Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
Wealth, as has been noted, is not without its advantages, and for the most part, having more money is preferable to having less.
But this week, fellow Vermonter, you might be happy that you have less discretionary cash than, for instance, Rodolphe “Skip” Vallee, the gas station impresario and Republican moneybags.
In this case, your relative penury may have saved you from making quite as big a fool of yourself as he just made of himself.
That’s because none of us is any less likely than Vallee to get furious at one or another of our elected officials, and in our fury say things that make no sense at all.
Big deal. That vast majority of us who don’t have a spare 10 grand hanging around to splurge on buying TV time will make no sense while talking in our living rooms, heeded (well, heard) only by our intimates.
Now and then, someone will express his or her fury sitting at the back table of the corner pub, to both intimates and acquaintances, and perhaps, if he or she had partaken of enough of the pub’s wares, with enough decibel power to be overheard by strangers at the nearby tables.
Piccolo catastrophe, as they say in Rome. Those strangers were partaking themselves, and will soon forget whatever nonsense they heard.
No, the risk here lies only among the few who get furious at an elected official, have that spare 10 grand hanging around (plus whatever it cost to produce the ad), and apparently rather little (no?) political sophistication. Add in an apparent indifference to intellectual honesty, and they are in danger of making fools of themselves in public.
That’s what Vallee did by airing the TV ad accusing Sen. Bernie Sanders of hypocrisy for regularly assailing the tax benefits and “golden parachutes” of the very wealthy even as his wife “got a golden parachute of her own” when she left the presidency of Burlington College in 2011.
To begin with, this could be the first political ad in the history of the world which serves no political purpose whatsoever. Many political spots do no good; some are downright counterproductive. But almost all have a political objective beyond just venting the spleen of their creators.
Sanders doesn’t have to face Vermont’s voters again until 2018. By then, this ad would be long forgotten even were there legitimacy to its content, which there is not. Since the ads appeared on only one Vermont television station (WCAX-TV, Channel 3), they can hardly have any impact on Sanders’ potential presidential campaign. No voters in Iowa and only a few in New Hampshire watch WCAX.
Then consider the ad itself, the narration of which begins with an error, the claim that “Bernie won’t tell you” about his wife’s separation package, but then says that he did tell you (and everyone) because he “reported (it) on his Senate income filing.”
Not exactly. He reported what he had to report, that his spouse earned more than $1,000 that year. It’s visible right there on Vallee’s ad.
The $200,000 figure (actually $200,795, but who’s counting?) has been public knowledge since Jane Sanders left the Burlington College job. The “Bernie won’t tell you” allegation, then, is both incorrect and irrelevant. He didn’t have to tell anyone, and never tried to deny it.
As the ad says, that 200 grand is “almost four times what the average Vermont household makes in a year.”
But Jane Sanders got the money over two years. It was basically a year’s salary, plus benefits, plus payment for sabbatical time earned but not taken, and another $15,000 just for going away. Considering that she had almost four years remaining on her contract, and that Burlington College’s trustees obviously wanted her to go (she wasn’t exactly fired, but neither was her departure totally voluntary), her separation agreement barely qualifies as a bronze parachute.
More like tin.
Simply contrast Jane Sanders’ separation package with what Vallee himself (in an interview with VTDigger.org’s Laura Krantz) suggested was proof of Bernie Sanders’ hypocrisy: benefitting from his wife’s payment while assailing the bonuses granted to the AIG insurance company in 2009.
This is less a comparison of apples and oranges than one of kumquats and second base.
Those AIG payments were indeed golden – more than $1 million to each of 73 on the insurance company’s staff, or five times Jane Sanders’ payout. But they were not parachutes. They were the opposite: “retention bonuses,” the company called them, designed to persuade employees to stay, not cushion their departures.
Besides, while partly government subsidized as are all colleges – without Pell grants and guaranteed student loans its revenues would be lower – Burlington College had not just received a $170 billion taxpayer-funded bailout.
AIG had, explaining why Sanders attacked it, as did several Republican senators who are as conservative as Vallee is. One of them, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, suggested that AIG’s top executives consider suicide. Read in context – and knowing that Grassley sometimes displays a puckish sense of humor – it’s clear he didn’t mean that literally. But it was not just senators from the left side of the political spectrum who were enraged at AIG back then.
Vallee, however, is enraged only at Sanders. For the sake of discussion, let’s stipulate the possibility that his anger is justified, that Sanders’ left-of-center policies are foolish and his criticism of the gasoline prices at Vallee’s Maplefields convenience stores is off the mark.
With a little time and perhaps a little expert advice, surely it would have been possible to come up with a more credible attack. Were Vallee a writer submitting this work to an editor, he would have been told to redo it so it made sense and told the truth. Were he a student submitting it as a paper to his professor, he would have gotten an F.
Which apparently it did. Its plea to listeners to call Sanders and “tell him to give back the golden parachute,” has resulted in “a trickle” of calls to Sanders’ Burlington office, and one to Washington, spokesman Michael Briggs said.
Oh, and by the way, it’s not Bernie’s “golden parachute” to give back. It’s Jane’s.
None of this means Skip Vallee is a bad guy. Given to a bit of petulance now and then, perhaps, but who isn’t? Vallee is former ambassador to Slovakia who once ran for the state senate as a Republican. It’s hardly surprising that he’s not a fan of Bernie Sanders.
Like a lot of other wealthy political activists these days (left and right), Vallee appears incapable of being embarrassed, sort of like a Vermont version of Donald Trump, whose public bravado all but proves that he is unaware that most people consider him a subject of ridicule. So it’s likely that Vallee will be unfazed about making a fool of himself in public, simply by refusing to recognize the possibility.
Again, this is not a character flaw as much as it is a sociocultural phenomenon, seemingly more common than ever, especially among the politically active. Maybe that’s because its appeal is hard to resist.
Happily, only a few people can afford to indulge it. Be thankful you’re not one of them.
