The fight is on, and it promises to be a humdinger.

Attack and counter-attack. Quick response. Thrust and parry. Jab and hook. Give no ground or quarter. The best defense is…well, you get the picture.

All of which is lots of fun, but threatens to obscure the meaningful substantive differences between Republican Brian Dubie and either Peter Shumlin or Doug Racine.

In fact, “obscure,” may understate the case. “Pervert” could be more appropriate. The barbs each side is throwing at the other seem designed to convince voters that the opposition is extremist: that the Democrat would raise everybody’s taxes; that Dubie would permit the poor to starve on the sidewalks.

Not hardly.

As mentioned here the other day, the winner will be governor, not emperor. Even if Shumlin/Racine wanted to raise everybody’s taxes, the Legislature would not. Nor would it allow the poor to starve on the sidewalks.

Besides, the Democrats, who are prudent, do not want to raise everybody’s (or anybody’s) taxes, and Dubie, who is decent, does not want the poor to suffer at all, much less starve on the sidewalks.

“People who depend on vital state services are not going to be abandoned by state government,” said Dubie campaign spokesperson Kate Duffy.

Even the semi-defensible attacks are a bit over the top. There is some justification for Shumlin to argue that Dubie’s economic policies would lead to “deficits, unending deficits, tax cuts for the wealthiest Vermonters and budgets that don’t balance.”  Dubie’s determination to cut taxes and his vagueness about what programs he would cut do complicate the budget-balancing task.

But in addition to redundancy (deficits are “budgets that don’t balance”), the attack ignores Dubie’s pledge that tax cuts “won’t happen in one big step or one year,” but would be “incremental.”

Similarly, Dubie may not be dead wrong when he claims the Democrats have “only two solutions for the challenges we face: more government spending and higher taxes.” Both Shumlin and Racine are on record in the past favoring new programs and higher spending. But while they still favor  some new state initiatives, they are not for higher taxes.

Besides, there’s another candidate who proposes new government spending: Brian Dubie. The jobs plan in his “Pure Vermont” document calls for the state to “increase support for (Vermont Economic Development Authority’s) highly successful interest rate subsidy program,” “ increase public investment in the new Technology Lending Program,” “add support for (Small Business Development Center) counseling,” and create an investment tax credit.

All that costs money. Yet the heart of Dubie’s campaign is to hold the state budget to spending increases of  two percent a year. Because revenue is projected to rise at a higher rate, a Dubie Administration could then cut income taxes by a total of $240 million over four years.

This means, said  Duffy, that Dubie’s plan “is not making any cuts.” State spending, she said, would continue to rise, just more slowly than it has been rising, and more slowly than revenue would rise.

Dubie’s arithmetic is correct, except that he first pledges to close the projected $112 million deficit for the coming Fiscal Year (2012). That would require a spending cut of more than 9 percent, creating a new base. Increasing spending by two percent a year for the next four years on top of that new base would mean that spending would fall by an annual rate of about three-quarters of a percent over a five-year period. Extend the same policy out another five years, and spending does go up, but only at an average annual rate of slightly more than one percent.

That might be the smallest growth rate of state spending in decades, if not a century, raising questions about how realistic the plan is. Dubie claimed that in the early 1990s, Gov. Howard Dean actually level-funded (no increase) spending over a three-year period, a harsher reduction than Dubie’s proposed two percent growth.

Not really. Check the esoteric document available from the Joint Fiscal Office web site’s “Appropriations” page,called “Budget History FY 83-present.” It shows that while the General Fund budget actually went down for one year under Dean, it then started up again, and over a five-year period it rose by an annual rate of 3.4 percent a year.

That document provides other interesting information, both casting doubt on the assertion that Dean really “level-funded” spending and confirming that budgeting is a creative art. In those same recession years that Dean was spending less out of the General Fund, some new expenditures are recorded in the Transportation Fund.

Could it be that the state was using Transportation Fund money (financed from gasoline taxes, auto registration, etc) for non-transportation purposes? The document suggests, but does not prove, that the answer to that question is in the affirmative.

If so, it would not be unusual, in Vermont or elsewhere. One reason for that $112 million projected shortfall for the next Fiscal Year, for instance, is that the Legislature and Gov. Jim Douglas have been effectively filching from the Education Fund by not transferring into it as much General Fund money as the law required. (Legislatures and governors, who make laws, can change them as an alternative to obeying them). Reached at home where he did not have access to his records, Joel Cook, the executive director of the Vermont National Education Association, estimated that the shortfall was at least $50 million.

If the Legislature doesn’t repay that (as it said it would) or come up with enough money again this year, the Education Fund could be short tens of millions of dollars. That would require either deep cuts in school spending or substantial increases in local property taxes.

This poses a potential political problem for Dubie. He wants to cut everybody’s income tax rate by about a third, reducing the top rate from nine to six percent and the lower rates comparably. That’s good politics; everybody likes lower taxes.

But the Democrats will try to convince voters that the result would be higher property taxes, which are the taxes Vermonters really dislike. Democrats are already making that argument as well as claiming that, in Racine’s words, Dubie’s “numbers just don’t add up.”

“He wants to add money for various business promotion efforts…but he wants to cut taxes,” Racine said in a telephone interview. “This sounds like the federal budget discussion. Make promises of higher spending for business and lower taxes for everybody. That’s Washington. We don’t do that here in Vermont.”

That’s harsh, but standard political rhetoric. What came out of the Dubie campaign late yesterday may have crossed the line from standard to…well, to  false. In a statement released yesterday afternoon, Dubie said Racine had wanted to use money from the state’s “Rainy Day Fund” to “expand government-run services,” and that he opposed the “Challenges for Change” plan to make government more efficient.

The first of those accusations is simply incorrect. Racine has suggested dipping into the reserve funds, but only to support existing social service programs, not to “expand” government service. The second charge is minimally defensible, but a stretch. Racine supported “Challenges for Change” during this year’s legislative session, voting for it at least twice,  though he voted against the final Fiscal Year 2011 budget which incorporated “Challenges.”

“Fundamentally, Brian is a decent man,” Racine said. “If he wants to disagree with me, that’s fine. But don’t be deceitful.”

It could be a long two months.

School starts this week (where it didn’t already start), as does – despite this year’s weird delay – Vermont’s general election campaign.

The two are related.

Whether they should be is a matter of legitimate disagreement. Some argue that education should not be “politicized.” Perhaps not. But it always has been and always will be, if only (and not only) because education accounts for more state and local tax dollars than any other function of government.

And this year, there’s little doubt that Republican Brian Dubie and either Democrat, Peter Shumlin or Doug Racine, will have very different ideas about schools and how to pay for them.

