(Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.)
[I]n general, as noted in the good book (Proverbs 16:18, worded more elaborately), pride goeth before a fall.
In Vermont, pride cometh every other fall, during political campaigns, which tempt Vermonters to assert their superiority to the rest of the country.
Unlike in those inferior states, Vermonters like to tell themselves, our candidates cannot buy their way into office; our voters are not deceived by dishonest negative campaign commercials; our political back-and-forth remains civil.
This year, that temptation to assert Vermont political superiority is stronger than ever. Out there in the rest of the world, there is a campaign heavy on personal attacks (some of them accurate), light on substantive discussion of public affairs, and featuring a candidate who makes more demonstrably untrue statements than any other presidential contender in the history of the universe.
That’s almost 14 billion years.
While in Vermont, two centrist, civilized, capable candidates contend for the governorship, with some comic relief from a third candidate who is more fun than the top two, who might be too centrist, civilized and capable to be very funny.
Even here, Vermont’s superiority to the rest of the country is manifest. There are a couple of minor candidates for president, too. Neither of them is the least bit funny. Ridiculous, perhaps. But not funny.
In Vermont, the two main candidates criticize each other’s policies. As is common in campaigns, some of these criticisms are based on what appears to be a willful misunderstanding of the other candidate’s position. But Democrat Sue Minter and Republican Phil Scott have not called one another names.
The presidential candidates could not reasonably make that claim.
Scott has even (while of course denying he was doing so) acknowledged having been wrong about something. After insisting for months that his co-ownership of a construction firm that got state contracts posed no conflict of interest or appearance thereof, he has now pledged to sell his share of the business should he become governor.
That was a shrewd political move — it was a necessary political move — but it was also sensible and even a bit humble. Humble is not present on the national political stage these days.
So go ahead, Vermonters. Feel good about yourselves and your politics. You’re better than those other guys.
What a low bar.
And before Vermonters get too puffed up about themselves because their campaign is not nasty, brutish and long, they should remember that it has become awfully silly.
Start with the Democrats, for whom silliness often seems the default position, and who recently filed a complaint with the attorney general’s office alleging that Scott and the Republicans had violated campaign finance laws.
Those laws prohibit any coordination between Scott’s campaign and a political action committee, in this case one set up by the Republican Governors Association. The association’s PAC is running pro-Scott TV commercials. The ads include close-up shots of Scott, which, in the judgment of Vermont Democratic Party Executive Director Conor Casey, “strongly suggests that the cameraman was allowed to remain in close proximity to Mr. Scott to obtain better quality images.”
Casey is an honorable gentleman. But as smoking guns go, his evidence does not smoke. It may not be a gun. No wonder Attorney General William Sorrell, himself a good Democrat, all but dismissed the complaint, saying that “for us to launch a real investigation, we have to have reason to believe that there has been a violation. It’s not just simple speculation.”
It isn’t that there has been no collusion between the Scott campaign and the RGA, or between the Minter campaign and the Democratic Governors Association. We are talking here about people who know one another, gather at the same drinking establishments in both Washington and Montpelier, travel in the same circles. It would be absurd to think they are not making sure their allied counterparts know of their plans.
But they know how to do that without breaking the letter of the law, and the fact that a cameraman got a good close-up of Phil Scott is hardly evidence of lawbreaking.
Just as one might begin to wonder what could be sillier than Vermont Democrats, along come Vermont Republicans to bail them out. Just a day or two after Casey’s accusation, Republican state Chair David Sunderland accused Secretary of State Jim Condos, a Democrat, of surreptitiously sending absentee ballots to Democratic areas earlier than to GOP strongholds, thereby giving Democrats an advantage.
“Clearly some voters are being presented with more time to cast their ballot than other voters,” Sunderland said. “And, because the equal protection clause protects individuals from unequal treatment by the state, there may be a concern about this process as it relates to equal voting rights.”
Sunderland is also an honorable gentleman. To his accusation of this improbable conspiracy, though, there is but one reasonable response:
“Huh?”
This is Vermont. It is not Alabama, Wisconsin or one of those other states trying to prevent people from voting. Any qualified Vermonter who wants to vote may vote and will have ample opportunity to do so — tomorrow, the day after and every tomorrow through Nov. 8, at any town clerk’s office or by absentee ballot. Those ballots are easy to get, everywhere. Were there any reason to suppose Condos thought he might tilt the election by sending them to Burlington earlier than to Milton, there would be reason to suppose that Condos had gone bonkers. He has not.
By and large, Vermonters can still feel (relatively) proud about their political campaigns, which are (relatively) honorable and civilized. But if the state’s party leaders continue to be so silly, that pride (or “haughty spirit” as Proverbs adds) could go before … well, it’s not important enough to be a fall, but at least an embarrassment.
