Before they grow all giddy at the prospect of electing a governor and therefore dominating all that stands between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut River as far as the eye can see from the highest Green Mountain peak, Vermont Democrats might ponder the wisdom of the late Lars-Erik Nelson.

Back when Democratic congresses and Republican presidents were the norm, Lars, the Washington Bureau Chief for the New York Daily News (who died much too young at 59 in 2000) explained how it worked:

Mr. and Mrs. Typical American, he said, vote for their Democratic congressional candidate to protect the government programs that keep them safe and prosperous. Then they vote for a Republican president to protect themselves against everybody else’s Democratic congressman.

There’s a Vermont version of this political phenomenon. For almost two decades (not counting the blip during the “Take Back Vermont” rebellion following passage of civil unions in 2000), Vermonters have been electing liberal Democratic majorities to the state legislature.

Then they elect moderate Democratic (Howard Dean) or Republican (Jim Douglas) governors to protect themselves against those very same liberal Democrats.

Consistent? No, but not illogical.

So yes, of course, Douglas’s announcement that he will not run next year seems to make it more likely that the next governor will be a Democrat. But it’s not yet time for the Dems to start measuring the Capitol’s second-floor Corner Office windows for the drapes. Whoever wins the Democratic primary is still going to have to convince the voters that he or she is not a spendthrift.

No, this does not mean that a successful Democratic candidate will have to become less liberal. In Vermont, being liberal is obviously not a political liability. Being profligate with the public fisc is. A candidate can be quite liberal without squandering the taxpayer’s money.

How?

Oh, we’ll let the campaign consultants earn their pay by answering that question. No sense in imparting this wisdom for free.

No sense, either, in repeating here the political chatter easily available elsewhere. All that stuff about who might or might not run and how it would all play out. Nobody knows how it will all play out. For now, let’s stick to what has not been said, and correct a few things that perhaps shouldn’t have been said.

Starting with the absurd claims that Douglas will not really be a “lame duck.” That’s just what he is. A lame duck is an elected official who is not going to run for re-election. Douglas won’t be powerless. He’s still the governor, with a veto pen and the biggest megaphone in the state. But Thursday morning he became less powerful than he would be if there were some chance he’d be governor for a few more years.

Not much more credible is the Republican claim that their party has a “deep bench.” It does not. Or at least, it doesn’t have a strong deep bench. Not that one of those third-stringers couldn’t end up winning; any one of them might turn out to be an excellent candidate. But none of them has shown much so far.

Also to be taken not-so-seriously are projections that if several Democrats run in their party’s primary, one of them could win it with only 20 percent of the vote, or even less, meaning a fringe candidate could get the nomination.

Possible, but not likely. So great is the political power of television advertising – and therefore of money – that even multi-candidate primary campaigns tend to pare down the field of possible winners rather quickly to the two or three contenders who can raise enough money to stay competitive. Few voters want to waste their ballot on a candidate who is not considered viable. Odds are that the winner of the Democratic primary will have a majority or close to it.

As will the winner of the Republican primary, if there is one. Apparently there will not be one if Lieutenant Gov. Brian Dubie decides to run, an astounding level of deference, the astoundingness of which has been ignored.

Yes, the Republicans have long been the more hierarchical party. But in most states, when the governor’s seat opens up, there’s usually at least one Republican big-wig who thinks about taking on the heir apparent. Does the consensus GOP view that the nomination is Dubie’s uncontested if he wants it mean that Vermont Republicans are even more hierarchical than their peers elsewhere?

Or just more timid? Or weaker?

Finally, let’s examine why Douglas made this decision that shocked La Toute Vermont (except, perhaps, regular readers of this web site, who might have noted that the possibility was at least suggested right here on July 17).

To begin with, it is reasonable, absent strong evidence to the contrary, to take people at their word. Even public officials have private lives. So when Douglas said he was “ready to write a new chapter in my life” after 36 years in politics, he probably means it. His observation that becoming a grandfather has given him a new “perspective” makes sense to all us grandfathers.

But the honest presence of a personal motive does not disprove a political motive. With the (rather small) amount of campaign money he raised, Douglas had two polls taken by Public Opinion Strategies, a highly regarded Republican polling firm.

The results have not been made public. They have not even leaked, and thereby perhaps hangs a tale. If they had been good news for Douglas –a 60 percent job approval rating, say – they would have been leaked. A political ally or aide of the governor, armed with a bit of printout, would have sidled up to a political reporter and said, “Hey, take a look at this.”

That no such leak occurred at least raises the suspicion that the job approval rating was closer to 40 percent. And indeed some other polls reportedly show not very encouraging numbers for the Governor.