So the News Guy today begins a series of several connected (though not consecutive) posts about Vermont schools – what’s wrong with them and what’s right; how much they cost and how they’re financed; what the candidates are saying about them.

Consider this post a general introduction, but one that will pose some impolite if not downright insolent questions, starting with this one: is the whole “school reform” movement embraced by both liberals and conservatives – the one calling for more transparency, accountability, and innovation – a lot of hooey?

Especially, perhaps, in Vermont, where according to the standards by which American schools are judged, the schools are quite good.

Some qualification: That question is a question, not an allegation or even a suggestion. Nor should it imply opposition to transparency, accountability or innovation, just some doubts about how those values are applied to American public schools.

And those italicized words two paragraphs above are emphasized because there is a plausible case to be made that schools in all 50 states aren’t very good, that American public education has become so preoccupied by process that it does not adequately transmit knowledge. (To be examined in a future post).

Though it received little attention, the State Board of Education on August 17 voted to adopt “Common Core State Standards” in math and English, actually a national standard promoted by the U.S. Department of Education, precisely the kind of step urged by “school reform” advocates.

At first glance, at least, this policy might be a step toward transmitting more knowledge. But as the Board acknowledged this transition “will certainly come with cost,” as schools and the State Education Department junk their old curriculum programs and the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) testing they have been using for years.

How much cost? The board didn’t say. But with the state likely to cut back on its share of school funding, any cost increase seems likely to fall on property taxes.

That’s one reason to be wary of school reform, and not the only one in Vermont. Earlier this summer, to qualify for $1.2 million in federal aid, the Burlington school district fired Joyce Irvine as principal of the Integrated Arts Academy. By almost all accounts Irvine was an excellent principal, but the school was “failing,” as measured by test scores, and the federal rules required a rough response – such as firing the principal – as a condition of more aid.

But the school did not “fail” because Irvine was a bad principal. It “failed” because it is chock full of children from poor families and immigrant children who do not speak English. Of course those kids do poorly in standardized tests.

There is only one word to describe Irvine’s dismissal: stupid. Not that the Burlington school officials were stupid; they did what they had to do to get the money they thought they needed. The whole structure is stupid, raising an interesting question: is school reform going to teach children that stupidity is the path to success?

None of this means that schools could not and should not be better, nor that, in Vermont, they might be cheaper. But it does raise questions about the wisdom (lack of stupidity?) of some of the “school reform” movement’s specific proposals.

One pet idea of some school reformers can be ignored– vouchers, or “school choice” as its promoters prefer, under which all parents would get vouchers to send their children to any public, private, or parochial school. This will not happen. It has fervent and well-financed devotees. But it is dead.

Who says? The American people. Voucher plans were put to public referenda in ten locations, including such large states as California and Michigan, in the 1990s. The results were clear. Even though in every case the early polls predicted easy approval, voters rejected all ten by large margins.

No, the pro-voucher side was not outspent. Instead the voters learned something during the campaigns. What they learned was that in the final analysis the “choice” (Americans love choice, which explains those early poll results) lies not with the parents or children, but with the private schools that taxpayer-funded vouchers would support. If it is not discriminating on the basis of race, religion, sex (or, in some states, sexual orientation), a private school may accept or reject any applicant for any reason or for none at all.

With few exceptions, the voucher advocates know they’ve lost. That’s why they’ve retreated to their drop-back position, charter schools. These are public schools operated by private (including for-profit) entities which are exempt from the some of the restrictions and requirements applied to conventional public schools.

Charter schools have not been rejected by the public. Furthermore, some of them seem to be quite good.

But others are quite bad, and on balance standardized tests reveal no convincing evidence that charter schools are any better than regular public schools. A report last year by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO)found that “a decent fraction of charter schools, 17 percent, provide superior education opportunities for their students. Nearly half…have results that are no different from the local public school options and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their students would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.”

In general, studies have found that students who benefit most from charter schools are poor, minority, children whose alternative is an inner-city school, often in a troubled neighborhood. There are, for all practical purposes, no such schools in Vermont. Still, education reformers recommend establishing charter schools around the state.

A good idea? Or an effort to fix something that ain’t broken?

One more observation before ending this introductory post, an observation for which no special expertise about education is needed. If improving schools is the object, making war on the teachers makes no sense.

This does not mean that teachers or their union should be coddled or granted every wish. The National Education Association is a union like any other. It always asks for more than it can or should (or knows it will) get. In this whiney society, teachers tend to be whinier than most, their closest competitors being building contractors, hunters, and farmers, the last of whom have somewhat more justification for their complaints.

Still teachers are  the employees of the entire community, and dissing your employees is not the way to get the most out of them. Like firing a good principal, it’s just plain stupid.

Yet some folks seem to get their jollies by bashing the teaching profession. One wonders where (or if) they went to school.

He'll debate

No, Brian Dubie is not trying to wiggle his way out of debates with his Democratic opponent by arguing that the five independent candidates for governor deserve to join them.

Oh, he thinks they do deserve to join them. But he understands that it isn’t up to him to set the debate rules.

“In theory,” said Dubie campaign spokeswoman Kate Duffy, “Brian does think it’s fair for every candidate whose name is on the ballot to have a chance to…participate in the debate process. But we have not made that a condition to our participation in any debate. We are coming to the debates we have been invited to.”

So there will be two-man debates between Dubie and whoever ends up with the Democratic nomination.

(Concealed Editor: ‘You mean two-person debates, don’t you, because Deb Markowitz could still win that final count of last Tuesday’s primary?’ Response: ‘OK, OK, but it’s more likely to be Peter Shumlin or Doug Racine).

(And for your datebooks, the sponsors and dates of the debates to which Dubie has been invited, Duffy said, are: Vermont Public Radio September 15; AARP at the Doubletree Hotel in South Burlington September 26; Vermont Press Association at St. Michael’s College October 3; Vermont Public Television October 7; WPTZ-TV at Echo Center  October 19; WCAX-TV October 23).

This little flapette emerged because Dubie has a history of being, shall we say, less than enthusiastic about debating his opponents (as Shay Totten of Seven Days documented last year),  and because during a press conference the other day, Dubie indicated he looked favorably on the idea of inviting at least one of the independent candidates to a debate.

But even if Dubie doesn’t want to debate (and there is no evidence that this is the case), he wouldn’t dare try to use the five fringe candidates as his excuse. If he said he would only debate if one or more of the other five got to participate, no one would believe him. Voters would just assume that he was afraid to debate his Democratic opponent one-on-one. It would be politically foolish, and there is no reason to think Dubie a political fool.

