The plan here is for this site to deal with at least two more substantive matters – each probably requiring two posts – before riding off into the sunset.

The hope was for part one of the first of these to appear today. Alas, the fates (in which the News Guy does not literally believe) have conspired against that. Check back Friday.

Meanwhile, to give you…well, not your money’s worth, because in most cases that would mean giving you nothing, but let’s say something to chew on, herewith some reflections on a national flappette which acquired a Vermont twist thanks to Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Who, as many no doubt already know, became enraged when MSNBC suspended commentator Keith Olbermann after learning that he had contributed to three Democratic congressional candidates.

The suspension, Sanders said in a statement released by his office, could “have a chilling impact on every commentator for MSNBC.”

So it could. Perhaps so it should.

No, not that it should chill commentators from speaking their minds. But maybe it should chill journalists from making political contributions.

Yes, the news world is changing, Keith Olbermann never claimed to be a neutral observer, and one could say he was putting his money where his mouth is. Furthermore, like every American, Olbermann has the constitutional right to make political donations.

But there is no constitutional right to be a political journalist, and there is a distinction between expressing one’s opinions (mouth) and personally participating in a campaign (money).

In 1980, the political world knew that columnist George Will favored Ronald Reagan. What no one knew was that he had helped Reagan prepare for his debate with President Jimmy Carter (using Carter’s debate briefing-book, stolen from the White House). When that news came out in 1983, Will was generally and properly condemned.

The distinction here is that even when a journalist is an avowed partisan, he ought to remain independent. That means not directly participating in anyone’s campaign, either by debate-coaching or money-giving. The honest reporter will criticize the candidate she is going to vote for as readily as the one she will oppose. That’s harder to do when she’s crossed the line from being an observer – even a committed observer – to being a participant.

Besides, in this confusion, somebody should raise a voice in behalf of the old notion – possibly outmoded but also possibly essential in a democratic society – of the journalism of the disinterested observer, the reporter who feels attached to no political party and no ideological faction. Keith Olbermann is not one, and never pretended to be. And he’s more marketable on cable TV for not being one.

But maybe the country still needs reporters who follow the motto of “no cheering in the press box,” a phrase not invented but popularized (it was the title of one of his books) by the late Jerome Holtzman, the  Chicago Tribune’s great baseball writer.

“We watch the game,” Jerome liked to say, speaking around both sides of his ever-present cigar. “We supposedly understand the game better than the average guy. We wear a tag around our neck that gets us on the field for batting practice and into the clubhouse after the game. But we don’t root for either team.”

Still not a bad attitude for a journalist.

Sanders was right when he said that  “talk radio is dominated by right-wing extremists (and) the Republican Party has its own cable network (Fox).”

Where, as he noted, not only the commentators but the company itself (the News Corporation) openly support the Republican Party.

But is the solution here really to bring MSNBC – and by extension the rest of the journalistic world – down to Fox’s level? The problem with Fox News Channel is not that it covers the news from a conservative perspective, which could be useful. It is that with rare exceptions it does not cover the news at all. It does something else altogether – basically anger enhancement, keeping a niche market riled up, often by feeding it misinformation, so that it will come back for more the next day.

The suspicion here is that the world will be no better off – perhaps worse off – if MSNBC merely becomes the left’s mirror image of the same marketing scheme.

Assuming, of course, that it has not already done so.

One more look back at the election before proceeding to matters of greater substance.

Start with this surprising statistic: fewer Vermonters voted last week than in the last mid-term election of 2006.

Sounds peculiar, doesn’t it?. That one was a runaway, with incumbent Republican  Gov. Jim Douglas whomping Democrat Scudder Parker  by 56-to-41 percent.  Then-Congressman Bernie Sanders won the open U.S. Senate seat by an even wider margin. Peter Welch’s victory over Martha Rainville for the House seat Sanders was vacating wasn’t quite as huge. But  53-to-44 percent isn’t exactly close, either. Well before election day, few doubted who the winners would be.

But 262,524 Vermonters went to the polls, roughly 20,000 more than the number turning out for this year’s neck-and-neck race to choose the first new governor in eight years.

This year’s final tally is neither official nor complete. According to the web site of WCAX-TV (Channel 3), which had by far the best vote-counting operation of the night, with 99.9 percent of the vote in, 241,697 votes had been cast for governor. Unlike the official count of 2006, that total does not include write-ins. But write-ins plus that last tenth of a percent are not likely to add more than a few hundred votes to the total.

Bernie Sanders is both more polarizing and more fun than most politicians, which might have boosted turnout. And until the last week or so, the Welch-Rainville race seemed kind of close. But neither of those factors, nor the two combined, seem sufficient to explain why turnout was higher for those romps than for this year’s nail-biter. The question deserves further examination.