No surprise, really. His job approval numbers haven’t been all that impressive for years. He won his last two races more because he faced weak opposition than because he was strong himself.

And he might be somewhat weaker now because he has seemed less moderate and more conservative in the last year. In both policy and rhetoric, he moved slightly but unmistakably rightward, occasionally getting a little whiney while he was at it.

Could it be that the Democrats might have a better case for measuring those windows if Douglas were running after all?

NOTE: There will be a special posting tomorrow, Tuesday, September 1. It won’t be about Vermont; it will be the News Guy’s reflections on Sen. Edward Kennedy.

(NOTE:

WHAT? THERE WAS SOME MAJOR POLITICAL NEWS YESTERDAY?

YUP. BUT YOU KNOW WHAT? IT WILL BE ABLY HANDLED TODAY BY OTHERS. THE NEWS GUY WILL LET IT PERK OVER THE WEEKEND, PONDERING IT (AS WELL AS THE WEEK’S OTHER IMPORTANT POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT) MONDAY.

About that moose, the one they’re calling Pete: There’s more to this story than meets the eye, at least such eyes that have been reading Vermont’s newspapers and watching the local television news, or clicking onto the You Tube and Facebook entries about poor, put-upon Pete.

This isn’t just a cute story about a moose and the old farmer who has befriended him (if “befriending” a moose is possible).

This is about politics. Not as in Democrats versus Republicans, but as in who has power and how should it be exercised. It is also about the uses and misuses of science. It is about natural resource policy, the rule of law, when violating it is justified, ethics and the philosophy thereof.

Oh, and money. As usual, money seems to be involved.

To begin with, the old (“73-and-a-half,” in his own words) farmer didn’t just stumble upon this abandoned moose. Nor, despite his flowing white beard and Northeast Kingdom roots, is David Lawrence some country bumpkin. He is a rather articulate fellow who knows just what he’s doing, knows it’s against the law, but thinks it’s the right thing to do.

He is, in other words, engaged in civil disobedience.

He is also part of an apparently elaborate animal rescue network whose other members also do not hesitate to violate the law, as they are doing in connection with this moose.

The moose, according to Lawrence, was discovered in early June of 2008, meaning it would have been no more than a month old, by two people from Bethel who were hiking with their dogs when they came upon a female moose with twin calves. The adult (and apparently one of the twins) ran off, leaving one baby moose apparently abandoned.

The hikers, Lawrence said, called the Fish and Wildlife Department where officials told them to do nothing, to leave the baby moose alone.

That’s the law, in Vermont and most other states.

For at least two reasons, one scientific and one…well, a combination of historic and philosophical. The scientific reason is that the baby moose may not have been abandoned at all. Female cervids (deer, elk, moose), say the wildlife experts, are likely to return to their young once they perceive that the “predators” (hikers and dogs in this case) have left.

(The dogs, by the way, had wounded the calf; so this whole controversy might have been avoided had the hikers had better control of their pets).

The other reason, as John Buck, one of the Department’s wildlife biologists explained, stems from “the public trust doctrine that the state’s wildlife belong to the people and not the king. Wild animals can not be owned by any individual.”

That moose doesn’t really “belong” to anybody, even the state; no bill of sale comes with it. But if it is nobody’s property, it is part of the public sphere or province. It doesn’t belong to the hikers, to Lawrence, or to Doug Nelson, on whose Irasburg elk impoundment the moose now grazes when Lawrence is not there feeding him doughnuts.

When the mother did not return after four days, (perhaps because people kept checking on the calf), the hikers decided to intervene. Somehow they found out about “a wildlife rehabilitator,” as Lawrence called her, who was part of the dissident animal rescue effort, and who therefore was apparently on the radar screen of Fish and Wildlife law enforcers.

“She knew that (if she took the baby moose) the wardens would be there and would destroy it. She called me. I’ve been known to do these things before. We believe in saving all the babies we can.”

As he had done at least twice in the past, Lawrence, a retired farmer who lives in Albany, took the calf to Irasburg, where Nelson keeps some 500 elk in 600 fenced-in acres, charging several thousand dollars for the privilege of shooting one.

“This moose was illegally taken, illegally transported and is now illegally being possessed inside an enclosure,” said Wayne Laroche, the Fish and Wildlife Department Commissioner. “My position is I need to be able to enforce the laws. We can’t have people just picking those animals up. I can’t selectively enforce the law. I have to enforce it the same, from the child that wants to keep a baby raccoon to the richest guy in the state.”

Nelson, a major dairy farmer, could be one of the richest guys in the state.