In short, the narrow question – will there be debates between the major-party candidates for governor? – is a non-story. There will be. What remains is the broader question – should the five independent candidates who qualified for a spot on the ballot be invited to debates?

Dubie apparently thinks so. His view, Duffy said, is that “debates are a very important part of the campaign process, and he would like everyone to have a chance to have voices heard.”

Who can argue with that? Is this America, or what? No one has the right to silence anyone else or to prevent dissident voices from being heard. The people have the right to be exposed to all points of view.

On the other hand, this being America, anyone may argue with anything. This being America, no voice may be silenced by the state. But (this still being America) no one may be forced to provide a platform for a voice he or she judges unworthy of being heard.

Let’s understand at the outset that no voice is being silenced. The five independent candidates have web sites which any voter who has an Internet connection or a nearby public library (and that’s everyone) can click into and read to his/her heart’s content. Furthermore, all five may go into any town in this state, pass out leaflets, make a speech on the village square, visit the local radio station and weekly newspaper office, or shake hands in the coffee shop.

In other words, they may campaign. They have that right.

But there is no right to be invited by private entities that want to sponsor debates. They have rights, too, including the right to choose which candidates to invite. While there would be nothing wrong if one such entity wanted to sponsor a debate and invite all seven candidates, there are good reasons for inviting only Dubie and the Democrat.

Only one of those two will become governor. These debates are public services, and the public wants to see and hear those two so they can choose between them. Bringing another one, two, or five candidates who can’t possibly win only takes time away from the two viable contenders.

Which might be worthwhile if one of the fringe candidates had anything interesting to say. Campaigns are primarily political; their purpose is to choose the office-holder. But they are partly intellectual. If a candidate who can’t win can nevertheless inform or enlighten – such as, say, the eminent biologist Barry Commoner did when he ran for president in 1980 – that candidate ought to get a little more platform time than one merely mouthing ideological clichés or gratifying his/her ego.

Alas, this year’s five independent candidates for governor fall far short of the Commoner standard. This judgment has nothing to do with agreeing or disagreeing with their policies. Indeed, the News Guy finds a few of their proposals rather appealing, But they are all – based on their web sites and other statements – intellectually  unimpressive.

They are:

–Cris Ericson, a one-issue candidate whose issue is legalizing marijuana and whose “official campaign slogan is ‘Please! People Lovingly Educating and Saving Everyone.”

–Emily Peyton, whose platform combines some reasonable proposals (a state bank) with others such as a “Vermont Unit of exchange (VU) to protect our state from Federal Insolvency” which might politely be described as dreamy.

–Ben Mitchell also has no web site but has some connection to the Liberty Union Party, which does (and who is technically running as the candidate of the Socialist Party). In an interview with Seven Days, Mitchell conceded that he was “not running to win (but just) sitting around for office.” Mitchell calls himself a socialist, but goes into no detail.

–Dan Feliciano who wants to “cut waste…while improving productivity,” as does everyone.

–Dennis Steele, who wants Vermont to secede from the United States. Vermont is not going to do any such thing. On his web site, Steele proclaims that, “the biggest challenge facing Vermont is neither jobs, health care, energy, nor education but rather the American Empire.  The American Empire is the largest, most powerful, most materialistic, most environmentally destructive, most racist, most militaristic, most violent empire of all-time.  Not only is it owned, operated, and controlled by Wall Street, Corporate America, and the Israeli Lobby, but it is unsustainable, ungovernable, and, therefore, unfixable.”

And he expects to be taken seriously?

They all have a right to campaign. The rest of us have the right to refuse to pay them any mind.

But before we leave, a political-grammatical note on the race that’s shaping up as perhaps the state’s meanest, the one between incumbent Republican (though elected as a Democrat) Auditor Tom Salmon and Democrat Doug Hoffer.

On Salmon’s campaign web site, he said that during the Democratic primary campaign against Ed Flanagan, Hoffer “came across as self-righteous and nasty with his dramatic criticisms of Ed and I.”

Elected officials should set a better example for the young (and for that matter the not-so-young). That should have been “Ed and me,” Mr. Auditor.

As for Hoffer, perhaps he could use a proofreader. His web site talked about something happening “throughout sstate government.”

Note: The News Guy will NOT be on Vermont Public Television’s ‘Vermont This Week’ this evening after all. What with all the political turmoil, the station decided that instead of the usual mid-afternoon taping, it would air the show live at 7:30, which presented a scheduling conflict.

Answer: Yes, and historic, too. If not the closest major-party, major-office primary anywhere, ever, it’s close. If nothing else, the Democratic primary is more fun to talk about than the economy, the sundry wars, or, for you Red Sox fans (one of which the News Guy confesses he is not, save when they play the Yankees), baseball. This election has it all: drama, suspense, even a little humor. So enjoy.

Question 2: Is having no winner (yet) bad for the Democrats, meaning good for Republican Brian Dubie?

Answer: Yes. But, then again, no.

Sure, the Democrats would be happier to have an undisputed winner, rather than one guy (Peter Shumlin) leading another (Doug Racine) by 192 votes, and only some 500 votes ahead of the third-place finisher (Deb Markowitz).

The Dems had hoped to hit the ground sprinting Wednesday, raising money and debating Dubie. The first debate had been scheduled for tomorrow evening (the News Guy was to have ‘liveblogged’ it from on site in South Burlington) but it has been postponed. Democrats think and Republicans fear that either Shumlin or Racine (and perhaps Markowitz, too) is a better debater than Dubie, who has a history of trying to meet his opponents one-on-one as rarely as possible. Now the Democrats will have to wait.

Question 3: For how long?

Answer: At least until Friday, maybe until Tuesday, or maybe even for another week after that. Racine issued a statement Wednesday saying he would not concede until the “official results” are released, which he said could come as early as Friday or as late as next Tuesday

Those official results could differ from the unofficial count showing Shumlin ahead. Early counts are often bedeviled by transcription errors, typographical errors, failures to communicate. Over the next few days, town clerks and other election officials will edit themselves and do some recapitulating. Who knows what their final count will be?

Whatever it is, both the second and third place finishers will be close enough to the leader to demand a recount, which could take another week or so.

Question 4: Wait a minute. Didn’t the last statewide recount take closer to two weeks?

Answer: Yes, but that was a general election, for Auditor in 2006, in which the top two candidates got 223,438 between them. Tuesday, slightly more than 72,000 people voted in the Democratic primary, a good turnout, but fewer ballots to count.

Question 5: But won’t another week’s delay be really bad for the Democrats?

