Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[W]ell, that’s over.
Campaign 2014 is about to slip away, mourned by few, and describable by one word: nothing.
In Vermont and nationally, this was a campaign that lacked a theme.
Oh, it had a lot of noise (though not even much of that in Vermont). There were charges and counter-charges, screaming and yelling, the endless search for “gaffes” during speeches and debates.
But as a dour Scotsman noted some years ago, sound and fury do not necessarily signify anything.
If anything distinguished the 2014 campaign (though, again, not that much in Vermont), it was money. All over the country candidates, political action committees (both regular and “super”), and “charitable” organizations raised and spent billions, some of it “dark money,” the origins of which need not be disclosed.
Vermont was spared most of that, as it was spared most of the name-calling, TV ads that distort the significance of routine votes in Congress, and mindless sloganeering.
Almost all the political news stories are about fundraising and ad-buying, campaign strategy and tactics, and which campaign has hired which consultants.
It wasn’t that the campaigners ignored issues. The candidates, their supporters and their opponents regularly invoked spending and taxes, the Islamic State and Ukraine, energy and the environment, schools and health care.
And, toward the end, Ebola. Not quite all Ebola, all the time. But close.
But to invoke is not to discuss, and there has been precious little discussion of any of these topics. Not that American political campaigns were ever models of dispassionate examination of the details of public policy issues. But amid the sloganeering, name-calling, and over-simplifying that always transpired – OK, maybe even that usually dominated – some of those public policy details were examined, if not always dispassionately.
No longer, or at least hardly at all any longer. Candidates proclaim what they are for or (especially) against. But they rarely explain why or go into more detail than would fit in a short sound bite or on a bumper sticker.
Nor are they very often asked to do so. If the nature of politics has changed, so has the nature of political journalism. That’s the nature, not the quality. In Vermont as in the rest of the nation, most reporters covering the campaigns are talented, skilled, and devoted to their task.
It’s just that the task rarely includes examining how candidates would try to govern or legislate. Almost all the political news stories are about fundraising and ad-buying, campaign strategy and tactics, and which campaign has hired which consultants.
And, of course, predicting, poring over the latest poll results as though they were the entrails of a dead fish by which necromancers of old prophesied the future.
“It may be too much to ask that we journalists stop trying to do what we do worst — predicting the outcomes of races — and start doing what we should do best: hounding the candidates into specific answers on difficult questions,” political columnist Joe Klein said last week.
But Klein is out of the old school (and – full disclosure –an old buddy) and probably knew that indeed it was too much to ask these days.
There is nothing wrong with “horse race” coverage. As the late, great, political reporter Jack Germond noted, whatever else a campaign may be, it is a race, and everyone wants to know who’s winning. Granted, comparing a candidate with a horse may insult the candidates, though on second thought some ought to be relieved that the comparison is to the horse in its entirety.
But there may be something wrong with coverage that rarely goes beyond the horse race, the fund-raising (important though that may be) and the strategies.
In mainstream journalism, it isn’t a reporter’s job to tell people which candidate’s policy proposals the reporter prefers. It is — or at least it used to be – the reporter’s job to tell people what those proposals are, and to subject them to rigorous, objective analysis.
That’s rare these days. And it’s been almost entirely absent in Vermont this year, though less because reporters ignored the proposals than because there were hardly an proposals to examine.
Go to incumbent Democrat Peter Shumlin’s web site and try to find a hint of programs and policies he will put forward if re-elected. Aside from repeating (in a grammatically questionable sentence) his pledge to make sure “every single Vermonter will have health care simply because they are a resident of the Green Mountain State,” Shumlin says almost nothing about his third-term plans.
That’s neither unusual nor reprehensible. Shumlin is a four-year incumbent running on his record. He doesn’t have to tell voters how he would govern the state because they already know.
Republican challenger Scott Milne started late and without much money, so he didn’t start outlining his policies until a few weeks ago. Only on Oct. 22 did he unveil an economic proposal.
The heart of his plan to “incentivize new employers,” is a five-year moratorium on the corporate income tax for “new Vermont businesses created in the next three years.”
The proposal confused fiscal experts because, as noted by Sara Teachout, a senior fiscal analyst of the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office, with very few exceptions, new businesses in Vermont don’t pay taxes as businesses. The owners pay personal income taxes on the profits.
In an interview, Milne acknowledged that fact, and explained (though this was not how the plan was outlined on his campaign website) that he did intend for the moratorium to be on the personal income that business owners earn from start-up firms.
“I’m saying that would be zeroed out,” he said, referring to the portion of the business owner’s income earned from a start-up..
That would be a somewhat regressive tax change. Business owners tend to be upper-income earners. His plan to “waive” capital gains taxes for three years on income earned from investments in Vermont companies would likely be even more regressive. Most capital gains are earned by the wealthy.
Milne said that reducing these taxes would “change the image of Vermont of not being an employer friendly state,” which in turn would spur investment and create jobs.
His assumptions here are plausible, but conjectural. Small business and business start-up statistics are as confusing as they are instructive. Most small business startups are sole practitioners, meaning a big jump in new start-ups can be a sign of economic weakness; lots of people start a business because they can’t find a good job.
This could be one reason scholars Yasuyuki Motoyyama and Jordan-Bell Masterson, in a study for the very pro-entrepreneurial Ewing Marion Kaufman Foundation of Kansas City, found that, except for providing good public schools, not much that government does can be proven to have any significant impact on the rate of business start-ups.
In fact, the assumption that Vermont’s much-proclaimed “poor business climate” has damaged the state’s economy – or even whether Vermont really has a poor business climate – is an assumption that may not withstand scrutiny. Murky though the statistics are, they by no means indicate that Vermont is the worst state in which to start a business, or to succeed with one. According to the Small Business Administration, new businesses started in Vermont in 2002 and 2007 were somewhat more likely to still be around in 2012 than were businesses started in those years in supposedly more business-friendly New Hampshire.
As Milne pointed out, Vermont has an impending “demographic problem,” with a projected decline in the working-age population. But so do other rural states, including those with lower taxes, weaker regulations, and a reputation for being “employer-friendly.”
This analysis of the Milne plan is open to debate. But it does appear to be the first analysis it has received. Perhaps reporters figured Milne was unlikely to win, anyway, so why go to the trouble?
Or perhaps that’s just not what reporters do any more.
Or what they no longer have the time to do, what with the slimmed-down staffs of news organizations.
If so, that’s good news for the political consultants, and maybe the candidates, but not for democracy.
