The Ultimate Political Scientist (Machiavelli)

“Why are Eric Davis and Garrison Nelson the only political scientist ever consulted about Vermont politics?” a reader asks. “They can’t be the only political science professors in Vermont.”

The question struck home. Not because there is anything wrong with either Davis (who was quoted in the post on which the reader was commenting) or Nelson (who wasn’t only because he couldn’t be reached). They are both fine fellows as well as respected professors (though Davis is now technically a professor emeritus at Middlebury),

No, the comment struck home because the News Guy, in his earlier, Washington incarnation, was a co-founder and one of the only two members (the name of the other will remain secret to protect the guilty) the IDNCNO society.

The initials stood for I Do Not Call Norman Ornstein.

And what, prithee, was wrong with Norman Ornstein?

Not a thing. Like the above-mentioned academics, a fine fellow. Intelligent, good-hearted, and precisely the person a reporter should call for a story about the inner workings of Congress, about which Ornstein is a rare and thoughtful expert.

What inspired the IDNCNO society was that Washington-based political reporters, which both us co-founders were, had started calling Ornstein for expert commentary on all matters political, including matters about which he knew no more than…well, than the reporter calling him.

What the IDNCNO society was ridiculing, then, was not Ornstein, but: (a) continuation of the outmoded contrivance wherein a reporter had to call a certified expert to provide the analysis the reporter wanted to provide him/her-self; and (b) the creation of a list of “usual suspects” to provide said expertise.

In the case of the post about which the reader was commenting (The Five Musketeers,June 2, available earlier on the VT Digger site), reason (a) above is not relevant. In this case, the News Guy, not having been in Vermont that long, needed the expertise of some folks with more experience in the state. But reason (b) speaks right to the reader’s remark that Nelson and Davis can’t be the only two quotable political scientists in the whole state.

They are not. To begin with, there is Nelson’s University of Vermont colleague, Associate Professor Anthony Gierzynski, who has been quoted by the News Guy in the past. Perhaps the Vermont press corps in general has minimized Gierzynski as a usual suspect (making him an unusual suspect?) because he is unabashedly partisan, having actually run for the Burlington City Council as a Democrat.

But considering that he lost and no longer lives in Burlington, the statute of limitations for that offense might have expired. Besides, he’s probably not the only one. Next time the News Guy needs to quote a Vermont political scientist, he will scour the state college system faculties.

In another recent post (That Unasked Question, May 31 the News Guy noted, in connection with Burlington store owners wanting to get “street people” out of the neighborhood, that “merchants vote; street people do not.”

With some justification, a commenter objected. Merchants, he wrote, “as well as other members of the public who are permanently housed possibly vote in higher numbers (but) it would be untrue to state that the (homeless) ‘do not’ vote…at all.”

Nothing “possibly” about it. Reams of data make clear that voter participation by the homeless is tiny. But it is not zero. The political point of that sentence – that merchants have a lot more electoral clout than street people – was correct. But saying they “do not” vote was overdoing it.

In a generally intelligent commentary on Vermont Public Radio the other day, teacher-historian Vic Henningsen, said that, “in 1968, when CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite delivered a downbeat report on American progress in Vietnam, public opinion rapidly soured on the war.  President Lyndon Johnson lamented, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”

A good story and an old one. Too bad it’s probably not true. As W. Joseph Campbell reports in his new book, Getting it Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism, (and reported on May 21 by Jack Shafer in Slate, the alleged remark first popped up in the late David Halberstam’s book The Powers that Be, which was written almost ten years later, and which did not actually quote Johnson.

There is no evidence that Johnson ever saw the program or watched a tape of it. And long after Cronkite’s report, LBJ was still calling for a “total national effort to win in Vietnam.”

Speaking of presidential remarks that never got remarked, Thomas Jefferson never said, “that government governs best which governs least,” or anything like it.

Henry David Thoreau said it some years after Jefferson’s death. But of course he didn’t mean it. Thoreau really hated the Mexican War. He regularly rode or walked the public roads to pick up his mail at the Concord Post Office without ever complaining about the highway system or the mail service.

GOOD COLUMN: Outdoor writer Lawrence Pyne in the Burlington Free Press noted Sunday that the celebrated “Pete the Moose” has been saved (though perhaps not permanently), but at the cost of possibly endangering the state’s wild deer herd.