Answer: Yes. Or, then again, maybe no. It would cost the eventual winner more valuable time, and it would be a real impediment to fund-raising. On the other hand, the delay would also keep Dubie out of the news and off-stage, or at least away from the center of the stage.

That’s where the top Democrats would be, right in the spotlight, where they are still looking good, acting like grown-ups and treating one another with civility. Shumlin did release a victory statement of sorts yesterday, but it was restrained. So far, the Democrats are neither strutting nor whining.

Question 6: How does anyone know that a recount would be more accurate?

Answer: Because it’s overseen by the courts and operates under much more rigorous standards. Each candidate can have a representative on site (the Washington County courthouse in Montpelier) to challenge any ballot that seems unusual and to monitor the tally. A recount would remove all reasonable doubt that the winner really got more votes than any of his or her opponents.

Question 7: So why not just agree on a recount right now?

Answer: Not a bad question. In fact, unless the leader has a margin of at least 400 or 500 votes,  it might be good politics for whoever wins the official tally to be the one calling for a recount. There will be one anyway if either opponent demands it, the chances are that the leader will still be ahead when the recount is over, and both the candidate and the party will appear public-spirited and generous.

Question 8: Aren’t Democrats worried that all those (mostly) young volunteers who worked so hard for one of the top three will be even more disheartened if one of the others ends up with the nomination, and therefore might not work for the nominee in the fall campaign?

Answer: Yes, and that’s a reasonable worry. But first of all there’s nothing they can do about it, and second it doesn’t loom as a major problem. These candidates, bland if enlightened, did not arouse much emotion. Even most of those who learned to love Candidate A didn’t seem to work up much animosity for Candidates B and C. Most of those campaign volunteers are first and foremost Democrats who want the Democratic nominee to win. They may have to work through a week or so of petulance and grumbling. But most of them will be knocking on doors for (fill in the nominee’s name) by mid-September.

Question 9: How did the Democrats get themselves into this pickle to begin with? Couldn’t they have locked all five candidates in a room and read them the riot act until at least two of them dropped out to seek another office or wait for another day?

Answer: It doesn’t work that way any more, if it ever did. Not just in Vermont, either., It hardly works that way anywhere.

Chicago Democrats or Dallas Republicans? Maybe. But that’s about it. No state party committee, and certainly not Vermont’s, has anywhere near the kind of power over ambitious candidates, who increasingly select themselves. The threat, ‘drop out or else,’ to any candidate would be met by the question, ‘or else what?’

At which point the threatener would have nothing to say. So nobody threatens.

OK, that’s enough questions for now. But remember, this is a good show our pols are putting on for the next few days. Enjoy it.

Scroll down for the earlier version of today’s post.

And don’t forget: The News Guy will be on Vermont Public Television’s ‘Vermont This Week’ Friday.

Assuming that, later in the day, we all know who won the Democratic primary for governor.

We certainly did not know at midnight, when men of a certain age should take themselves to bed, Peter Shumlin was 32 votes ahead of Doug Racine and a whopping 652 votes ahead of Deb Markowitz, with 37 precincts left to report.

(Early morning update: Shumlin ahead of Racine by 121 with 28 precincts still to report)

Which precincts? Where were they?

Who knew?

Well, perhaps someone did, but if so none of the local television stations or newspaper web sites bothered to find out and let the rest of us know, knowledge that could have provided at least a clue as to who was likely to end up ahead. A journalistic failure shared by all.

But WVNY-TV (Channel 7) and WPTZ-TV (Channel 5) had their very own failures. Channel 7 kept leaving one of the Democratic leaders out of its “crawl” with the results, while Channel 5’s just reported percentages. Hello Channel Five: When three candidates have 25 percent, you really ought to give the actual numbers.

Speaking of which, those numbers were kind of impressive. Remember (because you only have to remember the last few days) when all the wise guy political experts (yes, including this one) were predicting that only 40,000 Democrats, at most, were likely to vote?

Well, by midnight, more than 60,00 votes had been counted. It looked as though the total might top 65,000 (though, again, not knowing which precincts had not reported, they could all be small towns with only a hundred or so votes each). An August primary may not be such a bad idea after all

Still, the wise guy political experts and the conventional wisdom weren’t entirely wrong. Susan Bartlett did finish a poor fifth, and Matt Dunne, despite what seemed to be (and maybe was) a late surge, ended up a respectable but not close fourth. It was a three-way race after all.

This nail-biter was not what the Democrats wanted. A clear winner would have been stronger going against Brian Dubie in November. If the winner had been several points and several thousand votes ahead, the win would have seemed more impressive, the losers would have found it easier accept the results.

But that’s one way politics is like life. You don’t always get what you want. Then you have to make the best of what you get.

And what the Democrats got isn’t so bad. They got attention. They put on a good show, for several weeks before Primary Day, and it isn’t over yet. Yes, the close call of the two near-winners may convince some of their supporters to do some tooth-gnashing and grumbling over might-have-beens.

But probably not many. It was a civil campaign, with all five candidates – and almost every Democrat in the state – agreeing that any one of them would be acceptable. Almost no one fell in love with any of these candidates, or worked up a good hate toward the others. Even among the campaign staffers, anger at the opposition seemed muted. Besides, after eight years of grumbling over Gov. Jim Douglas, Democrats want to win, and will likely unite behind whoever comes out ahead.

Because it was so close, a recount is possible, and so are complaints of foul play by the candidates who come in second and third. But the candidates and their supporters know that whining will do their party no good. That long-planned noon “unity rally” today may have to be postponed, and if its’ really close – a couple of hundred votes or so – the runner-up would be justified in asking for a second look.

In fact, if it stays this close, the runner-up, party officials, and everyone else should at least ask the town clerks to make sure they reported the right figures, and that their reports were accurately recorded. A mere transcribing  error could produce the wrong result in this case, and the Democratic nominee ought to be the candidate who won the primary, not just the first tabulation.

Check back later in the day for a fuller post. (Or a special Thursday post if it takes that long to figure out who won).

Correction, though it has already been corrected: Readers who checked in early Monday morning read that Racine had been endorsed by the Vermont Natural Resources Council. The NRDC may not and does not endorse candidates. The endorser was the Vermont League of Conservation Voters.

Tomorrow is Primary Day. Wanna know who’s gonna win? .

Lotsa luck. So would everybody else. But they don’t know. Quite possibly, nobody knows. What fun.

No doubt some Vermonters (perhaps including the five Democratic candidates for governor) are distressed by this uncertainty. Better to savor it. Like much of life in Vermont, it’s a chance to live life they way it used to be lived, a throwback to the days before polling.

