“There’s been a shift — not just for me, but for all elected officials — from in the past, when even if we disagreed with the policy direction of a public servant, we had that discussion in a respectful way,” he begins. “In some quarters, we have joined the kind of nasty national dialogue that becomes more personal and hateful. Some of that’s technology. You can write anything you want anonymously on the Internet and not be held accountable. And the media measures stories by how many hits they get. People tend to look for sex, crime and controversy …”
“Or cat videos,” the reporter interjects. “People love cats.”
Shumlin is undeterred: “And good news doesn’t sell …”
“Do you have a cat?” the reporter interrupts again.
“Ah, no,” Shumlin replies.
Perhaps he should get one. When the 59-year-old Democrat was first elected, his public relations honeymoon rivaled the dizzying heights of Niagara Falls.
One reporter noted that Shumlin, as the second Putney loyalist to win his post, was following in the footsteps of Vermont’s most legendary statesman, the late George Aiken.
Another scribe, admiring the new leader’s “gazelle-like physique,” showcased his regimen of running and cross-country skiing.
A third, targeting the chief executive’s eye for deer hunting, tagged along to reveal, “Now here I was, sharing Shumlin’s Ziploc bag of chocolate-covered raisins — bro-ing it out in the woods.”
Such swooning only skyrocketed when the governor, facing 500 miles of state road closures after 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene, leapt into a helicopter and over the Green Mountains in a single bound.
Then something happened. Was it when the barefoot, barely clad Shumlin raised eyebrows in 2012 after crossing paths with nocturnal bears raiding his birdfeeder?
Or when he negotiated and later had to negate a controversial land deal with his down-on-his-luck next-door neighbor in 2013, only to disturb thousands of frustrated Vermont Health Connect customers three months later by dismissing trouble with the insurance website as a “nothing burger”?
Or was it one of the 87,788 other reasons cited by the same number of voters who favored his fledgling Republican opponent (“Reluctant Candidate Scott Milne,” one newspaper tagged him) in 2014, sending one of the closest races in state history to the Legislature for resolution?
Whatever the case, suddenly his media hunting buddies were loading up headlines about “Shummy” and “The Likability Problem.”
But this isn’t a story about Peter Shumlin the politician, dodging incoming fire while shooting off bullet points in advance of another legislative session.
This is a story about Peter Shumlin the person — the one who, while choosing to face public scrutiny, has something to say about constant criticism in a say-anything social media world.
“The bottom line is everyone likes to be liked, and I, like any human being, miss being liked by everyone. But the national electorate is turned off by politics and politicians, has seen stagnant incomes, feels incredibly frustrated, and wants to ‘throw all the bums out.’ Nobody is very happy with incumbents. I understood if I put forth a really aggressive agenda on all fronts, it wasn’t going to be a ticker-tape parade if we were going to get things done.”
Shumlin will kick off his final year as governor by delivering his last State of the State address Jan. 7 and annual budget message Jan. 21.
“There won’t be any big initiatives,” he says when asked for specifics. “It will be about completing what we promised to deliver.”
That said, Shumlin, talking to friends and neighbors over the holidays, is revealing plenty of plans for the future.
‘Removed from the mainstream’
The story of Peter Shumlin Private Citizen begins in the southeastern Vermont town of Putney, population 2,702, where he grew up in the same hills as Aiken, the former Republican governor and U.S. senator who chose green for the color of the state’s license plates and coined the term “Northeast Kingdom.”
“George Aiken was the first politician I ever knew, and that probably was true for any kid growing up in Putney,” Shumlin told this reporter on the eve of his 2011 inauguration. “George Aiken was our hero and who we thought of when we thought of public service.”
Shumlin was introduced to Aiken early: In 1951, his parents, George and Kitty Shumlin, founded Putney Student Travel to send high school students on educational excursions worldwide, and their first and only employee for a decade was Aiken’s daughter, Barbara. But when Shumlin became governor, he revealed a less celebrated childhood memory.
“I remember well in second grade being called into the principal’s office with my parents to have them be told what I already knew, but hoped beyond hope that they would never find out,” he said in his first inaugural address. “That with all the good efforts of my teachers they could not teach me how to read; that the prospects of my being a successful student and going onto college were unlikely.”
Shumlin was diagnosed with dyslexia, a condition in which neurological short circuits in an otherwise normal brain deter easily deciphering of the written word. With early intervention, Shumlin learned to read well enough to juggle English and government studies and graduate with honors in 1979 from Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
But those early years in Putney, one soon will see, continue to echo in all aspects of his life.
