[E]arly in the WCAX-TV forum for the Democratic candidates for governor Tuesday evening, co-host Darren Perron challenged contender Ethan Sonneborn by pointing out that at 14 he was “not old enough to drive, not old enough to vote, not old enough to drink, so why should Vermonters take you seriously?”
Good question, Mr. Perron. But then why did you and your bosses take him seriously enough to include him in your forum, giving him one fourth of the roughly 25 minutes devoted to the Democratic candidates? After all, it’s not as though he could really become governor, could he?
Well, yeah, he could. Channel 3 was right to include him in its panel. Perhaps because they lived in more rational eras, our predecessors did not bother to include an age requirement for the governor. Consistent with a Vermont political season that seems either absurd or pitiful, law and statute require only that governors have lived in the state for four years before they are elected. Sonneborn qualifies.
So we have to take him seriously.
Especially because (and here is where absurd and pitiful move to the fore), Sonneborn was by no means the least impressive of the six candidates who appeared on Channel 3 this week.
“I think Vermonters should take me seriously because I have practical progressive ideas and I happen to be 14, not the other way around,” he told Perron.
Not bad.
Not as bad as Keith Stern’s inability to answer much of anything in the half-hour he shared with incumbent Republican Gov. Phil Scott, whose re-nomination he is challenging, after the Democrats were done.
Not as bad as Christine Hallquist’s reply to her opening question about whether her being a transgender person would “factor into the vote and should it.”
She said she hoped voters would “treat it like I’m from a foreign country they really weren’t aware of.”
Whatever that meant.
Reasonable people can debate whether that question should have been asked. No one can doubt that Hallquist should have expected it and had a better reply ready.
Just as one of her opponents, James Ehlers, should have expected a question about clean water, his specialty. But after a strong start saying he would “insure that polluters pay,” he wandered into the history of clean water laws going back to 1983, and then talked about needing “a strong economy as well because we can’t recruit people to come work here if we don’t have the water,” which is true but did not answer the question.
But it’s the Vermont governor’s race of 2018, where not being ready for prime time is the norm. Polls show that most Vermonters have never heard of any of the four Democratic contenders. So all four had the opportunity to make that invaluable first impression.
It may be fitting that the one who took the most advantage of this was the least well-known: Brenda Siegel of Newfane. Though she stumbled a bit at first, Siegel spoke coherently and forcefully about her plan to combat opiate addiction.
But Siegel shone only in contrast to her competitors. This is known as setting a low bar. What stood out is that all six gubernatorial candidates from both parties were on the air, and the only one who seemed to know how to do the job was the guy who now has the job.
This is not an endorsement. There are plenty of reasons to vote against Phil Scott. But governor is not an entry-level position. The governor is the head of the government, meaning that experience in government might be considered a prerequisite.
It is generally accepted that the law firm’s senior partner should have passed the bar, the CEO of a brokerage firm should have bought and sold stock, the head honcho at a software company should know how to write code.
So maybe the governor should have worked in government.
But the five challengers for governor of Vermont are the owner of a grocery store (Stern), a former utility company executive (Hallquist), the head of an environmental advocacy organization (Ehlers), and the founder of a dance troupe (Siegel).
And a child.
What’s next? Electing a president of the United States whose chief credential is that he once hosted a reality TV show?
Oh, wait.
So the current level of political decadence is not unique to Vermont, and on both the state and federal levels, it is bipartisan. Some Democrats seem interested in running publicity-mad lawyer Michael Avenatti or publicity-mad billionaire Tom Steyer for president. There’s no reason to think they know anything at all about running the government. But they’re famous.
This all may have started in the 1980s with the two presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson. He was then and remains an extraordinarily intelligent person, a charismatic speaker, a compelling personality, and a hero to many of his fellow African-Americans.
But what convinced some people that he could get nominated and elected was his celebrity, which seemed to outweigh the complication that he had neither held nor sought public office. The presidency is not an entry-level position, either.
Or it least it wasn’t until now.
In Vermont, these inexperienced candidates filled the vacuum created when elected Democrats, assuming that Scott was unbeatable, declined to run. In that sense, all four Democrats deserve praise. So does Stern, the only one willing to stand up for the Republicans who find Scott insufficiently conservative.
But there’s a good reason that most people who run for higher office have first held lower office. It’s good training. Being governor (or president) requires knowing how government works, which includes knowing how politics works. It’s fashionable these days to disparage politics, but it’s a mistake. Politics is the mechanism by which free people govern themselves. It’s necessary.
It’s also a craft, one Phil Scott’s five challengers have not yet mastered.