Or at least before polling was reasonably accurate, which is roughly 60 years now, meaning longer than most folks remember. Polling’s biggest mistake came in 1948, when all the surveys predicted that Thomas Dewey would beat President Harry Truman, inspiring the Chicago Tribune to hit the streets with journalism’s most celebrated headline. “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

(A blunder firmly stuck in the newspaper’s memory as late as 1976, when the managing editor telephoned the reporter covering the New Hampshire Primary warning him not to call the winners prematurely because “we remember 1948 here”).

Since then, polling has gotten a lot more sophisticated, and if it’s hardly perfect, rare is the election in which almost nobody has the foggiest notion about who’s going to win. In recent years, two Vermont news organizations, the Burlington Free Press and WCAX-TV (Channel 3), contracted with polling firms. This year, they didn’t, perhaps to save money, perhaps because the polling firm Channel 3 had been using, Research 2000, has been sued by another client, and seems to be at least temporarily out of business.

Besides, this race might be effectively impossible to predict, even with a passel of polls. In any election, but especially in a primary, pollsters don’t just make their calls, ask the folks who answer for their favorite candidate, and tote up the answers. That would be pointless because not everybody who answers the phone will vote. So the pollsters first have to “screen for likely voters,” to use the industry jargon.

Hard to do when: (a) the primary is earlier than it has been; (b) no candidate has excited most voters; but (c) no candidate has repulsed them, either, and most Democrats could happily support any one of the five. The usual screening technique – asking respondents if they intend to vote, then maybe asking if they really intend to vote – might not be all that effective.

This could explain why no poll results have been leaked. There are polls. Two candidates, Deb Markowitz and Peter Shumlin, have retained pollsters. Presumably senior staff at both campaigns have some results. Yet none of those senior staffers seems to have sidled up to a reporter and whispered sweet statistics in his or her ears.

Meaning either that neither of those candidates is ahead (or at least safely ahead) or that the results remain inconclusive thanks to the likely-voter screening problem.

(Wait. Isn’t it possible that the senior campaign staffer, even armed with a poll showing his/her candidate in the lead, is too scrupulous to leak confidential campaign information?

Uhh, now that you ask: no).

So Vermonters are happily in the dark. We can all expect some real suspense tomorrow evening. Just think: a reality show with no vulgar housewives. What fun!

Does this mean the race can’t be scoped out at all?

Of course not. So let’s scope, starting with the conventional wisdom, a good place to start because, despite its bad image, the conventional wisdom is usually right, or it wouldn’t have become conventional.

The first conventional wisdom about political campaigns is that the candidate with the most money usually wins. So it’s a two-person race, between Markowitz and Shumlin, the ones who’ve raked in the bucks.

But here’s some conflicting conventional wisdom. In a low-turnout primary, which this is likely to be, the candidate with the best grass-roots support usually wins.

That would be Doug Racine, endorsed by the teachers union, the state employees union, the AFL-CIO, and the Vermont League of Conservation Voters (not, as stated in earlier versions of this post, the Vermont Natural Resources Council, which may not and does not endorse candidates). If all these organizations do a get-out-the-vote operation tomorrow – phone banks, email reminders, ferrying voters to the polls – Racine has a shot, too.

Especially because he’s the only candidate from vote-heavy Chittenden County, and was endorsed last week by a passel of influential Progressive Party members. Only around 10 percent of Vermonters are committed Progs (party chair Martha Abbott got 12 percent running for auditor in 2008), but they tend to be politically aware. They vote.

So it’s a three-person race.

Except for that little voice saying you can’t rule out Matt Dunne. In the last few weeks, he’s been endorsed by the Herald of Randolph, the Addison Independent and the Stowe Reporter. In the last few months, he’s raised more money than Racine and has run some pretty good television ads. His campaign seems to have some energy. At 40, he’s the youngest of the candidates, and the one most at home in the high-tech wired (or, actually, wireless) realm that may or may not be the future.

So it’s a four-person race.

Having come this far, can we take it a step farther and find some way for the fifth candidate, Susan Bartlett, to win?

Not really.

“This is anybody’s race to win,” Bartlett’s campaign claimed in an email yesterday.

Anybody’s but hers. Too bad in a way, because one can make the case that she’d be a good governor. But she never raised enough money to be competitive, nor did she give voters a compelling reason to select her over one of her better-known, better-financed opponents.

But wouldn’t it be funny if she did win?

Whoever wins will debate Republican Brian Dubie Thursday evening in South Burlington. The News Guy will be there, liveblogging from the debate hall (as will Anne Galloway of VT Digger) for Vermont Public Television. The next evening, the News Guy will be on VPT’s ‘Vermont This Week,’ broadcast at 7:30 PM Friday and 11:30 AM Sunday

A Democratic governor, that’s what kind.

Whatever their differences – and there are some – all the Democrats propose to govern the state as one would expect a Democrat would govern. Unlike Brian Dubie, the unopposed Republican one of them will run against after Tuesday’s primary, not one of them promises to cut taxes.

Which does not mean any would raise taxes. Only one even dares to mention the possibility, and the possibilities he mentions are either temporary or selective or both.

So to say that the Democrats would govern like Democrats is not to say that they would govern as Republican caricatures of Democrats, the kind who would make the rich pay higher taxes to finance more generous services for the poor.

These are five center-left Democrats. One or two are a tad lefter and one or two a tad centerer than the others. But as is often the case, Candidate A might be slightly to the left of Candidate B on one issue, but slightly to the right of him/her on another. So where one puts them along the ideological spectrum (assuming that the ideological spectrum is important) depends on which issues any voter finds most important.

From one perspective, for instance, Doug Racine might be considered the most liberal of the contenders. He’s the one who’s open to tapping into the “Rainy Day Fund” or even imposing a temporary tax hike (though he doesn’t think it’s needed now) to avoid budget cuts harmful to the poor. He’s even suggested making sure Internet sales are subject to the state sales tax, and perhaps a special tax on sugar-heavy processed snacks and sodas.

But Racine’s overall policy outlook is relatively restrained. He proposes no big spending programs. Instead he wants to “get back to basics” by being a governor who is “directly involved in every phase of our economic development strategy,” starting with the selection of “the right Secretary of Commerce and Community Development.”

Racine, then, seems to be pledging to improve the state’s economy less by a specific economic program than by his own forceful leadership, with which he hopes to energize state government.

By contrast, Matt Dunne’s rhetoric is unabashedly pro-business. His economic policy paper is titled, “The Innovation State: a Business Plan for Vermont,” and he even accepts the Republican complaint that the state’s economy is held back by “complicated regulations and taxes (and) burdensome costs.”