Pyne also pointed out the legal/legislative travesty involved. Without holding hearings, three lawmakers – Newport Republican Rep. Duncan Kimartin and Democratic senators Bobby Starr of North Troy and Susan Bartlett of Hyde Park – slipped language into the budget bill transferring authority over the animals at the “game farm” where Pete now resides from the Fish and Wildlife Department to the Agriculture Department.

“Worse,” Pyne wrote, “they also essentially transferred possession of those animals to the preserve’s owner, in direct disregard of the long-standing public trust doctrine, which holds that wildlife is a publicly-owned resource.”

Maybe even worse than that. It was legislative (meaning political) interference with legal proceedings, an inverse bill of attainder granting amnesty not just to the moose but to those who broke the law in its behalf.

BAD COLUMN: Last month, Vermont Business Magazine ran a piece based a survey by the Arno Group of Stowe which “asked more than 3,000 Vermont businesses in February to complete a 37-question survey (and) received 254 responses, largely from companies with fewer than 20 employees.”

Not enough response, as the Arno Group knew, calling it “not necessarily representative of the Vermont business community as a whole,” and therefore without “statistical validity.”

So kill it. No doubt. No discussion. No story.

Finally, to a comment which seems to have disappeared from this site, perhaps because of the clumsiness of the fellow running it.

The comment was about the promise in Campaign Kickoff (May 26) to ride herd on statements by the candidates for governor, but “not with a petty, ‘gotcha’ attitude…” bothering about “slips of the tongue” or “the kind of trivial flubs everybody makes in spontaneous speech.”

Before it ended, the post chided Democratic contender Matt Dunne for some improper English on his web site. The reader who commented said, essentially (the comment being lost, it can not be quoted), that making fun of a candidate’s grammar was a good example of petty “gotcha” journalism.

OK, the News Guy confesses to being finicky about the English language, his stock in trade after all. But the error was not a “slip of the tongue” or a “trivial flub” made in everyday speech. It had been written, and presumably edited and read over. Somebody should have caught it.

And check’s Dunne’s web site. They fixed it.

Sometimes the most important questions are the ones that don’t get asked, even by reporters, whose job it is to ask that next question.

Usually this failure to ask is more inadvertent than deliberate, and nothing in today’s post should be interpreted as criticism of any reporter. The first example, in fact, comes from a good story by reporter John Briggs on the front page of last Monday’s Burlington Free Press headlined, “Frustration grows over downtown scene.”

The story was about how panhandlers in and around Burlington’s Church Street Marketplace are harassing passers-by and angering store and restaurant owners who want those passers-by to shop and eat at their establishments.

No one has been hurt, but, Briggs wrote, merchants say the situation has become “unpleasant…and may seem threatening to potential shoppers and tourists.”

If anything, Briggs exercised excessive journalistic caution in attributing that conclusion to the merchants. The panhandling, often aggressive and vulgar, simply is unpleasant, and might well seem threatening, especially to women, children,  the frail or the elderly.

As a result, city officials are considering various steps, including passage of laws against blocking the sidewalks. The city council has already passed an ordinance prohibiting smoking in or near parks or recreation areas.

The story did an especially good job in dealing with the political and sociological tensions surrounding the dispute. The panhandlers, many if not most of them drug addicts, homeless, unemployed and perhaps unemployable, have their defenders and advocates who claim the business owners, and the council members working with them (merchants vote; street people do not) are indifferent to the plight of the poor and dispossessed.

Quite possible. And those poor and dispossessed are their fellow citizens whose humanity need not be belittled. But the needs of the non-poor, non-dispossessed should also be taken into account. Forget the merchants for a minute, who obviously have an economic self-interest here, and just consider all the folks – just regular folks, not particularly rich or poor or influential or even important (except in the sense that everyone is important )– who are walking along the sidewalks to shop, eat, sightsee or just meander.

They ought to be able to do this without being assailed by assertive drifters who clog the sidewalk and shout obscenities. This is not a free speech issue. Anyone has the right to set up a soapbox in the park outside City Hall and proclaim the most unpopular opinion imaginable. To the passer-by offended by that opinion, the only response – or at least the only American response – is: Who cares? Be offended. It’s the price for living in a free society.

But sidewalks are, as their name suggests, for walking, and those using them as they were intended to be used have a reasonable expectation that they will be neither impeded nor insulted. Regular folks have rights, too.

Reporter Briggs also did a good job pointing out that the problem had gotten worse because of the recession and because the local agencies that help addicts, the mentally ill and the homeless were stretched to their capacities and beyond. But now comes the question not asked:

Isn’t this what happens when the state cuts its social service budget?

