Brian Duff quoted in story on Maine tea party

Brian Duff, Ph.D., associate professor of political science, was quoted in an Oct. 4, 2010 Kennebec Journal story on  tea party groups in Maine and their impact on the gubernatorial race, which has GOP candidate Paul LePage, a tea party favorite, facing Democrat Elizabeth Mitchell. "LePage saw an opportunity that very few people saw in the primaries, to go out and find these people and say what they wanted to hear," said Brian Duff.. "It wasn't difficult for him, because I think he believes in it himself. Back in that primary, you had a bunch of millionaires who thought they were going to run TV ads and win. Well, LePage did it another way, and it worked really well." Duff added: "The tea party movement is really just taking what is an essential piece of Republican rhetoric, which is that government doesn't work and we need to shrink it and cut taxes." However, "the results can be devastating," he said. "What happens in those cases is, nobody really regulates big business, because they trust big business more than they trust government; and when nobody regulates them, big business can get away with things. I think we saw that on Wall Street in the disaster with derivatives and in the Gulf of Mexico with the BP oil spill."

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