But Dunne’s specific policy proposals are possibly the most audacious of the bunch (if not always the most comprehensible, at least to those to whom power point presentations remain exotic). He’s calling on the state to issue two separate revenue bonds, each for roughly $400 million, one to finance renewable energy production, the other to bring high-speed Internet service “to the last mile” of every road in the state.

Similarly, Susan Bartlett, the self-described “moderate” in the race, has one of the more novel ideas. Arguing that “innovation and entrepreneurs have always been a part of Vermont,” and could be “true job creators,” Bartlett would establish an ”Office of Innovation and Intellectual Property” to “coordinate the various pieces of our business support organizations (and) educate regional economic development groups about the potential of intellectual property.”

The other two candidates, arguably the most establishment as well as (by the conventional political wisdom) the front-runners, exhibit a comparable mix of caution and daring. Deb Markowitz’s “Jump Start VT” (she does not use spaces between the words; there are depths of degradation to which this web site will not descend) isn’t just an economic policy document. It’s an all-purpose laundry list of positions on issues ranging from ethnic diversity to education.

No sweeping, big-spending programs, but a few bold moves. Markowitz would emulate New Hampshire and require young Vermonters to stay in school until they are 18 unless they have graduated and she would take state money out of big banks that don’t grant adequate credit to Vermont businesses.

Peter Shumlin does have one big-spending plan, $33 million to provide “universal pre-kindergarten education” statewide. But he would pay for it, according to his economic policy (“Vision for Vermont,” spaces in the original) by releasing the state’s imprisoned “non-violent offenders back into society,” which he claims would save $40 million.

Shumlin’s numbers seem to be accurate. His confidence that the Legislature will agree to such a large-scale release of convicted criminals may be misplaced.

As any Vermonter who has been watching television in recent weeks knows, Shumlin also wants to bring a single-payer health care financing system to the state. So does Dunne. Racine favors a similar approach, though he doesn’t say so on his campaign web site, calling only for “universal” coverage. That’s what Bartlett and Markowitz want, too.

Does this mean that if one of these candidates gets elected, Vermonters can expect a universal health insurance system?

No, at least not for a while. The single-payer option is especially iffy, being, for the moment, illegal until 2017 under the new national health law. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the U.S. Senate champion of a “Medicare for all” plan, has said he will try next year to get Congress to move that date up to 2014. Congress seems unlikely to comply, and at any rate, 2014 is two years beyond the term of the governor to be elected this November.

Health care is not the only area of near-unanimity among the Democrats. They all want to bring high-speed Internet to everyone.  They all want to provide small businesses with more credit options. They all want Vermonters to produce and consume more “sustainable” energy, created neither from fossil fuels nor from the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, which they all think should shut down when its license expires in 2012. They all want to use the state’s higher education institutions to help spark a knowledge-based “green” economy.

All five also clutter their position papers with stale bromides. “I want every family to know that if they encourage their children to do well in school and to work hard, they will be better off,” proclaims Racine. “To move together as a state we will need to work together,” intones Markowitz. “Build a Vermont future that is a global leader in the innovation economy, based on a foundation of authentic communities, strategic location, and our premium Vermont brand,” says Dunne.

If pressed, all five would probably endorse motherhood and apple pie, too.

Another commonality is that, like most candidates these days, the Democrats (Shumlin’s pre-kindergarten plan being the exception) make little effort to provide the nitty-gritty details of how much their proposals will cost and how they would pay for them.

In fairness, most of their plans wouldn’t cost much, and they all suggest trimming some state programs. But, just to take one example, Dunne does not seem to have asked an economist to run the numbers on how (or whether) the revenues from Internet and energy users would pay off those $400 million bonds. The other contenders are comparably vague about how they would pay for everything they suggest.

It may be too early to condemn the candidates for this fuzziness. At this point, only Democratic primary voters care what the candidates say, and they are saying enough to give those voters an idea of how each of them would try to govern the state. Each is presenting a vision. Whether the numbers add up isn’t all that important yet.

After all, they are running for governor, not emperor. Governors do not promulgate programs. They suggest them to the Legislature, which will create nothing it can’t pay for. Almost certainly, that means pay for without raising taxes, which the candidates (Racine’s limited exceptions noted above) don’t want to do, either. Like presidents, governors not only don’t get everything they want, they end up not even asking for everything they really want.

It’s still helpful for the voters to know what the governor-to-be really wants.

This generosity of spirit will not last long. Whoever wins the Democratic primary and Brian Dubie will both be pressed harder to tell the voters how they will pay for new programs or for tax cuts. But that’s for next week.

Steel yourselves for heartbreak, you teeming hordes who clicked in today expecting to read the post advertised last Friday – an in-depth analysis of the economic plans of the five Democratic candidates for governor.

Only four of those plans are ready. The fifth, from Doug Racine, was scheduled to be released Wednesday, but scheduling problems, said his campaign, forced a postponement until Monday. Out of fairness, then, the analysis will be put off until next week’s only scheduled post, again on Friday.

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to say today. In fast-paced, ever-changing Vermont, the news never stops, so neither does the News Guy.

As noted in another recent post (Guilt By Association, July 27) finding politicians “guilty by association” is acceptable. We’re not sending them to jail, just holding them responsible for their choice of friends.

Earlier this week, Sen. Bernie Sanders chose as his friends an organization called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), which inspired him and two other senators to introduce legislation to phase out taxpayer-supported scientific experiments on chimpanzees.

The senator might want to reconsider.

Not that he or PCRM are necessarily wrong on the chimpanzee issue. According to Sanders, the animals are “no longer needed for research,” and the fact that only the U.S. and Gabon continue to hold chimpanzees for testing indicates that he has a point.

But chimps are not PCRM’s only issue. The organization and its senior medical and research advisor John Pippin, who was quoted supporting Sanders’ bill, also  advocate malariotherapy, or giving patients malaria to treat AIDS and other diseases.

In correspondence that the Cincinnati Beacon said was written by Dr. Eric L Matteson, chair of the Division of rheumatology at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota, Matteson said the World Health Organization has condemned such treatment as “charlatanism.”

(Dr. Matteson’s assistant, Beth Hielscher, said Dr. Matteson was on vacation until next week, and could not be reached to confirm that the correspondence was in fact his. But the Beacon a feisty independent weekly, printed what appeared to be copies of correspondence on the letterheads of both Matteson and Pippin).

There have been other allegations that PCRM is more interested in promoting vegetarianism than in sound scientific research, and that it is allied with PETA (People for Ethical Treatment of Animals) whose scientific reliability is also open to question.

