Isn’t anything going on in Vermont except this infernal political campaign?

Yes, actually. Quite a lot. For instance, on Thursday there is an evidentiary hearing in Superior Court in Woodstock in the matter of Galloway versus Town of Hartford, an important public records case (see Public (?) Records, August 4.)

On October 15, Superior Court Judge  Katherine A. Hayes denied the town’s motion for summary judgment, allowing the case to proceed. If possible, the News Guy will cover the hearing.

But here’s the thing about political campaigns: they end. This one is going to end in six days, making it hard to deal with anything else. So for now, we’ll continue with political stuff.

But first, this embarrassing admission.

Monday’s post ended with praise for how WCAX-TV anchors Darren Perron and Kristin Kelly questioned candidates Brian Dubie and Peter Shumlin during Saturday’s debate.

Except those who read the post before it was corrected (about 8:45 AM) did not see Darren Perron’s name. They saw the name of Anson Tebbetts, who is Channel 3’s news director, not its co-anchor.

Early (or perhaps not-so-early) sign of impending dementia?

Or just the kind of goof one can make toward the end of the day about two guys who work for the same station and both have two two-syllable names?

Either way, pluperfect dumb, and though it is not likely that either of these honorable gentlemen is insulted by being confused with the other, herewith apologies to the both of them.

Speaking of getting stuff wrong, during that debate Shumlin asserted that “Vermont lost more dairy farms in the last eight years (while opponent Dubie was lieutenant governor) than in any other time in Vermont history.”

Actually, no. Dubie and Gov. Jim Douglas took office in 2003, when there were 1,459 according to the Vermont Dairy Promotion Council. When U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsak visited Vermont last February, he was told there were 1,019 dairy farms.That’s a drop of 440.

In the eight years before the Douglas-Dubie team took office, the state lost 683 dairy farms, which, as it happens, is more, not less, than 440 and while no doubt a few farms have gone out of business in the last seven months, losses of the last eight years are clearly smaller than those of the previous eight years.

Yes, the more recent decline is slightly larger in percentage terms. But not much, and anyway, that’s not what Shumlin said. An email to his campaign asking where he got his (apparently  mis-)information was not answered yesterday.

(Not to mention that it makes no difference. Whoever is governor and whatever agriculture policies are followed, the number of dairy farms will continue to decline at a rate determined largely by factors well beyond the governor’s control).

In that same debate (and again in a VPR interview Monday) still trying to argue (to the distress of some of his strongest supporters) that Shumlin plans to release hordes of prisoners before their terms expire, Dubie twice mentioned an “August 15 Rutland Herald article in which Shumlin said he wanted to empty the prisons of 780 nonviolent offenders.”

Apparently not, the “apparently” is required here because the News Guy was unable to find that edition of the Herald either on line or in print. But at his request, someone else perused a printed (on dead tree) original version of the August 15 Herald and found…no mention of Shumlin releasing prisoners.

There was a Shumlin profile, a political column, and a “Capital Beat” column in the paper that day, the reader said, but nothing about letting lots of folks out of the pokey.

It is theoretically possible that both candidates will apologize for their misleading statements. It is highly unlikely.

Just as it is highly unlikely that the latest legal fracas is going to have much impact on the governor’s race. The state’s other news organizations have adequately covered the Attorney General’s suit against two political action committees, and the countersuit by one of them against him, so we won’t go into detail here. We’ll just answer three common questions:

Question One: Has there been and is there collusion between a candidate’s campaign and the supposedly “independent” entities that buy ads to support said campaign?

Answer One: Always. Take the following sentence both literally and as metaphor. In every capital city, all the political operatives (or at least all the political operatives of each party) drink in the same saloon. Since table-hopping can not be outlawed, information can always be shared (though the shrewd operative will first check to see whether any reporters – who also drink at those same saloons – are present).

What may have happened this year in Vermont is that somebody got careless and too blatant. According to official documents, the Republican Governors Association (one target of an AG suit) received a $22,500 in-kind contribution from the Dubie campaign on Sept. 22, and the Dubie campaign paid $25,500 for a poll five days later.

That would appear to be collusion, banned because the RGA is one of the “independent” entities buying pro-Dubie ads. It might have piqued the AG’s interest in seeing whether the RGA is registered as a political organization in Vermont. It is not.

Question Two: Doesn’t the U.S. Supreme Court Citizens United decision mean Attorney General Bill Sorrell and his assistant, Michael McShane, are going to have a hard time prevailing in court?

