Sunday, December 17, 2006

The center is a conservative think tank founded four years ago. Its staff wrote the legislation that became TABOR. Its executive director, Bill Becker, spent months making speeches praising TABOR, very often in the company of leading TABOR advocate Mary Adams. A senior policy analyst for the center, Roy Lenardson, became the chief spokesman for the TABOR political campaign, while remaining an adviser to the center. And, indeed, while meeting with the editorial board of this newspaper during the fall, Becker -- joined by Mary Adams -- clearly urged us to support passage of TABOR.

That's why he met with us. If anyone in the state wanted a comment in favor of TABOR, they only needed to go on the center's Web site, or call it directly. The Maine Heritage Policy Center was the TABOR machine.

Yet, in responses to the ethics commission, center staff and attorneys have steadfastly maintained that they were not directly promoting the passage of TABOR. They were only educating the public, Heritage officials said. Becker said that to us in October. We didn't believe it then. We don't believe it now.

Whether the center is technically in violation of the state law on campaign disclosure will turn on a very narrow reading of an exceedingly narrow law. And even if it is found in violation of that requirement, as ethics commission staff suggest may be the case, that can be corrected with a post-deadline filing and perhaps a penalty.

Yet there is a larger issue at stake here. And that's the Truth -- with a capital "T".

The kind of esoteric hairsplitting that Maine Heritage Policy Center's defenders are engaging in is offensive. Whether they convince the ethics commission or not that they really, truly, absolutely and positively didn't actually advocate for passage of TABOR is irrelevant. We know, and every voter in the state of Maine who didn't turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to current events over the last six months knows, that the center's name was synonymous with TABOR. Their insistence that they didn't really urge people to vote for TABOR is insulting to voters, demeaning to all the work the center actually engaged in, and ultimately, promotes cynicism in a public that is convinced that public figures lie all the time.