When asked about PCRM, Sanders press secretary Michael Briggs emailed that the Senator and his aides “worked primarily with the Humane Society,” and were not aware of the controversy surrounding PCRM.

Another Vermont politician who might want to reconsider an association is Brian Dubie. In the financial disclosure of his campaign for governor, the Republican lieutenant governor candidly reported that the $3,050 his campaign spent with Stormo & Associates of Caledonia, Michigan, was for “opposition research.”

Nothing wrong with oppo research. All candidates do it. Nothing wrong with Stormo & Associates, either, unless one is running for statewide office in Vermont, where one would probably seek to play down any connections with the farthest right fringe of the Republican Party.

Which seems to be where Jeff Stormo is. He did not return a phone call yesterday, but there is ample evidence (see for instance here) that he is closely allied with Dick and Betsy DeVos, the very active, very wealthy (he’s the heir to the Amway fortune who ran for governor in 2006, largely financing his own campaign to circumvent Michigan campaign finance reporting laws), and very conservative couple who squabble almost as frequently with Michigan’s moderate Republicans as they do with liberals and Democrats.

Two of the DeVos’s major issues are opposition to abortion and support for an organization called All Children Matter (Betsy DeVos is or at least was on its board) which supports school voucher systems which would largely replace the existing public school systems.

Perfectly defensible positions, but not ones to run on and win in Vermont. The Democratic candidate, whoever he or she may turn out to be, is likely to try to make Dubie look as right-wing as possible. Here Dubie has provided him or her with some ammo.

And speaking of the Democrats, they all appeared on a televised debate on Channel 3 last night. Channel 3 lost.

Not because there was anything wrong with the questions. There was something wrong with the setting, outdoors at an Addison County fair in New Haven, with fairgoers making noise and several obnoxious children (some of whom were at least 30 years old) jumping up and waving their hands behind the candidates as they spoke.

The candidates were all fine, though Peter Shumlin and Doug Racine were clearly the most impressive on this occasion.

With only 11 days to go until the primary, Democrats are steeling themselves for a paltry turnout. If in fact that comes to pass, one reason will be both the weakness and the strength of the field of candidates.

The weakness is that none of the five has really caught on. Not one of them stands out as especially inspiring. If there is a surge for any one of them, it is well hidden.

The strength is that they all come across as reasonable, enlightened, reassuring. Any one of them seems as though he or she could be a good candidate and a competent governor, maybe even a very good governor.

Perhaps strangely, this may hold down the turnout. Picture the typical Democratic voter, who would gladly support any of the five in November. This voter will have to do some work and some thinking to decide which one to support. Worse, to vote for one person the voter likes requires him or her to vote against another one, two, or more the voter also likes. What a quandary. It all creates a psychological disincentive to vote. Let the other folks decide.

Still, if the turnout is low, and the pundits, chatterers and grouchy letter-to-the-editor writers want to blame someone (assuming for the moment that ‘blame’ is the right reaction), don’t blame the mid-summer date or the candidates. Just blame the non-voter. Everyone should know when Primary Day is. Furthermore, early voting has been open since July 12. No one is disenfranchised.

Note One: An Apology– Thanks to the storms of Tuesday evening, the News Guy kept getting disconnected from the Internet. In the rush to finish writing, and to get the post into the system before the connection broke again, confusion prevailed more than it usually does. As some readers noticed, the post got posted twice. As at least one reader noticed, the first reference to the town of Hartford called it “Hartland,” another town entirely, if not that far away. Apologies to all readers and to the residents of both towns.

Note Two: The Next Two Weeks–As previously announced, the News Guy is going to take some time off. Admittedly, not the best timing, what with the primary on August 24, only a little more than two weeks away. But even primaries have to take a back seat to family events and school vacation periods.

So there will be no posts next Monday or Wednesday. There will be one on Friday, and it will be an in-depth analysis of the economic policy proposals of the five Democratic candidates for governor, one of which is not scheduled to be released until next week. (Republican candidate Brian Dubie has said he will release his after the primary).

There will also be no posts the following Monday and Wednesday (August 16 and 18), but there will be one on Friday, the 20^th, after which the regular Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule will resume.

Note Three: A Clarification– Chris Roy, one of the two Republican candidates for Secretary of State, took issue with the News Guy’s assessment in last Friday’s post, Getting Tetchy, that he “seems to be losing” the primary race to Jason Gibbs.

Roy may have a point. He agreed that Gibbs has more money in the bank,(though Roy who has been running far longer, has raised more overall), has the support of Gov. Jim Douglas, and has been more successful in getting his name into the news.

But, Roy said, in what is likely to be a very low turnout, his “targeted” campaign, based on “a very focused mailing program and very focused phone call program” could propel him to victory.

So it could. At any rate, he provides a worthwhile reminder. Much attention has been paid to the likely Democratic primary turnout, with estimates ranging as low as 40,000. But at least the Democrats have a real race for governor, the highest-profile position. On the GOP side, though, nobody is challenging Dubie or U.S. Senate candidate Len Britton (whose prospects against Sen. Patrick Leahy are bleak anyway). Yes, there is a three-way contest for the U.S. House seat. But it is among three little-known long shots against Rep. Peter Welch, and therefore not likely to arouse much enthusiasm among rank and file Republicans. The Republican primary turnout could be really anemic.

Note Four: An Assessment– Speaking of the Democratic primary, has anyone noticed that it is one of the weirdest political campaigns in recent years, and not just in Vermont?

That’s because of what has happened in the race: nothing. Usually, in political campaigns, the process creates its own dynamic. Either Candidate A makes a fool of him/her-self, or Candidate B gets accused of some misdeed or peccadillo, or Candidate C makes a magnificent speech that captivates 5,000 cheering supporters in an arena, or some bizarre event not directly connected to the campaign plays to some candidate’s strength, or….well, or something.

If nothing else, in a close race the candidates start attacking each other. Or at least the candidates who are behind in the polls start attacking the front-runner. Rarely do these attacks enlighten, but they often get folks more interested.

Not here, at least not yet, and there’s not much time left. This race is about where it was when it began. It pits five honorable, responsible and not very exciting mainstream Democrats battling each other for the biggest share of the primary pie. Not one of them has stumbled. Not one of them has really caught on.

As to attacking, it isn’t certain that any of them knows how. Or, perhaps more likely, all are reluctant to start attacks because they know the attacker would be hurt as much as the attackee.