Answer Two: Possibly not. McShane said The AG’s office is only trying to get the RGA and Green Mountain Future  “to register as (political action committees) and file reports with the Secretary of State’s office.” Because they have not done so, McShane said, they have “violated Vermont law.”

(Try to keep all this straight. GMF is a creature of the Democratic Governor’s Association, which has registered as a political committee in Vermont, and which so far has spent more on the Vermont gov’s race than the Repubs. The RGA has not registered, nor has GMF, but the RGA’s front group, Green Mountain Prosperity, has).

Citizens United, though, was not about registration and disclosure. It allowed corporations and unions to make political contributions from their treasuries, not just from money specifically raised (and voluntarily contributed) for campaigns. Martha Wright, the attorney who helped Sorrell argue Vermont’s election law case before the U.S. Supreme Court (they lost) pointed out that Citizens United “upheld disclosure provisions that were challenged.”

That doesn’t mean the AG’s move can not be challenged. Vermont’s statutes on electioneering expenses might be “unconstitutionally vague,” Wright said, and its “definition of a political committee” can also be disputed.

All of which can help explain the rationale behind the RGA’s countersuit and answer…

Question three: Will all this influence anybody’s vote?

Answer three: Probably not. If the court hearings are held before the elections, the Republicans – and therefore Dubie – could appear sneaky. Hence the RGA countersuit, which, whatever its legal merit (challenging the power of the AG even to seek information to investigate does seem a bit over the top) plays into the average, middle-of-the-road voter’s assumption that “they all do it” (True. See Answer one above).

Finally: Today is the last day of early voting in Vermont. Early voting by everyone, not just the physically impaired or those who are going to be away on election day, has become increasingly popular all over the country of late.

It’s a very bad idea. It depresses turnout (see this in Monday’s New York Times). It interrupts the rhythm of a campaign, which is designed to end on election day. It provides an incentive for some people to vote before they’re gotten all the information they need (who knows how many would have voted for the other candidate had they waited?). It diminishes the communal experience of the polling place.

Cicero at court

With a week to go, one question dominates the Vermont campaign for governor: Can it get any pettier?

Don’t bet against.

Conventional political wisdom holds that in the final two weeks of a campaign, the candidate should “go positive,” start telling voters why they should vote for him, leave off telling them why they should not vote for the other guy.

If that’s going to happen here, it has not happened yet. As late as Saturday evening’s final debate on WCAX-TV (Channel 3), Brian Dubie and Peter Shumlin, each claiming to be waging a “positive campaign on the issues,” spent more time squabbling over trivia.

An interesting question here is whether the two candidates are equally guilty, and it’s interesting not because there is any real doubt about the answer, but because there is some problem with the very notion of “unequally guilty.” Neither side being innocent, are there gradations of guilt? Or does even one transgression justify (if not require) a “plague on both their houses” judgment?

In the non-political realm, when assessing journalists or scholars, the outlook here is the second one, derived from the old Roman legal principle of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. The witness who deliberately falsifies anything surrenders credibility for everything.

But in elections, at some point the voter has to choose between two contenders, both guilty. In that case, comparative guilt may be necessary. To the extent (and it should only be some extent) that the voter’s decision is based on how the candidates campaign, it makes sense for the voter to judge which candidate hypes and distorts more than the other, even while deploring such behavior in both.

In this case, it’s an easy call. Peter Shumlin has spun his own record on tax legislation to emphasize the times he helped cut taxes, which he did, while ignoring the occasions he helped raise them, which he also did.

And arguably should have. A really forthright candidate would stand his ground and point out that sometimes taxes have to go up. That may be too much to ask of any politician these days.

By and large, though, Dubie is both quantitatively and qualitatively the guiltier. More of the what he and his campaign commercials have said has been out-and-out false. It’s also been falser, not to mention more personal and more petty.

The Shumlin campaign commercial that aroused the most condemnation was accurate, if perhaps childish. That was the “Pinocchio” spot in which Dubie’s nose grew after each of three misstatements.

Misstatements they surely were. At least one may have been an error rather than a falsehood, and in the Pinocchio story his nose does not grew when he makes mistakes, only when he lies. So the ad went farther than scrupulous intellectual honesty would allow. But it was not baseless.

Neither was another Shumlin allegation criticized earlier here, and repeated by Shumlin in Saturday’s debate, that Dubie favored a $100 million property tax increase. Actually, Dubie favored a 2009 plan by Gov. Jim Douglas that, had it been enacted, would almost surely have resulted in some increase in property taxes, possibly even $100 million.

But from the way Shumlin and his campaign put it, one would think that Dubie had just come out and suggested that kind of property tax hike. He did not.