Returning home, Shumlin would join his younger brother, Jeff, in taking over the family travel business, which, partnering with the National Geographic Society, has grown into a multimillion-dollar company.
At age 24, he also won election to the Putney Select Board and waded into a local quagmire — what to do with the town’s shuttered Windham College — that led to his first state media splash.
The federal government proposed turning the school into a 500-bed prison. Shumlin persuaded Putney voters to reject the plan by a 3-1 margin, then convinced organizers of the nation’s first college for students with dyslexia, Landmark College, to take over the property.
In so doing, Shumlin took his first step on the political ladder.
“I know this sounds so corny that people don’t believe it, but I’m the kid who had trouble learning how to read, and there was no expectation I’d have the privilege of running a state,” he says today. “I really felt that Vermont had given me so much, I wanted to give something back.”
In 1989, Shumlin won appointment to a vacated Vermont House seat, then won election as a state senator in 1992, became his chamber’s minority leader in 1995 and, when Democrats gained a majority, its president pro tempore in 1997. After an unsuccessful run for lieutenant governor in 2002, he returned to the Senate and his party leadership post in 2006.
Shumlin wasn’t afraid to push ahead-of-their-time proposals inspired by his past. Championing the bills that allowed Vermont to become the first state in the nation to adopt same-sex civil unions in 2000 and to approve full marriage rights by a legislative vote in 2009, he pointed to his early struggles with reading.
“You can’t go through an experience in life where you are ridiculed and questioned without having huge empathy for those who are also different, for those who are struggling, for those who don’t have a voice. Having felt removed from the mainstream, I tend to connect to issues like that.”
Moving on to tackle climate change and its threat to the state’s ski industry just as the nation was starting to discover the Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006, Shumlin repeated a remark made by Aiken in 1941: “Vermont is one of the few states that can sell 4 feet of snow and 20 below zero at a profit.”
‘Do it on my own terms’
Shumlin hoped to make more history upon becoming Vermont’s 81st governor.
“I really felt that in order for the state to grow jobs, opportunity and our quality of life, we needed to make some pretty bold changes, and I think we’ve done that.”
Shumlin cites the shift from the now-closed Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon — which he spent years trying to shut — to more renewable energy sources such as solar and wind; the state’s first-in-the-nation universal access to preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds; and policy changes to treat drug addiction as a disease rather than a crime.
“When I devoted my 2014 State of the State address to heroin addiction, we took a fair amount of heat. People said, ‘You should be focusing on everything else but.’ Now you’ve got presidential candidates saying we do have a problem.”
But not everything has gone according to plan. Just ask any signal-starved Vermonter who remembers Shumlin’s “commitment to delivering broadband and cell service to every last mile.” Or people still struggling to navigate VermontHealthConnect.gov. Or the dozens of demonstrators who interrupted his most recent inauguration to protest his decision to abandon a plan for a single-payer health care system.
“We’ve taken a lot of abuse on the Vermont Health Connect website, and that’s fair enough — it was a challenge. And we failed on single-payer financing — the price was just too high to be economically palatable, and that was a huge disappointment. But we now have the lowest uninsured rate in the country, after Massachusetts. That’s virtually universal coverage. There’s more work to do, but it’s huge progress.”
Vermonters don’t necessarily agree. A fall survey by the Castleton Polling Institute found that 40 percent of those surveyed believe the governor is doing a good job, compared with 43 percent who think otherwise. Shumlin’s approval ratings are lowest among those who say they follow news very closely.
“I think the biggest misperception is that we have failed to accomplish what we set out to,” he responds. “The way you win elections now is by painting everything as terrible and negative, and you’re going to save the day. My biggest frustration is that good news doesn’t sell.”
That hasn’t stopped Shumlin from making headlines. This past June, he divulged he won’t seek re-election in 2016 — an early-bird announcement unheard of for anyone not wanting to be seen as a lame duck.
The governor believes he had little choice.
“The new campaign finance laws required me to either announce it or have my filing tell the story on July 15. Since I never asked for a penny from anybody after this last election, I knew the press was going to write the story, ‘He’s not running again,’ and I couldn’t deny it. So I wanted to do it on my own terms. But had that filing deadline been Aug. 15, I would have waited until Aug. 10.”
