Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political analyst.
[O]h, good. Vermont is in the national limelight again, this time thanks to the results of the Democratic primary for governor.
Or maybe not so good.
Because this latest media/advocacy group squabble over Vermont politics has served no purpose except to reveal both the nastiness and the inanity of public discourse these days.
It started Wednesday evening on the “Tucker Carlson Tonight” program on the Fox News Channel, 24 hours after Christine Hallquist was declared the winner of the primary.
As was true all over TV much of last week, the chatterers cared about nothing but the fact that Hallquist is a transgender woman, for which, said a guest on the program, “she’s come under a lot of criticism.”
Not so, said Carlson. “I think she’s celebrated for it actually, let’s stop pretending. Of course she is celebrated for it.”
Enter now Carlson guest Chadwick Moore. Moore was a left-wing gay writer until he wrote an article for a gay magazine about Milo Yiannopoulos, the gay right-wing provocateur, and was roundly excoriated for it by some readers. Moore apparently assumed that, being gay, those readers were leftists (though to quote one of America’s leading conservative political operatives, “sexual orientation is not an ideology.” Neither is gender identity).
So outraged was Moore by their outrage (this by his own account) that he became a conservative.
Yes, this is an age in which some folks reverse their political views out of petulance.
Not only is Hallquist “celebrated” for being transgender, Moore said, she has “transgender privilege.” In fact, he went on, “she can get away with many, many things simply by being transgender. … But while the entire country is fixated on the fact that she’s transgender, nobody knows anything about her policies.”
Pause for a moment to consider that for much of this discussion, the chyron (for those too sane to watch much cable news, that’s the print slogan superimposed near the bottom of the screen) read: “Dems increasingly hostile to Christians.”
Where did that come from?
Patience. Meanwhile consider Moore’s assertion that “nobody knows anything about her policies.”
Only anybody who paid attention to the campaign. Her policies are those of a plain vanilla center-left Democrat, which Moore could have found out in 10 minutes online had he cared about facts, which he apparently does not.
Enough (for the moment) about the silliness on that side of the spectrum. Turn to the other side, in this case the LGBTQ Victory Fund, whose president, former Houston Mayor Annise Parker, responded to Fox by saying that Hallquist won because she laid out a “progressive vision for Vermont.”
The Fox pundits, Parker said, “claimed Vermont primary voters know nothing beyond her gender identity while in fact the opposite is true – voters chose Christine because of her experience and positions.”
To recap briefly (because it’s been said here before), Hallquist was a weak candidate who beat weaker candidates because she was slightly better known than they were, and she was better known because she was a successful business executive whose transition from male to female had been in the news.
And, yes, she won because she was transgender, because many voters, seeing little reason to vote for her opponents, wanted to tell themselves and the world that Vermont is not as narrow-minded and mean-spirited as … well, as Fox News.
But narrow-minded and mean-spirited observers are not always wrong. The Fox pundits were on solid ground when they said Hallquist’s victory owed quite a bit to being transgender.
And Parker was on weak ground to suggest that Vermonters had flocked to Hallquist’s “progressive message.” She’s less progressive than the candidates she beat. Nor is there much evidence that she (or anyone) excited many voters. There are objective criteria for judging such phenomena – campaign signs on lawns, lots of letters to the editor, big throngs at campaign events. None of that happened.
Oh, about Democrats being “hostile to Christians.” A sweeping statement based on the thin evidence that one Democrat (Hallquist) tweeted more than a year ago, “radicalized Christians are a part of the American landscape, and we tolerate it.”
Arguably a foolish (if not entirely inaccurate) thing to say for someone thinking about running for office. Of course it might seem less (or more) foolish if one knew the context, apparently irrelevant at Fox.
Fox got that Hallquist quote from the Daily Caller, a conservative website co-founded by Carlson. When it writes about Hallquist, it refers to her as “he” and “him.” This is beyond mean-spirited. It is gratuitous cruelty.
The folks at Fox also had great sport about Hallquist’s confusing answers about capitalism and socialism in a CNN interview. She said she doesn’t “know what socialism is.” And when asked if she supported capitalism, she said “I, you know, well obviously the long history of measuring ourselves by increasing gross domestic product is a flawed measure.”
Bad answers. But some politicians who call themselves socialists don’t know what it is either, including Vermont’s own Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose “socialist” model is Denmark, which has a thriving capitalist economy. She didn’t come close to answering the question about capitalism. As mentioned, she is still not very good at this game. She might improve. Practice tends to make better, if not perfect.
It will be interesting to see whether she improves enough to defeat incumbent Republican Phil Scott in November. Is it too much to hope the campaign can proceed without needless, ignorant, naïve, and/or offensive commentary from her detractors and her champions outside the state?
Probably.
