "no new taxes" pledge.

Bush two years later, running for re-election in 1992, said he screwed up in agreeing to Mitchell's budget deal.

In a new retrospective in The New Yorker, famed Watergate reporter Bob Woodward of the Washington Post quotes Bush's budget director, Dick Darman, remembering Jim Baker, Bush's chief of staff, calling it "the worst political mistake I've ever seen."

Bush went on to lose re-election to Bill Clinton, whose victory effectively meant George Bush would have a lot more time to go fishing off the coast of his Maine summer home.

George Mitchell, the shrewd architect of the budget deal that by all accounts snookered Bush into a Kennebunkport exiling, became the darling of the tax-loving liberals by singlehandedly returning the White House to the Democrats after twelve years of Republican rule.

But if Mitchell was celebrating his newfound political sainthood, a rumored scandalous skeleton his closet would eventually bring him a fall from public grace arguably more damaging and personally painful than the defeat suffered by his awkward-bedfellow president who shared with him a love of life the way it should be, Maine style.

Thirty-five years after Mitchell's having successfully knighted himself by taking down a president of the opposing party with a simple tax hike, his reputation as an untarnished senior statesman went poof.

Mitchell's name showed up in the so-called "Epstein files," named for his friend - convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

The former federal judge and U.S. senator from Maine allegedly had sexual contact with an underaged girl who had been prostituted by Epstein.

Though Mitchell has claimed he never had contact of any kind with Virginia Giuffre, who later said under oath in a legal deposition that he had, his public image came crashing down.

His portrait was removed from the Maine statehouse, he resigned from a Portland scholarship foundation bearing his name, a college in Ireland that had honored his international peacemaking efforts dismantled a campus statue of his likeness, and an organization promoting peace in northern Ireland as well as Maine's state university both severed ties to him.

If Mitchell disgraced a president who later claimed losing the 1992 election became a humiliation he could never escape, the Maine native ex-senator, former federal judge and respected international peace envoy ended up a tragic hero, forever hostage to an allegation of pedophilia from which he will never escape, guilty or not.