Author Archives: John S. Walters

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About John S. Walters

Writer, editor, sometime radio personality, author of "Roads Less Traveled: Visionary New England Lives."

“Election Day” is an obsolete concept

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Us political observers haven’t taken sufficient notice of the fact that early voting is making the idea of “Election Day” ever more irrelevant. And that’s a good thing.

Well, except when a politician flip-flops on a key issue late in the game.

Vermont hasn’t gone as far as some jurisdictions in abandoning the calendrical imperative as a limit to voting rights. Oregon’s elections are entirely conducted by mail, with each registered voter automatically receiving a ballot. We don’t do that, but at least we make ballots freely available either by mail or in person at your town clerk’s office for more than a month before election day.

Although the service is underpublicized (Jim Condos doesn’t have an advertising budget), more and more Vermonters are taking advantage. According to VTDigger, roughly 17 percent of ballots for the “August 9” primary will be returned in person or by mail before the polls open.

This is inconvenient for pollsters and pundits and for politicians crafting last-minute strategery, but it’s a very good thing if it enables more people to vote.

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He spins right round (like a record)

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Matt Dunne has forgotten the cardinal rule of what to do if you find yourself in a hole: Stop Digging.

The series of events he triggered with his spinaroonie on renewable energy siting continue to echo through Vermont’s gubernatorial race. It’s clearly the single most significant passage of this interminable campaign, which is why I keep writing about it. And I am frankly shocked at the lack of media coverage it’s received. (Except for Seven Days, which jumped on it immediately and has followed it ever since.) Digger? VPR? Free Press? Vermont Press Bureau? Bueller?

I withdraw the preceding comment. VPB’s Neal Goswami wrote it up Monday afternoon. VTDigger’s Mark Johnson filed a story that appeared Tuesday morning.

Today brought two more events, neither of which will do Dunne any good — and one that will further damage his standing (or what remains of it) with ‘mainstream Democrats.

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Matt Dunne loses his biggest environmental booster

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For those who thought I was making a mountain out of a molehill, here’s your Monday morning wakeup: environmental activist Bill McKibben has withdrawn his endorsement of Matt Dunne for governor. He’s shifted his support to Sue Minter. The news was broken today by Seven Days’ Terri Hallenbeck.

This is big in two fundamental ways. First, obviously, McKibben is the planet’s number-one climate change activist. His endorsement of Dunne was effectively an environmental seal of approval.

Second, McKibben was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Dunne — indeed, he encouraged Dunne to run for governor, presumably because he thought that Dunne was the best candidate to continue Vermont’s renewable energy push. As recently as last Wednesday, McKibben co-signed a letter to the Addison Independent endorsing Dunne.

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Dashboard to the junkyard?

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Way back in January 2013, when the earth was young and Peter Shumlin was still popular, the Governor unveiled two online transparency portals aimed “to open access to a litany of information about state government finances and life in the Green Mountains.”

Spotlight provided information on how state funds were being spent. Dashboard offered updates on the progress of Shumlin’s policy initiatives. Shumlin was particularly proud of Dashboard.

“We compiled a list of statistics that’ll show progress, if we’re making progress, or sliding backwards, on issues from crime to school graduation rates,” Shumlin said, referring to the “Governor’s Dashboard” site.

Spotlight is still there. Dashboard, however, appears to have been taken out back and shot.

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Methinks The Donald is overcompensating

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Recently, I made sport of the graphic-design misadventures of the Lisman and Scott campaigns. Well, maybe it’s a Republican thing, because Donald Trump is putting out some truly awful stuff himself.

The Donald’s banner ads have started following me around the Internet. There are several different ones, all featuring Trump doing his best Mussolini pose (except he’s always wearing that damn baseball cap, which makes him much less dignified than Il Duce) with short, bold messages and some sort of vibrant, thrusting visual. Like so.

Trump thrustYeah, that’s the ticket! Noble visage, call to action, stirring image of American ingenuity at work.

Except, hmm, that’s the space shuttle, right? First flew in 1981, now permanently retired from service? Rendered obsolete by the passage of time and its own imperfections? Occasionally subject to catastrophic failure?

Maybe that’s intentional. You know, “Make America Great Again,” like when we had our own rockets penetrating the atmosphere and delivering payloads into space.

Or, more likely, the graphic designers got an order to come up with a picture of a stiff, hard phallic device thrusting upward with explosive force, scattering its fiery power far and wide on the landscape. Liquid hydrogen pearl necklace, you might say.

Good grief. Instead of remaking himself into a more acceptable figure, he’s just getting stranger and stranger. I hope Vermont Republicans are proud of their standard-bearer.

“No one will ever trust him again.”