Keeping wild animals as pets, Laroche said, poses disease risks for both people and animals. It can also be dangerous, a judgment confirmed by Joel Berger, a moose specialist for the Wildlife Conservation Society and a professor at the University of Montana.

“Why would you want a pet moose?” Berger said. “As males grow older, testosterone will kick in, and people will need to deal with his increasingly aggressive behavior.”

Berger said a moose can be safely and humanely confined if its human keepers “know what they’re doing. It’s no different from the Bronx Zoo, if they’re accredited for raising captive animals.”

Nelson and Lawrence are not.

But Laroche has another reason for insisting that the moose leave that elk compound. He worries that Pete, along with perhaps 12 other moose and more than 200 white-tail deer inside the compound endanger the state’s wild deer herd because the wild deer could catch chronic wasting disease from the elk.

CWD, always fatal to deer, has not yet appeared in Vermont, but it has been found in deer in nearby New York State. The disease “leaped the species barrier from sheep to cervids. “ Laroche said. “It makes me very nervous.”

Nelson called CWD fears “totally (nonsense)” (He used another word, but this is a proper web site). He said a brain sample is taken from every elk shot on his property and is tested at a laboratory. None have shown signs of CWD, he said.

Kelly Loftus of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture confirmed that a laboratory in Wisconsin had tested the samples from 73 elk shot at Nelson’s hunting compound in 2008 and 43 this year. No CWD was found. The tests are paid for by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Despite these findings, wildlife biologists fear that whenever wild animals are contained, CWD is a legitimate concern.

“At this point, the literature suggests that artificially concentrating animals tends to exacerbate the danger of the disease,” said Bruce Smith, who spent 23 years as senior scientist at the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. “It creates more of an opportunity for disease transmission.”

This doesn’t mean that Nelson’s elk are likely to have the disease. Probably they don’t. But “probably” isn’t good enough for Fish and Wildlife. Because even a small chance of CWD getting into the Vermont deer herd could decimate it. The hunting community would be furious, as would the many hotels, restaurants, and shops that rely on the patronage of hunters. For the department, it would be a disaster.

But there’s more going on here. By January, Nelson needs a permit from Fish and Wildlife if he is to continue operating his elk-hunting operation. The Department insists that, because of the CWD danger, he first eliminate (essentially, shoot) all the wild white-tails and moose, including Pete.

“I would assume they’d be coming in with the strong arm of the law, Nelson said.

Will he comply?

“I don’t know,” he said “We’ve got an awful lot of public support.”

He does. Even Gov. Jim Douglas said he hoped some means could be found to save Pete.

It’s that kind of talk that leads many in the Department to suspect (though Laroche would not come out and say this) that Nelson is using the tumult over Pete as a political device to pressure Fish and Wildlife to grant him the permit without destroying any of the wild animals.

Nelson, on the other hand, thinks the Department would like to shut down his entire elk hunting operation. He’s probably right. Fish and Wildlife officials never liked “canned hunting.” Many don’t even consider it hunting, since it lacks, in their view, the element of “fair chase,” defined by the Boone and Crockett Club the “taking of any free-ranging wild, native North American big game animal in a manner that does not give the hunter an improper advantage over such animals.”

In fact, confined hunting is now illegal in Vermont, with Nelson’s and one other operation “grandfathered” into legality because they were operating before the law was passed.

Nelson does not deny that he has a financial interest in the status quo. Killing all the moose and white-tails would “cost a fortune,” he said, and he already has “a fortune” invested in the deer “because we’ve fed them for nine years.”

Nelson needs the permit, because hunting is the only money-making potential of captive elk. For years, elk owners sold the velvet from elk antlers to Asia, where it is used as medicine and (with more hope than scientific foundation) an aphrodisiac. But several years ago, U.S.-produced velvet in South Korea was found to be contaminated with CWD, and Asian countries banned imports from North America.

This by no means proves that Nelson is motivated only by money. He considers his right to do as he pleases on his land “a property rights issue,” and by all accounts he is a genuine animal lover. He does not hunt. He argues that having hunters shoot the elk is more humane than some kind of mass slaughter.

He also agrees with Lawrence and his guerrilla animal rescuers.

“You know, it’s kind of human nature to nurture and protect the young,” he said. “The game warden said, let’ em die, let ‘em die. I’m a farmer by nature tend to try to help things live.”

Even John Buck of Fish and Wildlife acknowledged that it is “human nature to try to rescue something, to save something, a beached whale or an injured bird.”

But, Buck said, wildlife management “is concerned with the entire population, as opposed to individuals,” and keeping wild animals in captivity “doesn’t serve the conservation purpose of allowing animals to live freely.”