At this point, that question can’t be answered definitively. It would take a great deal of research to make a direct connection between those budget cuts and the increase in the number of troubled panhandlers in downtown Burlington.

But for the last two years, the Legislature, prodded by Gov. Jim Douglas, has cut the budget of the Human Services Agency to hold down taxes and to maintain spending on schools, transportation, and other functions. They did this despite warnings from, among others, law enforcement officials (including Burlington Police Chief Michael Schirling) that the result would be more troubled or homeless people on city streets, creating problems that would have to be dealt with by local governments.

These cops seem to have had a point.

The other question wasn’t asked up at Morses Line.

This was last month, in another perfectly good Free Press story, this one by Matt Sutkoski, about the dispute between the Rainville family and the Department of Homeland Security’s effort (apparently about to be abandoned) to take part of the family’s farmland to expand a little-used border crossing station.

Among the sources quoted was a spokesman for the government agency who explained that no major improvements to the facility at Morses Line had been made for 70 years, and that the crossing station  “fails to provide the tools we need to guard against the threats to our national security.”

The question which should have been asked there was: Our What?

Because officials at DHS and its various sub-agencies have been throwing around that “national security” explanation almost every time there’s any debate about Canadian border policies. But the examples they give are invariably about attempted drug smuggling or foreigners trying to sneak into the U.S. to get a job or find a relative.

Stopping those activities is part of DHS’s job. But they have nothing to do with “national security.” The nation’s security is not threatened by a pot (or even heroin) peddler or an illegal farm worker. “National security” deals with threats to…well, the security of the nation, from foreign powers or – these days – from terrorists.

Since September 11, 2001, not a single terrorist seems to have entered the United States from Canada, and there is little reason to think a terrorist could get into Canada any more easily than he or she could come directly to the U.S.

“There’s lot of misunderstanding on the relationship between borders and terrorism,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

Since 2001, Alden said, “there have been about 25 terrorist plots inside the US, involving 58 individuals. Thirty were US-born citizens, 11 were naturalized citizens, one had dual citizenship. Nine were legal immigrants or visa holders. Only six were here illegally and maybe one more, from the Middle East.”

Furthermore, he said, “illegally” meant only that they had overstayed their visas, not that they had snuck across a border.

“For the vast majority of incidents, the border was completely irrelevant,” he said.

There’s no guarantee that someday a terrorist won’t try to sneak over the border from Canada, as Ahmed Ressam, the so-called “Millennium Bomber” tried to do in 1999. He was caught at a border crossing station in Washington State. But that was before September 11, 2001. Since then, Canadian authorities have tightened their surveillance of refugee applicants, which was Ressam’s status at the time.

But like other anti-terrorism experts, Alden said that far more important than watching the Canadian border was working cooperatively with Canadian intelligence agencies.

“The level of intelligence  sharing with Canadian authorities is the best we have with any country,” he said. “It’s a very , very close and cooperative one. The US and Canada are trying to do the same things to keep these people out of North America altogether. They use similar systems to try to screen overseas passengers.”

If, as now seems likely, the Morses Line border station is closed, something will be lost; there will be less coming and going across the border for both business and social reasons.

That’s too bad. It has nothing to do with national security.

Susan Bartlett said she did not throw a reporter out of a meeting of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which she chairs, because “there was no meeting.”

She did, she acknowledged, ask Louis Porter of the Vermont Press Bureau  (The Times-Argus and the Rutland Herald) to leave the room one day the week before last while she and the other Democrats “consulted with legislative council.”

Two House members, Democrat Jason Lorber of Burlington and Republican Oliver Olsen of Jamaica, were also asked to leave.

The consultation, Bartlett said, was originally going to be held in the Legislative Council’s offices, but the space there was cramped, and she suggested they’d be more comfortable in the committee room.

“We can do that,” she said.

Obviously they can, because she did. Whether senators may, under their own rules, hold closed sessions inside their committee rooms is less certain. Because an official meeting had not been convened, holding a private session might not have violated those rules.

Or maybe it did. It seems to be a matter of interpretation.

The place to start looking, suggested State Archivist Gregory Sanford, is the Vermont Constitution,  specifically Chapter 2, Section 8, which states that, “(t)he doors of the House in which the General Assembly of this Commonwealth shall sit, shall be open for the admission of all persons who behave decently, except only when the welfare of the State may require them to be shut.”

According to Sanford and others, this section applies to committee rooms as well as the legislative chambers, the exception for “the welfare of the state” refers only to emergencies, and being a reporter is not proof of indecent behavior in and of itself.