Shumlin doesn’t cite poll numbers when he explains his decision.
“What I love about being governor is that you really can make significant change, but I’ve never seen anyone get much done in a fourth term. I’ve watched both Gov. (Howard) Dean and Gov. (James) Douglas go longer than six years, and I think it’s very, very difficult to get a lot done and still have people enthusiastic about your new ideas. If you say, ‘Tell me big, bold things that Gov. Douglas got done in his last years,’ I don’t think there would be 20 new ideas that came popping out of your mouth.”
That said, Shumlin empathizes with everyone who has held the position.
“Until you get here, you don’t realize how all-consuming, difficult and exciting this job is. Like any profession, to have friendships with current and former governors is a huge help. Because they are there or have been there making the tough decisions.”
‘It’s how I survived’
Shumlin speaks regularly with fellow governors John Hickenlooper of Colorado and Dannel Malloy of Connecticut (both who also grew up with dyslexia) and well as his predecessor Dean, who now offers political commentary on such television news outlets as MSNBC.
Shumlin is an equally skilled speaker — for some, too much so, a fact he attributes to his childhood reading challenges.
“Some people have said I come off as sounding kind of slick,” he told this reporter in 2013. “The fact of the matter is I’m not — I’m able to very quickly express thoughts because it’s how I survived.”
But that hasn’t stopped people from questioning whether he’s always truthful or trustworthy (for proof, scroll through the reader comments under most any Internet story about him).
“I’m not someone who spends a lot of time worrying about what perceptions are,” he responds. “Don’t misunderstand me, we all like to be liked. But I’m more concerned about focusing on how do I get done all of the stuff that I put in the air to get done. I have found this the most productive time in my governorship in many ways because I don’t have to worry about getting re-elected. I can really focus on the job.”
Then again, listen to this reporter ask a seemingly simple question about a recent press release from Vermont Interfaith Action — a grassroots coalition of several dozen Green Mountain religious congregations — that said Shumlin’s administration had agreed, for debate’s sake, to disclose the full cost of all needed public services, rather than simply start budget negotiations with an already pared-down plan.
Is that true?
“Hook, line and sinker,” Shumlin said just before the holidays.
The reporter checked to ensure his audio recorder was working.
“Well, actually, I don’t really know,” Shumlin quickly amended. “We met with them, had a good conversation. I had to leave the meeting early and, to be honest with you, I haven’t followed up. I said leave it with Justin (Johnson, his administration secretary), he gets thing done.”
(And he did: Johnson confirms his office will provide the requested numbers upon presenting its annual state budget proposal later in January.)
What’s the average Vermonter to make of all that? Some may see it as proof that Shumlin’s just another politician. Others may point out he unwittingly proved his interviewer’s original thesis: That the target of so much viral venom is, in the end, human.
Speaker of the House Shap Smith understands. This past summer he entered the 2016 race for governor, sparking a flurry of comments like, “Do we need another Shum-lite?” This past fall he exited to help his wife fight breast cancer, spurring his onetime critics to switch to public prayers.
Shumlin shakes his head at it all.
“You gotta love politics,” he says.
Does he?
“No — I’ve never found the politics of politics a game that I want to stay involved with. That’s why I don’t want to be a politician for the rest of my life. When I had to give up my other jobs to become a full-time public servant, I didn’t see it as a career. The press never believed me on that. They always thought, ‘Oh, he’s ambitious.’ But as a governor who has no ambition to go to Washington, D.C., I’m just not the kind of person who can sit in Congress and not have things happen.”
Instead, after turning 60 this coming spring, he’ll prepare to move onto a new chapter. After years of not publicizing his personal life, he recently announced his marriage to his longtime partner, Katie Hunt.
“I’ve been governor for the time that we’ve been together,” he says, “so you can imagine how little quality time we’ve been able to spend.”
Shumlin says they’ll move this coming fall to Windham County, where he’ll return to work at Putney Student Travel.
“We change kids’ lives in a short period of time.”
He anticipates his own transformation will take longer — specifically, 12 months from now.
“I do think when you make the decision not to run, the press disengages with you a little bit — they stop covering every breath you take. I’m not complaining. I’m really looking forward to going back to private life and being Peter Shumlin, not Gov. Shumlin. And I think that, in the end, history will judge us for what we got done, not what people said about us.”
Kevin O’Connor, a former staffer of the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, is a Brattleboro-based writer. Email: kevinoconnorvt@gmail.com
