Has everybody been keeping up with the campaign websites?

You don’t know what you’re missing.

First, of all, printed out, they are perfect cures for insomnia. Just try to stay awake reading prose such as “Supporting and sustaining Vermont’s businesses will be the first step in an eonomic development strategy” (Deb Markowitz, and, yes, that’s cut and pasted; her web site really says ‘eonmic’) or “I devoted my time to bringing entrepreneurs and business leaders together to develop economic development legislation that would create jobs” (Matt Dunne).

What is remarkable about the candidate web sites is not that they are filled by writing that recalls the late novelist Nelson Algren’s term “dead stick prose,” but that most of them read as though they were written by the very same practitioner of dead stick prose. It seems highly unlikely that there could be four writers who are quite that bad in exactly the same way.

(Four, not six, because the sort-of exceptions here are Sen. Susan Bartlett’s and Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie’s web sites. When Dubie “speaks” in the first person on his site, he does so in plain if uninspired English. On her site, Bartlett is both breezy and specific).

But today’s post is not primarily a literary critique. It is a plea to Vermont’s voters – and especially to its journalists – to read some of these web sites carefully, to note the (often concealed) specifics in the public policy positions, and to insist that all the candidates flesh out their relatively indistinct proposals with real detail.

Specifically, with dollars and cents detail.

The first job of any governor of any state is to be a prudent steward of that state’s fisc, as the public treasury used to be called. So when a candidate pledges, for instance, to take steps to improve the state’s economy, somebody ought to ask that candidate just how much those steps will cost, and just how the candidate intends to pay that cost.

And any candidate who responds, “by making government more efficient,” or words to that effect, is not qualified to be governor.

For instance, most of the Democrats say they will “expand broadband to every last mile by 2012” (Sen. Peter Shumlin on his web site; in his television commercial he says 2013) or “(b)ring the economic development potential of high-speed internet and cell service to all of Vermont’s businesses and to the last mile of every town in Vermont,” (Dunne).

That has to cost money. As Sen. Doug Racine had the gumption to acknowledge, “we cannot rely on the private sector to provide this service.”

Private Internet providers are not going to extend broadband down every little dirt road in every little hamlet unless the state helps pay for it, directly by appropriation or indirectly by giving the companies a tax break.

Either way, that means less money in the ol’ fisc.

(It should be noted here that by and large Racine is the most straightforward candidate when it comes to acknowledging fiscal realities. During the Legislative session, he even suggested a temporary tax increase).

The Democrats also like to talk about “investing.” “In our institutions of higher learning” (Dunne), in “energy efficiency” (Markowitz), in “smart grid and smart metering technology” (Racine), in health care (Racine and Shumlin).

Another word for “investing” is “spending.” It isn’t that the Democrats are being disingenuous here. Those spending proposals are real investments, which may pay benefits in the future. First, though, they cost money.

Even Republican Dubie, who wants to cut taxes and spending, calls for a “strong push to help Vermont students lead the nation in science, math, engineering and technology,” which sounds very much like an investment, or cost as it is sometimes known.

But isn’t it unreasonable to ask these candidates to tell Vermonters just – or at least roughly – what all these proposals will cost and how they will pay for them?

No. Au contraire, as they say just north of here, it’s irresponsible not to ask them. Certainly after August 24 when the Democratic nominee is known, it would be irresponsible not to insist on specifics from that nominee and from Dubie.

In fact — and this is specifically for the political journalists, including this one – it is irresponsible not to ask them for their paperwork. Let’s not take their word for it. When Candidate A says his/her broadband or higher education plan will cost X million bucks, let’s ask how they know. Who’s the high tech or higher ed economist who ran their numbers? Let’s see those numbers (this is especially for news organizations with lots of resources; are you listening Channel 3? The Free Press?) so we can run them past our own experts.

There is here a difference between Dubie and the Dems. Though the Republican, should he win, will propose spending money – every governor does –his campaign centers on his pledge to cut both spending and taxes.

OK, Mr. Lieutenant Governor: Just which programs would you cut or eliminate? Which taxes will you reduce? How much would that cost the state treasury? And precisely how would you offset the revenue loss?