That would seem to indicate that the session in the committee room –whether or not it was a “meeting” — should have been open. Bartlett acknowledged that five committee members – a quorum – were present.

Bartlett said the committee was also gong to discuss “personnel” matters, therefore it could meet “executive session.”

It can, but only after voting to do so in open session, by a two-thirds majority, and even then only for certain designated reasons, one of which is to discuss personnel. None of that happened the day Bartlett closed the meeting.

But Allen Gilbert of the Vermont American Civil Liberties Union, himself a strong advocate of open meetings, acknowledged that Senate rules might be unclear as to whether a gathering “is a meeting unless it’s convened.”

At any rate, Gilbert said, there is no remedy for this violation, if it was a violation. The only redress is to “complain to the (Senate) Committee on Rules” because the Senate is “not covered by the Open Meeting Law,” so there is no “statutory violation.”

There also appears to have been no harm done. Privately, some senators from both parties were unhappy about Bartlett clearing the room. But no one suggested she was trying to pull a fast one. She just wanted to meet in more comfortable surroundings.

But in the first place, it’s not certain that under Senate rules a reporter (or anyone not misbehaving) didn’t have the right to be at the meeting no matter where in the Statehouse it was held. Or maybe even if it was held out of the statehouse, though Sanford pointed out that lawmakers have sometimes held closed meetings elsewhere, apparently (though perhaps mistakenly) believing that as long as they were in a different buildings they could bar press and public.

Gilbert said the Open Meeting Law draws no distinction between meetings in official or unofficial venues. Should two members of a three-person school board or select board bump into each other at the grocery store, he said, they are forbidden from discussing board business.

It’s unclear whether the Senate rules are quite that strict, but it would seem that Bartlett at least violated the spirit of Vermont’s open government tradition.

To be sure, a case can be made that the tradition is too strict. Maybe people have to get together in private sometimes to hash matters out. Banning such sessions in public (or even in the grocery store) could just push officials into more clandestine locales, such as the back table of the local saloon. (No, come to think of it, that’s too public). But if the system should be changed, officials should argue for changing it, rather than simply breaking the rules.

If there is any price Bartlett will pay here, it’s political. She’s one of the five Democrats running for governor. Getting a reputation for acting surreptitiously (which in general she does not seem to deserve) is not likely to be a political plus.

But when it comes to tension between public officials and members of the Fourth Estate, Bartlett cannot compete with State Auditor Tom Salmon.

Salmon apparently dislikes Seven Days political reporter Shay Totten. Disliking Totten, an unusually pleasant and easy-going fellow, is not easy, but presumably if a reporter keeps catching a politician doing stuff he shouldn’t do, the pol might start taking it personally.

A couple of weeks ago Totten caught a member of  Salmon’s official staff  sending a political email from a state computer during business hours. The email “welcomed” as an opponent (perhaps prematurely) State Sen. Ed Flanagan into the Auditor’s race. Flanagan, who once served as auditor, is thinking about running for his old job against Salmon, who was elected as a Democrat but switched parties last year.

Responsibly, before writing a story, Totten emailed Salmon for response and comment.

Which arrived promptly and…well, let’s just say bluntly. No, on second thought, let’s say obscenely. This web site, determined to persist in its policy of (outward) respectability, will not quote Salmon’s reply (but here’s the link). Suffice to say that it was as far from respectability as one can get.

There is a term for a politician who not only talks this way to a journalists, but actually puts it in writing, meaning he can’t later claim to have been misquoted.

No, make that two alternative terms: (1) A person of dubious judgment; (2) a dope.

At least one Republican, sort of defending Salmon, suggested in a Statehouse corridor last week that Totten was “nitpicking” because sending the email on state time and state equipment was a minor infraction.

Maybe, but you know what? Reporters are supposed to be nitpickers. The Auditor’s office is about a five minute walk from Republican headquarters, and Salmon’s aide could have gone over there at lunch time or after the business day to send the email all legal and proper on a GOP computer. Campaign finance laws, like open meeting laws, exist for a reason.

For the Vermont voter, the political prospects for the Auditor’s race seem especially dismal. For reasons that will be dealt with another day, Flanagan’s judgment isn’t all that reliable, either. In fact, perhaps the most puzzling political question of the day is why Democratic leaders haven’t by now found an attractive accountant – or at least finance-savvy businessperson – to oppose Salmon, who would seem vulnerable if opposed by a minimally competent candidate.