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Matt Dunne, pre-Friday:

Dunne says the state can’t meet its 90 percent renewable energy goal by 2050 unless it encourages the development of large-scale wind and solar projects.

Dunne is a proponent of large-scale renewable wind and solar projects.

That’s from VTDigger’s guide to the primary candidates. and it’s completely at odds with the Matt Dunne who came out against ridgeline wind on Friday.

“We must battle climate change and continue down the path to 90% renewable energy by 2015. …But we must do this in a Vermont way.

… “Large-scale ridgeline wind projects should only take place with the approval of the towns where the projects are located.

… “Vermont’s renewable energy future is largely in solar and small-scale hydro.”

In short, Matt Dunne has executed a last-minute flip-flop on one of the key issues in Vermont politics. And that’s why a well-connected liberal insider told me today that “No one will ever trust him again.”

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Matt Dunne just lost my vote

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I’ve been thinking about the race for governor since the very beginning. I’ve never felt a sense of clarity because I thought the two frontrunners, Matt Dunne and Sue Minter, were both good candidates. There were good reasons to go either way.

Until now.

Dunne just released a renewable energy siting policy that would make it much harder to expand our renewable capability. It would give veto power over large-scale wind projects to local communities. In all respects, it adopts the rhetoric of the anti-renewable movement.

And, in a turn that may be unprecedented in our politics or anyone else’s, his press release includes a quote from his gubernatorial rival, Peter Galbraith, a persistent opponent of ridgeline wind.

Seriously, has that ever happened before?

(Yes, I know it happened earlier in the cycle when Dunne adopted Galbraith’s stance on corporate contributions. But at the time, Galbraith hadn’t officially entered the race. Now, so close to the primary? That’s a whole different ballgame.)

There’s something fundamentally Nixonian about this. Two candidates ganging up on Sue Minter — who I must now presume is the front-runner, and clearly the biggest threat to Dunne’s election.

It’s also very close to a white flag from Galbraith, a tacit acknowledgment that he’s not going to win.

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Bernie’s hometown bros could use a little help

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Fun fact: When you Google “Has Bernie Sanders Endorsed Matt,” it autofills “Has Bernie Sanders Endorsed Mattresses.”

Unfortunately, the search results don’t shed any light on whether Bernie has sold out to Big Serta, or if he prefers the versatility of a Sleep Number. (Heck, for all I know he’s still rockin’ the waterbed.)

I discovered this irrelevant factoid when trying to find out if Bernie has ever endorsed Matt Dunne for governor. The answer, once I undid the autofill, is apparently no. Dunne endorsed Bernie very early in his campaign for governor, and has lashed himself to the rhetorical mast of the S.S. Sanders, but the Junior Senator has not returned the favor.

Dunne did manage to bag Bernie’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, whose endorsement was announced today by the Dunne campaign.

Which begs the question, What About Bernie?

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The VPR Poll: Pants On Fire, and other observations

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Rich Clark was worried about inaccurate results. That’s why he didn’t want to survey Vermonters about their preferences in the August primary.

Okay, but when you look at the results of his VPR Poll, you realize that some of those people are lying their asses off. Which kinda makes the whole accuracy concern seem a bit irrelevant.

The biggest whoppers came when respondents were asked how likely they are to vote. 87 percent said they were very or somewhat likely to vote in November. In actual fact, we’ll be lucky to hit 60.

As for the primary, 68 percent claim to be very or somewhat likely to vote. More than half of those people are lying. The biggest primary turnouts in recent years were 23 percent in 2010 and 30 percent in 2000, the year of the Great “Take Back Vermont” freakout.

Which makes me wonder. If that many people are lying about that, why should we believe the rest of their answers?

After the jump: analysis of their possibly truthful answers. 

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Too Many Cooks Equals No Broth

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Sorry to do this to you first thing in the morning, but it’s time for a reading and math comprehension test!

Take a look at this table, and see if any numbers jump out at you.

AuditorTable 7.16

The abbreviations in the first column are for three departments in state government: Human Resources, Information & Innovation, and Finance & Management. And the answer, or at least the answer I’m looking for, is on the DHR line.

The Department of Human Resources has 25 supervisors and 82 classified employees. That’s a rather stunning ratio of one supervisor for every 3.28 supervisees.

There is no absolute ideal ratio; it depends on many factors. But rarely, if ever, is 1:3 a reasonable figure.

There may be perfectly good explanations for DHR’s ratio. But to the outside eye, it looks like featherbedding.

This table comes to us courtesy of State Auditor Doug Hoffer. It’s included in his latest performance audit, which exposes a dismaying case of administrative sloppiness in state government. In those three departments, administrators routinely failed to conduct annual performance reviews with their staff.

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