But first a digression. It is high time that Vermont politicians and Vermont news organizations – both print and on-air – stopped bragging about the state having voter turnout rates in the 70-to-75 percent range. That may be the percentage of registered voters who came to the polls last Tuesday. But the standard measurement for voter turnout is the percentage of eligible voters, meaning citizens who are at least 18 years old.

Thus in 2,000, the year of the last Census, there were 461, 248 Vermonters who were over 18. But about 10,000 were non-citizens or otherwise ineligible to vote (though this state does not disenfranchise inmates or ex-convicts). That left 451,982 Vermonters eligible to vote, of whom 63.1 percent did cast ballots in that close presidential election.

Last year, according to the latest Census Bureau estimates, there were 671,760 people in the state, of whom 20.3 percent, or 136,213, were under 18. That left 535,547 Vermonters of voting age.

The 2000 count is from the “actual enumeration,” as the Constitution requires, while the 2009 statistics are a Census Bureau estimate The estimate, as it turns out, might be more accurate but it did not count non-citizens. Considering the immigration of the last several years, there are probably many more non-citizens in the state than there were in 2000.

But just for the purposes of discussion, assume there were twice as many. That would leave roughly 516,000 eligible voters in the state, making this year’s turnout about 47 percent. That’s still higher than most states, but not that impressive.

OK, let’s return to the question of why this year’s turnout was relatively low. Obviously, we are in the realm of conjecture here (even more than in the process of comparing not-totally-comparable statistics), but here are two theories: Early voting, which increases every year and seems to depress turnout in more places than not; or “negative” ads.

The quotation marks are there because, while acknowledging that this is the widely used term for dishonest, trivial, misleading political commercials, what is really deplorable about these commercials is that they are dishonest, trivial, and misleading. There is nothing at all wrong with a candidate being “negative” about his or her opponent as long as the negative message is true and relevant.

‘True,’ in this case, means what it means. ‘Relevant’ means that the commercial be about an actual policy position of the candidate – or in some cases, a blatant act of personal dishonor – not a distorted interpretation of some long-ago vote to refer a bill to committee, or the revelation that the candidate once went to dinner with an unlikable fellow.

This year’s campaign in Vermont had plenty of false and irrelevant ads (though no one seems to have sunk quite as far as the dinner-date theme), and plenty of analysis that the tone of the advertising hurt Republican candidate Brian Dubie, whose ads were criticized even by some Republicans.

It may have hurt him because it undercut his major political strength – his image as a nice fellow. But it also may have been one factor holding down the turnout.

The political scientists disagree here, with some pooh-poohing the assertion that many voters are so turned off by nasty campaigns that they decide to stay home. But in some campaigns, the most contentious mud-slinging has been followed by the most meager turnouts, and if the cause and effect is not provable, neither can it be ruled out.

If that happened here this year, Dubie might not have done any better had he chosen a different strategy. The people who stay home out of disgust with the tone of campaigns tend to be middle-of-the-road voters, and in most of the country, more middle-of-the-roaders vote Democratic, if they vote. If that’s true here, Dubie might have lost by a larger margin had he run a higher-toned campaign.

And in conclusion, a brief word about the national results.

A big Republican victory. A meaningful Republican victory, the significance of which should not be minimized.

Or maximized. Here is what politicians learn every time their party wins big.

No, scratch that. Here is what politicians fail to learn every time their party wins big.

The winning big does not mean the people agree with you.

At best, it means that on that day, those voters who voted (in the off-year, always less than half the eligible electorate and about two-thirds of those who will vote next time) agreed with you marginally (or perhaps minimally) more than they agreed with the other party.

More likely, all it means, especially when the out-of-power party wins big, is that the voters are dissatisfied, and that voting for you, you being “the other guys” was the only way they could express that dissatisfaction.

If you fool yourself into thinking it means any more than this, you’ll be….just like all who went before you.

First, the announcement:  A final decision will not be made for another week or so, but this web site is probably in its final days.

The election is over, the year is coming to an end, and so, most likely, is the News Guy.

It has been fun. It may have done some good. But with the election over, the year coming to an end, perhaps it is time to go.

A few weeks ago, the proprietor of this site woke up and found himself 70. No problem. There is but one alternative to getting older, and as long as most systems are functioning adequately, getting older is the preferred option.

But it is a reminder that if one is going to do something different, one had best get to it. Being the News Guy isn’t all that different from previous activities.

It isn’t much less time-and-effort consuming, either, and at least in the old days, the time and effort was compensated for with…compensation. At best, this web site breaks even. Happily, under the present circumstances, profit is not necessary. But neither is expending all that time and effort, enhancing the appeal of either (a) spending the time and effort at something potentially remunerative; or (b) not spending the time and effort at all.