Laroche said the Department was trying to relocate Pete to another state. If that fails, he said, “we need to have the authority to control possession of wildlife in the state.”

He seems determined to enforce the law. Nelson and his allies seem determined to keep the moose and deer. This business is not over.

The News Guy is hot on the trail of several complicated and controversial stories, none yet ready for public consumption.

But fear not. He will not leave you in the lurch, There are always some tidbits, none worth a major take-out on its own, but interesting in small doses.

Consider, for instance, the recent meeting of the Rural Sociology Association in Madison, Wisconsin. Like most gatherings devoted to rural America, this one seemed pitched mostly to the South and the Midwest; lots of talk about the pros and cons of ethanol. But there was also some information that could apply to small towns and rural areas everywhere, even in Vermont.

As reported by Bill Bishop in The Daily Yonder, several of the sociologists reported that their studies found that while rural and small town residents want to make money (who doesn’t?) that wasn’t all they wanted. It wasn’t even what they most wanted.

Terry Besser of Iowa State University studied “thriving small towns” which, she said, were more likely to be in remote areas than close to cities. That seemed to be because the more remote areas required more community involvement.

“You may have less income if you’re more remote, but you will have more connections,” she said.

Rural people who lived near a city were likely to work in that city, meaning they had longer commutes as well as weaker ties to the town they lived in.

Incomes were higher, but she said there was a sense that “people were just living in a place,” rather than really belonging to it.

On the other hand, residents of the tiniest towns and villages seemed less content than those who lived in slightly larger municipalities. In very small towns, she found (according to Bishop) “people burned out working on their communities. Communities of at least 5,000 residents ‘have an advantage over those 1,500 and below,”Besser said.

Similarly, Cheryl Burkhart-Kriesel of the University of Nebraska found that people moved to small towns in that state seeking “a slower way of life,” and closer ties with relatives. Only a third said they moved to take a higher paying job.

No doubt that’s true of many Vermonters. Not that anyone wants to be poor, or even low-income. But apparently a great many people have figured out that – contrary to what one reads in some circles – it isn’t necessary to be all that high income, either.

The lesson being that in pondering “economic development,” its costs, as well as the benefits ought to be in the mix.

Speaking of costs and benefits, here’s an item that the boys in biz school would probably warn against, as it comes under the heading of free advertising for the competition.

But have you noticed that there’s a new, on-line, newspaper in the state? It’s called vermontdailynews.com, and you are invited to Google away for it.

It isn’t really competition, since it: (1) concentrates on Chittenden County rather than statewide matters; and (2) seems to do little (or maybe no) actual reporting on its own. It aggregates nicely, though, and the photography is superb. Word has it that the guy who runs it is a photographer, but for some reason he doesn’t identify himself (or anyone else) in the “About” link.

Don’t be shy, fellas. Tell us who you are.

The health care debate is nationwide, and not specifically a Vermont issue, especially because it’s pretty clear that a substantial majority of Vermonters favor the Obama/Democratic approach to changing the system, if not changing it even more (you will note absence of the word “reform,” a word honest reporters ought not use; “reform” means “to improve by alteration.” Whether the proposed alteration is an improvement is precisely what is at issue).

But along with the other northern tier states, Vermont gets a little attention because it borders Canada, whose health care system is held up as a paragon of virtue by one side and as a sinkhole of horrors by the other. Many a Vermonter knows both: (1) a neighbor who sneaks over to Canada for less expensive prescription drugs; and (2) a wealthy Canadian who has come to the U.S. for elective surgery (paying for it out of pocket) rather than wait months to get the same treatment there.

How pleasing then to find a peer-reviewed, intellectually honest , comparative study of health care in the two countries by American and Canadian physicians and policy experts. It was actually a study of studies, and here’s how we know it’s intellectually honest: it says that for some ailments Canadians seem to get better treatment, but for others it’s the folks South of the border who get better results.

Anyone who resists the temptation to oversimplify and overstate his/her case should be taken seriously.

The study was limited to examining whether there are “differences in health outcomes (mortality or morbidity) in patients suffering from similar medical conditions treated in Canada versus those treated in the United States.”

Neither country “won” in every category. Even these folks, though, have to conclude that by and large the Canadian system serves its people better, not to mention a lot cheaper.

“Despite the limitations of the available studies, some robust conclusions are possible from our systematic review,” the report concluded. “These results are incompatible with the hypothesis that American patients receive consistently better care than Canadians. Americans are not, therefore, getting value for money; the 89% higher per-capita expenditures on health care in the United States does not buy superior outcomes for the sick.

“Canadian health care…produces health benefits similar, or perhaps superior, to those of the US health system, but at a much lower cost.”

But we knew that.