The irony here is that there’s a harsher attack Democrats could make on this Douglas-Dubie proposal. Not that it would raise property taxes, but that it was not serious governing, and perhaps was never intended to be.

The problem being addressed was that the cost of education was rising, too fast in the view of the Republicans. Serious governing would have started in at least mid-2008 by getting together with the various constituencies – teachers, school boards, superintendents, town officials – and trying to come up with a cost control plan.

Instead, in January, after most school budgets had been finalized, Douglas proposed shifting some costs (mostly the state contribution to the teachers retirement program) from the General Fund, largely financed by sales and income taxes, to the Education Fund, which gets most of its money from property taxes. The Governor and his allies, including Dubie, didn’t want property taxes to go up. They wanted to raise the threat of property tax increases to pressure schools to make big cuts in their budgets rather than face the wrath of property tax-payers.

That’s not serious governing. It is a cynical political ploy.

(And, as it happened, one that didn’t work. The Legislature didn’t adopt the Douglas plan, the school boards did not change their budget recommendations, the voters did not defeat many school budgets. It all came to naught).

But that critique is hard to express in a 60-second TV ad, and too complicated for a political speech. Easier just to say that Dubie wanted to raise property taxes.

Dubie’s transgressions can be dealt with more briefly. He continues to make statements that are simply false, and that he must know are false unless he is willfully refusing to acknowledge what is obviously true.

First, he continues to insist that Shumlin has proposed freeing non-violent convicts before their terms expire. As noted earlier here, Shumlin’s account of his corrections policy in his official campaign document is a touch vague, and might have led people to infer that he did mean to release prisoners early.

But neither in that document nor elsewhere did Shumlin ever say that this was what he planned to do, and plainly it is not. That earlier account suggested that it was “not dishonesty as much as stubbornness” that kept Dubie from acknowledging the facts.

Maybe that’s not an either/or situation.

Even less defensible is Dubie’s insistence on citing the obviously flawed Seven Days “survey” (closer to a poor effort to conduct a survey) finding Shumlin “ethically challenged.”

This matter was dealt with here adequately on October 11 (Ethical Quandary) and need not be repeated, or elaborated on except to wonder at what point political stubbornness morphs into complete shamelessness.

Political/Media Note 1—Usually, a candidate who gets endorsed by a newspaper can take that endorsement to New York City and get on the subway, assuming said candidate also has a farecard.

But the Burlington Free Press endorsement of Shumlin could help him. Whatever else it may be, the Freep is the voice of Vermont’s – or at least northern Vermont’s – establishment. That has to include the business establishment, and even though Dubie will probably win more business votes, the endorsement at least sends the signal that Shumlin is OK with the movers and shakers.

Political/Media Note 2—Great Job Saturday by Channel 3 co-anchors Darren Perron and Kristin Kelly as they firmly but politely interrupted both Dubie and Shumlin in an effort to get them to answer the questions they’d been asked.

It didn’t work, of course. Both candidates just regurgitated their talking points, and the anchors didn’t try to push it. They didn’t have to. They’d made their point.

A nice refutation of the assumption that TV news anchors are just readers. This was first class journalism by both of them.

Innumeracy: A front page story in Monday’s Free Press noted that the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC) “is pushing to hold on to Vermonter’s loan accounts, arguing that Vermont default rate (4.7 percent) is well below half the national rate (7 percent)…”

Forget the lack of either the word ‘the’ before, or an ‘apostrophe s’ after, ‘Vermont,’ and just concentrate on 4.7 being “well below half” of seven.

Let’s see. “Below half” would be less than twice as much. So multiply the lower number by two. Seven times two is 14. Put down the four and carry the one. Four times two is 8. Add the one and you get nine. Twice 4.7 would seem to be 9.4, which at least to the untutored eye is more than seven, making 4.7 definitely above half of seven.

“Well” above?

That’s a judgment call.

Illiteracy (economic version): In a column in Sunday’s Free Press, Betsy  Bishop, president of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce, declared, “government does not create jobs.”

A widely held and bipartisan sentiment. Sen. Susan Bartlett posted the same words on her web site during her primary campaign for governor. But it’s economic illiteracy.

Cops, firefighters and teachers are employed, almost all of them by one government or another. While employed, they provide a service, which creates wealth, which produces more jobs.

There is a name for the system described above. It’s called a market economy, sometimes known as capitalism. Among Adam Smith’s great insights in Wealth of Nations (1776) was that it made no difference how wealth was created or who created it. By any means, from any source, it enriched society and created jobs.