And don’t say, “by reducing waste, fraud, and inefficiency.” As the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to note, there is no line item in any government agency budget reading, “waste, fraud and inefficiency.”

Then let’s hope Dubie does not succumb to that national Republican deception of claiming that taxes can be cut without loss to the treasury, that lower taxes will so spur the economy that tax revenue will stay level, maybe even go up.

This is unadulterated garbage, and should be described as such. Lower taxes did not lead to higher revenue under George W. Bush, under Ronald Reagan, or under John F. Kennedy in the 1960s.

Yes, in raw terms, revenues did rise after those presidents cut taxes. But only because the economy grew. Yes, it grew somewhat faster because taxes were cut. But in all those cases, the government would have ended up with more money in the till under the older, higher, rates. The authority here ought to be Gregory Mankiw, the highly regarded economically conservative economist and loyal Republican who was the head of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors: “Lower tax rates might encourage people to work harder and this extra effort would offset the direct effects of lower tax rates to some extent, but there was no credible evidence that work effort would rise by enough to cause tax revenues to rise in the face of lower tax rates.”

The Reagan tax cuts, Mankiw wrote, “did not cause tax revenues to rise,” and he called those who predicted that they would “charlatans and cranks.”

Or, in this context, unqualified to be governor.

Tomorrow, candidates have to file their campaign finance reports, revealing how much they’ve collected, and from whom. How much they’ve spent, and on what.

Though money and politics is the subject of the bulk of today’s post, those filings will not be discussed here Friday. As regular readers know, the intent of this web site is to cover the stories nobody else is covering, and almost every major news organization will send a reporter to the Secretary of State’s office Thursday afternoon to get the info.

All those reporters can read and do arithmetic at least as fast and as accurately as this one, who is happy to defer to them.

Sen. Bartlett: Enough money?

This one will, however, get copies of the filings, look them over, and discuss them Monday if there is anything worth discussing that the other folks have not already covered.

Speaking of politics and money, a housekeeping note and an appeal. The News Guy, who has a life outside these postings, is going to take some time off in August (exact dates to be determined). Aside from the time off, many of the 39 days and (roughly) ten posts between now and the August 24 primary will be devoted to covering that primary, primarily the contest for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

This means going to campaign events, which in turn means driving around the state, which in turn means buying gasoline and occasional lunches and possibly a motel room or two if an important event ends too late and too far away to drive home safely.

It means, in short, spending money, and despite those advertisements you see over on the right, the News Guy’s major source of revenue is reader donations. Readers who have not donated are urged to do so.

Just Look over on the right under “Pages,” where it says, “Donate. It’s easy.

Speaking of politics, money, and news coverage, kudos to the Burlington Free Press, which, first of all, did not run last week’s very bad Associated Press story about the race for Auditor as if there were two, not three, major candidates. Then on Monday, the Freep had a front page story centering on the other guy, Doug Hoffer, who is challenging State Sen. Ed Flanagan for the Democratic nomination. (The winner will take on Republican incumbent Tom Salmon).

One of the papers that did run the bad AP story, the Brattleboro Reformer, then used the AP’s corrective (but not correction; it didn’t acknowledge the earlier story) about the Democratic primary, and also had a staff-written story about Hoffer.

But the Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus and the (jointly owned) Rutland Herald only appended a semi-correction to a letter to the editor, promising to do better in the future and saying “(T)he Associated Press was in error by not including Doug Hoffer in its article.”

Yeah, but you were in error, too, fellas. Editors ought to know who is running for major statewide office.

Okay, now to those campaign finance reports, even though we don’t yet know who raised how much.

Except that we sort of do.

One may take, as the saying goes, to the bank, that Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie, the only Republican seeking the governorship, will report having raised more than any of the five Democrats. A couple of weeks ago, one of Dubie’s senior campaign staffers mentioned the figure of $800,000. Sure, he could have been bragging. But that would have been foolish. The exact figure will be known to all the world Thursday evening. The smarter move would have been to low-ball the expectation. Dubie has probably raised more than 800 grand.