Just from the political perspective, the major recent development was Peter Shumlin’s decision to start television ads last month. The ads are pretty good, but as far as can be determined (not very far, there being no public polls) they haven’t much changed the structure of the race. Maybe, it being midsummer, voter are simply not paying enough attention.

All this is good news for Deb Markowitz, who started as the best-known, best-liked of the contenders, and seems not to have lost a step. True, as a candidate Markowitz is not exciting. But she’s likeable, and the other four haven’t inspired the voters to mobilize behind their banners, either.

Note Five: A Critique—The good news that came out of the Associated Press’s interviews with all six candidates about how, if elected, they would deal with next year’s likely budget shortfall, is that one candidate had a very specific idea which would clearly save money, and the candidate knew how much money the idea would save.

The bad news is that it would save only $16,000.

The idea was Markowitz’s pledge not to accept the $61 per diem allotment for the governor’s meals. She said the governor of Vermont earns enough to pay for her own meals.

From other candidates, the responses ranged between imprecise and arguably inaccurate. Bartlett said Vermont could save money by bringing home some of the prisoners it now sends to out-of-state facilities, though one reason the state sends prisoners elsewhere is that it’s cheaper. Shumlin said the state could save as much as $50 million by more closely policing some $250 million of outside consulting work, which might cut costs as much as 15 percent.

But 15 percent of $250 million is $37.5 million, not $50 million.

Then there was the candidate who, asked how he would reduce the budget gap, proposed increasing it.

That was Dubie, who told the AP he would make the budget easier to balance by cutting taxes.

“A gradual reduction in taxes will put more money in the hands of hardworking Vermonters,” Dubie said.

Yes, it will. And with more money in their hands, Vermonters (including the ones who don’t work all that hard) will pay more in taxes. But not enough more to offset the revenue loss the tax cuts will create. Whether cutting taxes is a good idea is debatable. That it will reduce revenue and therefore make the budget gap bigger, not smaller, is not. It will.

Not-so-petty squabbling

The original plan for today was a post dealing with a substantive, significant, and complex policy matter.

Too complex, as it turned out, to deal with in the time available. So in the interest of both precision and fairness, it will have to wait until next week.

Meanwhile, let’s have some fun with politics, because, with less than a month to go until Primary Day, a few of the candidates are starting to get a little tetchy.

Or at least to pretend to be getting a little tetchy. As a campaign reaches its final days, candidates have to find some way to distinguish themselves from their opponents. Often, that means finding some reason – or ostensible  reason—to criticize said opponents, or at least to make some news.

Perhaps surprisingly, this testiness has not really been evident in the race that dominates the scene right now – the Democratic primary for governor, in which the five candidates so far are being gentle with one another.

So far.

Oh, there was that little dustup between Peter Shumlin and Matt Dunne. After Shumlin bragged that he was “the only candidate in this race who has sponsored a single payer health care bill,” Dunne noted that  “in the 1993-1994 Legislative Session, House Bill 0763 titled, ‘Vermont Health Security Plan/Single-Payer Health Plan’ was co-sponsored by several House Members including Matt Dunne.”

Shumlin conceded defeat (well, he conceded error), and the two shook hands in front of the State House and they all lived happily ever after, at least until they can find something else about which to quarrel.

As squabbles go, this was both bland and minor. Perhaps more significantly, it was also irrelevant to the actual world and the actual state both men want to govern. According to Pubic Law 111-152, officially the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, commonly known as the Health Care Law, states may not adopt significantly different health care financing systems until at least 2017.

Some Vermont Democrats insist that Congress might change this provision earlier. Congress will do no such thing, and a politician who refuses to acknowledge this reality risks disserving the voters.

Will one of the Democratic contenders be so bold as to publically acknowledge this?

Don’t bet on it.

But the real tetchiness has come in the two primaries for secretary of state, an office which may not be worth getting angry about. On the Democratic side, the flappette began when candidate Charles Merriman of Middlesex went on Mark Johnson’s WDEV-FM radio show and said, “I should have run as an independent… I thought about it and frankly I ran as a Democrat because I figured I had a better chance of winning than if I ran as an independent. If I get in, I’ll run as an independent next time.”

Horrors!

So, at least, proclaimed a few Democrats. Merriman’s opponent, former Chittenden County Senator Jim Condos, the apparent front-runner in the race, told Vermont Public Radio that the comment might reflect on Merriman’s “character, if you’re…using the party to benefit yourself.”

Merriman tried to wriggle out of the hole he’d dug by proclaiming himself a good, loyal, liberal, Democrat, but one who thinks the Secretary of State’s office ought to be non-partisan.

Not a bad point. Perhaps the Secretary of State’s office ought not even be elected. It is, after all, an administrative (as opposed to policy-setting) position. In neighboring New York, the Secretary of State has been an appointed position for decades, and it works just fine.

But if the Democratic candidates are having a little tiff, the Republicans are engaged in a cat-fight. The first blow was struck by the candidate who seems to be losing, attorney Chris Roy, who accused Jason Gibbs of exaggerating his accomplishments both in the private sector and as Commissioner of Forests and Parks.

“Inaccurate and misleading accusations,” shot back Gibbs, who has the endorsement of Gov. Jim Douglas, whose spokesman he was for several years. Gibbs also appears to have more money and a better-organized campaign.

Indeed, so confident does Gibbs seem to be that he has poked his snoot into the governor’s race, trying to help Republican Brian Dubie by attacking the incumbent Secretary of State, Deb Markowitz, one of the Democratic candidates for governor.

In a letter to Markowitz, Gibbs claimed that “insufficient effort has been made (by her office) to ensure that all (Vermont troops in Iraq and Afghanistan) are adequately notified” that the primary date has been moved up to August 24.

As evidence, Gibbs cited a tape of Gov. Douglas, on his recent trip to the war zone, discovering “that the Primary Election date being provided to troops there was still September 14.”

Yes, but while that is evidence of a mistake, the mistake was not made by Markowitz. It was made by the United States Armed Forces, which are, as those of us who have served in them are well aware, so mistake-prone that their employees over the years have created several inventive expressions for mistake-making which are too colorful to be repeated here.

Gibbs also criticized Markowitz because some of the ballots for early voting in the primary, which started July 12, were printed on paper that was the wrong size. The error, which was made by the paper company, was discovered and rectified (at the company’s expense) that day, and there have been no reports of anyone who wanted to vote being unable to do so on time.

Markowitz has been Secretary of State since 1998. Being mortal, she has no doubt made a few mistakes in that time. But if her opponents can’t come up with more troubling examples than these, she must have done quite a good job indeed.

There are 25 days to go. Prepare for more of the same, only pettier and tetchier.