Our society, to be sure, has decided that most economic activity – and therefore most wealth-creation and job-creation – should take place in the private sector. For all sorts of reason, that’s a very wise decision. But it does not mean that government does not create both wealth and jobs. In fact, five days a week for most of the year, in almost every town in America, schools (the vast majority of them public, meaning government-run) create human capital, perhaps the single greatest source of wealth, and therefore of jobs.

Numbers, good and bad: Via Huffington Post and an organization called Mint.com, comes this inter-active map showing poverty rates by state and county in 2009, when the poverty reached its highest levels in 51 years. No big surprises. Vermont’s poverty rate (10.4 percent) is lower than the national average (14.3 percent), but not as low as the rates in several other states, including neighboring Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The states with the lowest rates were Wyoming, Hawaii, New Jersey, and Minnesota. Mississippi, Alabama, and the District of Columbia had the highest rates.

Vermonters between the ages of five and 17 had almost the same poverty rate (10.6 percent) as the entire population, but the rate for children under five was a surprisingly high 16.2 percent. Even that was lower than in most other states. In Mississippi, more than 30 percent of children under five were poor.

Unlike most states in the deep South, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and both Dakotas, no county in Vermont had a poverty rate of anywhere close to 30 percent. Still, there were obvious – and perhaps not surprising – differences among the state’s 14 counties. The lowest rate was Grand Isle County’s 8.4 percent; the highest Essex County’s 14.8 percent.

The rates in the rest of the state were as follows: Addison 10.4; Bennington 12.2;  Caledonia 11.8; Chittenden 9.6; Franklin 9,9; Lamoille 10.1; Orange 10.9; Orleans 14.3; Rutland 11.6; Washington 9.7; Windham 9.8; Windsor 9.3.

Numbers and Words: The following is clarification, not criticism. Vermont Public Radio has been trickling out reports from the statewide poll that it commissioned from Mason-Dixon Polling and Research. The results are interesting, and probably accurate, but the latest accounts could be misleading if not understood in context.

For instance, the poll showed that 44 percent of the respondents think the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant should be shut down when its license expires in 2012, while 39 percent want it to get the 20-year renewal it seeks and 17 percent are undecided.

Asked whether they support or oppose a plan to consolidate the state’s 278 school districts into 45 “to save administrative costs, which could result in the closing of some smaller schools,” 45 percent supported the idea, 36 percent opposed it, and 19 percent were undecided. On health care, a 56 percent majority supported either a universal government-run program like Medicare or a “public option” alternative like Catamount Health Care.

As mentioned in Monday’s post, Mason-Dixon is a respected firm, the sample of 625 was big enough, so there is no reason to doubt that these results are accurate.

But there is some reason to doubt that they accurately represent popular opinion on those issues by the people of Vermont.

That’s because, as also noted Monday (just scroll down) the average age of those 625 people is substantially higher than the average age of Vermont’s voting age population. A full 60 percent of the respondents are over 50. Almost 60 percent of voting-age Vermonters are under 50.

The pollsters didn’t goof (although “to save administrative costs,” though accurate, might invite a positive reply on the school question). They were first and foremost trying to figure out who’s likely to win next month’s elections, so they “screened” for likely voters. Older folks vote more. The sample, then, quite likely represents those Vermonters who are going to vote on November 2.

But no matter who wins the elections, the results on those three questions are likely to be used during next year’s legislative session as though they reflect where Vermonters stand on those issues. Perhaps they do not.

OK, there’s a certain amount of conjecture here, because the poll did not break out the voter preferences by age groupings. But there’s something close to a consensus among politicians that younger voters are:

–More likely to oppose Vermont Yankee;

–Less likely to be for school consolidation because they are more likely to have kids in school. Rare is the parent who wants his/her child to have a longer bus ride to school. If nothing else, it means getting up earlier in the morning.

–Perhaps (though this one is murkier) not as keen on government-run health care.

Still in the realm of conjecture, but restrained conjecture, here’s a suggestion that a poll of all registered voters – not just those likely to vote this year – would find a small majority against Yankee’s relicensing, with perhaps 30 percent in favor and almost 20 percent undecided.

Politically, that’s a big difference because the undecideds don’t matter; they’re not going to vote against a legislator either way over the issue. But a lawmaker who might hesitate before displeasing 39 percent of the electorate, while earning the thanks of only five percentage points more, is less likely to pause before pleasing a majority and annoying only a third of the people.

As is often true in life, in polling, when it comes to numbers, nothing is more important than the words.