This commentary is by Gordon Korstange of Saxtons River, a retired Vermont English teacher.
At last it’s in the open — what we knew all along: Phil Scott is our Daddy, “the adult in the room.”
We should have known it, since he’s just like a lot of daddies: While the family would argue and plan what to do, Daddy would sit in the living room reading a newspaper and dream up auto racing metaphors like: “We have to make sure the engine doesn’t over-rev and self-destruct.”
Then, after his family came to him with the proposals, he would rear up and be the adult in the room and, like many daddies, say, “No, no, no. I won’t go and you can’t either unless you follow my Big Voice directions.” Back to the children’s room we go to change our plans.
Twenty-three times he’s done this, for a new Vermont record, just ahead of Howard Dean.
Now he’s at it again. He wants to allow individual members of the public employee family to be able to take their “allowances” and spend/invest it in 401(k)s, which may sound good to those who want to take their chances on the market. For the rest of the family who don’t want to go it alone, however, that would mean a loss of funds available for the group pension fund investments.
Well, Daddy is a Republican, after all, and that means trusting private enterprise, not government. Looks like we’re in for Veto 24.
It’s important for Phil-Daddy to keep the family in line because as he, the adult, stated recently, there’s a “feeding frenzy” going on in the house. Descending the metaphorical evolutionary ladder, he goes from implying that legislators are children and then that they’re fish. Of course, then he says how much he really likes them, doling out the daddy love.
Well, we could have changed our daddy in the election of 2020, but lots of the Democratic Party (including former legislators!) wanted to keep him — for reasons unknown to me — except that maybe (1) they think our brave little state should have a brave Republican daddy just to prove that we were different from Alabama, or (2) that we don’t really trust our Democratic family or (3) that our hearts really do belong to Daddy Phil.