As to the Democrats, it’s all but certain that Secretary of State Deb Markowitz will report raising more money, and Sen. Susan Bartlett less, than their three competitors. Markowitz’s campaign aides have not thrown around a number, a la the Dubie camp. But they are obviously operating under the assumption that their candidate will lead the money parade as she did in the earlier filing last summer.

Bartlett effectively acknowledged she’d be last, issuing a statement Tuesday afternoon conceding that after the numbers are in the “conventional ‘wisdom’ will be that my candidacy is in last place.”

But Bartlett argued that “there have been many Vermont elections in which the highest spender hasn’t been successful, I’ve won some of those elections and plan to do it again in August.”

Leaving the three guys, Sens. Doug Racine and Peter Shumlin and former Sen. Matt Dunne, perhaps in that order.

Or perhaps not. Dunne will no doubt have the least of the three, but Shumlin has bought television advertising time while Racine has not, perhaps meaning that Shumlin has more money to spend.

Or just that Racine is biding his time and saving his money for later. Amy Shollenberger, his campaign manager, said the campaign was “working on  a paid media strategy for sure,” and exploring “different options.”

Which could mean that the campaign isn’t sure it will be able to afford much TV time.

“We’re running a really grass-roots campaign,” Shollenberger said.  “It’s different from some of the others. We relying on a lot of volunteer help.”

So say officials of all the Democratic campaigns except Markowitz’s.

“The ground game in this race is going to be very important,” said Shumlin Campaign Manager Alex MacLean. “It’s going to be mail, phone calls, and canvassing, because we’re targeting such a small number of people.”

Kevin  O’Holleran of the Dunne camp had a similar message, saying the candidate who “comes in with the most money and is able to buy a whole bunch of TV time isn’t going to be successful. We’re building up more of a grass roots campaign.”

All that could be the denial and/or desperation of losers.

Or, in this case, it might be true.

Because the turnout really is likely to be quite small. Political Scientist Eric Davis suggests no more than 60,000 voters in the Democratic Primary. And the estimates go down from there, down to as low as 30,000.

Just to put this into some context, in 2008, Democratic candidate Gaye Symington got 69,534 votes finishing third in the governor’s race after running one of the most bumbling campaigns ever. Not just ever in Vermont. Ever anywhere. Yes, that was a general election, Still, her total would have to be considered the rock-bottom Democratic vote, a rock-bottom not likely to be reached next month.

If these low estimates turn out to be accurate, reaching the “masses” (even just the Democratic-voting masses) may be less important than mobilizing committed supporters, appealing to two or three socio-political niches, and getting loyal voters to the polls.

It would be kind of like “the old days”(“old” meaning back about 1980) when primary campaigns worried less about TV ads than about “identifying your ones and twos” (committeds and likelies) and arranging for enough high-school seniors and bored housewives to drive them to the polls.

An old-fashioned election. How Vermontish. It’s the political equivalent of eating local food, fixing up vintage houses, wearing fleece vests to dress up. It might work, Susan Bartlett is right. More money does not necessarily lead to victory.

But not enough money necessarily leads to defeat. The Democrats may be about to find out how much is enough.

On April 17, 2009, Aaron B Xue, a 15-year-old freshman at Essex High School who was an honor roll student, a tennis player, and a cellist, shot and killed himself in a field near his home.

The weapon, according to his mother, Ge Wu, a professor in the University of Vermont’s Department of Rehabilitation and Movement Services, was left in the field for Aaron by another Essex High School teenager.

This other boy, Ge Wu said, was both a friend and a tormenter to her son. The other youth, she said, “frequently coerced Aaron, spread rumors about him, and threatened him.”

Essex police would not precisely confirm Ge Wu’s account of where Aaron got the gun, but did not dispute it, either. Captain Brad LaRose of the Essex Police Department said that because the investigation remains “open,” and concerns a juvenile, “the laws are very strict on releasing any information.”

But he did report that “the gun did not belong to (Aaron) or to his family.”

According to Ge Wu, the friend-tormenter actually left two guns, which had belonged to his late father, a State Police officer until his death some five years earlier. The boy also left ammunition for the weapons, she said.

In their grief, Ge Wu and her family did what parents who have lost children often do. They decided to memorialize their son by trying to prevent similar tragedies in the future. In their research, they discovered an ugly little fact about Vermont: its high teenage suicide rate.

