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Correction Appended

Gov. Paul LePage of Maine said Friday that the state’s N.A.A.C.P. leaders could “kiss my butt” after they questioned his decision not to attend Martin Luther King Day events in Bangor and Portland.

The remark by Mr. LePage, a newly elected Republican, came after The Portland Press Herald reported Friday that the N.A.A.C.P. felt increasingly slighted by him. Leaders of the group’s Maine chapters told the newspaper that Mr. LePage had declined several invitations from them in recent months and questioned whether he would look out for their interests.

Asked to respond Friday, Mr. LePage – who gained a reputation for combativeness on the campaign trail – said he merely had scheduling conflicts. He also said the N.A.A.C.P. officials should “look at my family picture,” pointing out his adopted son.

“My son happens to be black, so they can do whatever they’d like about it,” he told a reporter for WGME. “The fact of the matter is there’s only so many hours in a day, so many hours in a week, and so much that you can do.”

When the reporter asked Mr. LePage to respond to the suggestion that he had a pattern of slighting the N.A.A.C.P., he said, “Tell them to kiss my butt,” adding, “If they want to play the race card, come to dinner. My son will talk to them.”

Mr. LePage’s spokesman, Dan Demeritt, later released a statement reiterating that the governor’s decision not to attend the events on Monday was not about race. “This is about a special interest group taking issue with the governor for not making time for them,” the statement said, “and the governor dismissing their complaints in the direct manner people have come to expect from Paul LePage.”

Mr. Demeritt also released the text of a recorded radio address, scheduled to be broadcast Saturday, in which Mr. LePage praises Dr. King as someone who “spent and ultimately gave his life making sure that people got a fair shake regardless of race.”

During the campaign, Mr. LePage turned heads when he told a group of fishermen that if elected he would tell President Obama “to go to hell.”

Correction: January 14, 2011

An earlier version of this post misidentified the television station where the reporter Mr. LePage spoke worked. It was WGME, not WCSH-TV6.

View the original article here

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