With slightly more than ten weeks to go until Primary Day, Vermont’s political season has begun, and as is true of any political season, the danger of rhetorical excess looms.

If the past is any guide (and it is the only guide, imperfect though it may be) we can be reasonably certain that these excesses will include:

–each candidate’s praise of him/her-self and deprecation of his/her opponents;

–each candidate’s insistence that the issue he/she has chosen to highlight is the most important issue facing the state;

–screeches from interest groups left and right that victory by the other side will condemn Vermont to years if not decades of misery.

But there’s another bit of hyperbole for which the reasonable citizen should be on alert: the temptation to moan and groan about how awful things are.

It’s a temptation candidates find hard to resist, especially in close races, which both the Democratic primary and the general election for governor seem likely to be.

First, because candidates tend to convince themselves that only their election can stave off disaster (the ego-challenged rarely run for governor), and second because glooming and dooming can invigorate specific constituencies. Nothing like riling up the teachers, the small businessmen, the hunters or the enviros just before voting day.

OK, Vermont has problems. There is some waste and inefficiency in government at all levels. There are injustices. There are outrages.  There is a fair amount of ignorance abroad in the land in both the public and private sectors. There is even, mostly on the local level, a bit of corruption. It’s the duty of candidates to call attention to these problems, and to explain how they propose to fix them. It’s also the duty of journalists, including this one, to uncover waste, injustice, and other ills of government and society. We’ll do that.

But herewith a preventive inoculation of sorts against the likely stream of apocalyptic rhetoric. Viewed objectively and in the national context, life in this state ain’t half bad.

Start with the basics: health, education, prosperity. According to several measurements, Vermont is the healthiest state in the union.

A smaller percentage of the population goes without health care than in almost any other state. And it’s pretty good health care. The federal government ranks Vermont’s quality of hospital care for Medicare patients the best in the country. That probably means the under-65 set gets good care, too.

To the extent that standardized test scores mean anything (and they mean something) Vermont also has one of the best public school systems in America. A case can be made that this is faint praise, that American public education is heavy on process, light on content, and inadequate for the 21^st Century.

Maybe so. But the schools can only be judged within their context. Within their context, Vermont public schools are excellent, and efforts to make the case to the contrary become increasingly pitiful.

The case for Vermont’s prosperity is slightly more complicated. Economic statistics can always be interpreted as each interpreter chooses. But it’s awfully hard to argue that this is not one of the more prosperous states. Its unemployment and poverty rates are well below the national average. Its median household income is the 22^nd highest in the country.

Not that Vermont has no economic problems. It has plenty, but most of them are similar if not identical to the problems facing other states. For instance, two of the Democratic candidates for governor, Sens. Doug Racine and Peter Shumlin, point out that many Vermonters “are struggling.” Racine leaves it there. Shumlin specified that they are “struggling to find a job, pay mounting bills on stagnant incomes and make a good living in a state that has become unaffordable for many.”

They’re right. Many Vermonters are struggling. So are many Kansans, Alabamans and Coloradans. For the last 30 years or so the real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of middle-income and lower middle-income families have gone up minimally if at all, while the costs of basic goods and services such as health care and higher education have been rising. Struggling families are the inevitable result. Evidence that Vermont is less “affordable” than most other states is hard to find.

If anything, Vermonters might be struggling a bit less than most other Americans, at least as a result of the Great Recession that is effectively (if not officially) still here. The state lost a smaller percentage of jobs than did the nation as a whole. Vermont’s foreclosure rate has been the lowest in the country.

But doesn’t the Joint Fiscal Office project that expenditures will exceed state revenues over the next several years?

Yup. But those projections are not predictions. And a similar look at most other state budgets would show the same gap, often worse. Vermont is weathering the Recession relatively well.

Vermont’s prosperity is all the more remarkable because the state operates under a distinct disadvantage: it is (sort of) rural. All over the country, it’s the larger metropolitan areas that are the richest, rural areas the poorest, unless they have coal or oil under the ground. Vermont could probably become richer if its people wanted it to look and feel more like, say, Connecticut or New Jersey. Most of them, it seems, don’t.

It is true that Vermont’s population isn’t growing very fast. But in the first place, that isn’t necessarily bad; a state need not grow larger to grow richer. More to the point, though , here again there is little that any governor or public policy can do about the problem, if it is a problem. Almost all Vermonters are non-Hispanic whites. Worse (from the population growth perspective), they are disproportionately affluent, educated non-Hispanic whites, precisely the kind of people who don’t have many babies. Were it not for immigration, the population of  the entire US of A would be falling if the population of the entire US of A were as white and Anglo as Vermont’s.

As mentioned, this post is a pre-emptive strike. So far, at least as judged by their campaign web sites, the candidates have not warned of the disaster that only their election can avert. One of them, Democrat Matt Dunne, even noted that “Vermont’s many assets far outnumber our current problems.”

So it would seem. And maybe we’ll be lucky and none of them will resort to the pessimistic depths that distort so much political debate. But don’t be surprised if they do. And don’t let them get away with it.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 4th, 2010 at 12:15 am and is filed under Politics & Elections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.