Because a few interesting subjects have been put on hold during the election campaign, the News Guy will continue for another couple of weeks. But that’s probably it.

Now to the analysis. Last Friday’s post (The Big Day Dawneth) pointed out that the “downside” of Brian Dubie being governor would have been the constant (and worse! Incorrect) repetition of the mantra about Vermont’s economy being in such bad shape.

But there would have been an upside to a Dubie governorship, too, and one that might have transcended Vermont. That’s because Dubie – his anti-abortion stance and some attacks from the hard-line left to the contrary notwithstanding – is a politician of the center-right.

For instance, he was one of the few candidates in either party, anywhere this year to praise the new health care law. No Tea Partier, he campaigned for tax cuts and budget restraint, but not for decimating or dismantling government. According to office-holders in both parties, he has sometimes shown more flexibility than Gov. Jim Douglas in negotiating with lawmakers and officials.

Some critics argue that political expediency forced Dubie to try to come across as more moderate than he really is, that if he were not running in (sort of) left-leaning Vermont, he would have shown his true, farther-right, colors.

Maybe, but it makes no difference. He was running in Vermont. Had he won, he would have been governor of Vermont, and whatever private agenda he might have had, his would have been a center-right governorship, which is by no means the worst kind of governorship to have.

Especially now, where the center-right is endangered in Vermont and all but extinct elsewhere. The most prominent center-right office-holder in the country, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, is leaving office in a few weeks. With a few exceptions, the Republicans of the impending 112^th Congress can not be described as center-right politicians.

In Vermont, it is not clear whether leading Republicans have quite grasped what the Dubie defeat means for their party. Political fortunes are (in the words of a great poet) “constantly fickle,” so the GOP could rebound quickly. But it’s hard to see how. The party holds fewer than a third of the seats in the Houses, barely over a third in the Senate, and could not find credible candidates to run for either the U.S. Senate or Congress.

‘Credible,’ in this context, means ‘center-right’, the only kind of Republican who can win statewide elections in Vermont. The fact that no center-right Republican made any effort to take on Sen. Patrick Leahy or Rep. Peter Welch – even knowingly playing the sacrificial lamb role to build up some party cred for a winnable race in the future – speaks volumes about the poor prospects for the GOP in the state.

Yes, there are Lt. Gov-elect Phil Scott and re-elected Auditor Tom Salmon. But Salmon has, so far, painted himself farther right as he apparently prepares to challenge Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2012, an uphill battle to say the least. Scott is center-right, and right now seems to be the Vermont Republican Party’s best hope.

But it isn’t easy being lieutenant governor when the top guy is from the other party. It will not be in Gov. Peter Shumlin’s interest to give Scott much opportunity to look good, and the lite gov really has no official duties.

Well, presiding over the Senate, but with the Senate 20-8 Democratic, the presiding of a Republican will be largely ceremonial.

Had Dubie won, he might have helped revive the moderate wing of the Vermont GOP. He might also have been one of only a handful of Republican center-right governors in America (there are a few Democrats who fit that description), along with Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Terry Branstad of Iowa.

And the country needs center-right office-holders. For at least two reasons, even liberals ought to be glad that center-right politicians survive, and sometimes win. First, even when they are wrong, center-right officials keep the center-left from getting carried away with itself, as it is wont to do. Second, center-right politicians are not always wrong.  Because there are so many genuine needs, governments do have an incentive to keep spending money, sometimes more than is wise. Here moderate conservatives, wary of spending but not hostile to government, help restrain excesses.

Alas, other excesses on the right have all but obliterated moderate conservatism. Explaining how and why is beyond the scope of this post, but two examples should encapsulate the problem. Nationally, the conservative mainstream refuses to accept two facts: (1) cutting taxes means governments will have less (not more; less) money to spend; (2) the world is getting warmer, in part because of human activity. A political movement that willfully blinds itself to reason can accomplish nothing more than winning some elections. Winning elections is indeed one purpose of a political movement, and an important one. But so is rational governing.

Those are two Kool-Aid cocktails Brian Dubie did not drink.

Actually, Vermont may have a center-right governor next year – Peter Shumlin. Either winner would have faced the same immediate dilemma: expected revenues next year will be some $110 million lower than anticipated revenue. Though not as ideologically – even viscerally – hostile to higher taxes as Dubie, Shumlin doesn’t want to raise taxes either. It would be bad politics, and bad economic policy (though not as bad as laying off more state workers).

Like a center-right politician, Shumlin is going to propose budget cuts, possibly deep cuts, possibly deeper than many Democratic legislators can accept. The next session could be a tough one for Democrats. Maybe Vermont Republicans will enjoy themselves after all.