As explained in Wednesday’s post (scroll down) Vermont has a relatively high suicide rate for people of all ages. But at least in comparison with most of its sister states in New England and neighboring New York, Vermont’s teen suicide rate is strikingly high.

According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, between 1987 and 2006,  2.12 of every hundred-thousand Vermonters under the age of 19 shot themselves to death. Maine’s rate was almost as high, but in the other New England states and New York, the rate was substantially lower. New Hampshire’s was 1.71. The others were less than one per  hundred-thousand. The rate in Massachusetts was only 0.42.

Ge Wu thinks she knows why: guns. Not only are they plentiful and all but unregulated in Vermont, but Vermont and Maine are the only two states in New England without a Child Access Prevention (CAP) law, requiring firearm owners to lock their weapons away from children when they know minors might have access to them.

So she decided to try to get one passed. With the help of professionals dealing with youth suicide, she formed Citizens for Safer Vermont Children and drafted proposed legislation labeled “Aaron’s Law.” One of her legislators, Linda Waite-Simpson, a Democrat of Essex Junction, introduced a bill last February, H. 737

It promptly went nowhere.

Well, it went to the Judiciary Committee, from where it went nowhere, and the committee chairman, Democrat William Lippert of Hinesburg, understands why, and how difficult further progress is likely to be.

“It would take grass roots organizing,” he said. When she came before the committee, we heard very powerful and emotional testimony. But I said to her, if and when this is taken up, it’s not a slam dunk. It’s filled with controversy because it touches on the issue of firearms, even though it is not a gun control bill. Those are the political realities as I see them.”

Lippert is right to see powerful opposition to “Aaron’s Law” from the influential gun lobby. Ed Cutler of Westminster, the chief legislative director and past president of Gun Owners of Vermont, said his organization has “serious problems with that bill.”

First, he said, “the lack of suicide and violence in this state” made the legislation unnecessary.

Worse, he said, “even kids should be able to defend themselves,” and passage of a CAP law could prevent people from getting to their weapons if they were attacked in their homes.

The only example he gave was Kimberly Cates, the Milford, N.H. woman who was murdered in her bed last October. Her 11-year-old daughter was tormented and seriously injured. The family had guns, Cutler said, but the woman’s husband, who was away on business, “had (the weapons) locked up and nobody could get to them.”

If this is Cutler’s best argument, he doesn’t have much of a case. According to the story in the Manchester Union Leader, Kimberly Cates was slain in her bed at 4AM by intruders who snuck into the house. There’s little reason to think that had her husband been home he wouldn’t have been just as fast asleep at that hour. Only taking a loaded gun to bed would have saved them.

This doesn’t mean that the case for a CAP law is airtight. In New Hampshire, which has such a law, the teen suicide rate by firearms was slightly higher than in Pennsylvania, which does not.

Furthermore, a case can be made that CAP advocates are overstating the extent of the danger. Nationally, suicide rates declined among 10-to-24 year-old males from 15.43 suicides per 100,000 in 1991 to 11.39 suicides per 100,000 in 2006, according to the CDC.

And while Vermont’s teen suicide rates are high, the actual numbers are small. IN 2007, the last year for which final statistics are available, four young Vermonters committed suicide, at least two of them with firearms.

The question is whether any of them might not have killed themselves had they not been able to get their hands on a gun. The answer, not from gun control advocates but from data-driven scientists, seems to be yes.

Daniel Webster, a health policy expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said an article that he and others published in the Journal of the American Medical Association “examined effects of CAP  (laws) on teen suicide, and found that they did indeed lower suicide risk for teens.”

It may be true that, as Cutler of the Gun Owners of Vermont said, “if (teens) really want to commit suicide, they’re going to find a way.” But studies show that most suicide attempters decide to kill themselves on impulse, an impulse that often fades before they complete the task. Most of those people don’t end up dying from suicide.

“Given these facts,” an article in New England Journal of  Medicine noted, “access to guns likely turns an impulse into a final decision.”

But those are only scientific facts. They may not prevail in the Vermont Legislature, where power – or perhaps, in this case, perceived power – often trumps mere data.

Note: There will be no post next Monday.