Oh, no, not the local angle.

Always be wary of the veteran newsie who can find the parochial aspect of the most universal story. Sometimes it’s a stretch. Were all life on earth in danger of ending tomorrow, the likely implications for Vermont would be indistinguishable from those in Botswana.

And so one might think about the two major news stories (so far) of the current week – the swine flue outbreak and Sen. Arlen Specter’s switch to the Democrats. There’s a “Vermont angle” to these developments?

Specter

Yeah, actually, there is. Or, more precisely, there are. The local applications are indirect, and less than earth-shaking. But that renders them no less real. The first connection is scientific, and a reminder to be prudent. The second is obviously political, and a reminder that the politics of the region is changing rapidly enough to shock the average Vermonter.

Not that it should. Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that another moderate Republican senator left the Republican Party. That was Vermont’s Jim Jeffords, in a prelude of sorts to what happened yesterday.

The flu outbreak has no direct Vermont connection. But it has a possible Vermont application if the virus first leaped from pigs to humans near the site of a massive pig-farming operation in Perote, Mexico, in the state of Vera Cruz.

That’s not certain. The first cases were reported in Vera Cruz, but that falls short of proof that the big pig farm was the culprit. Still, that does seem to be the working hypothesis, because it is consistent with the connection between certain diseases and  human-caused dense concentrations of animals. For example, many fish biologists think the whirling disease that has decimated the rainbow trout populations in many Western rivers originated in hatcheries.

Vermont does not have any huge pig farms. It does have some fairly large dairy and chicken farms, and proposals to create more. It also has elk farms, and captive elk have been associated with chronic wasting disease (CWD), the always-fatal transmissible spongiform encephalopathy which can spread to wild deer.

That’s why the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department has a moratorium on any more captive elk hunting preserves, though the existing facilities in Irasburg and Fairlee have been “grandfathered in.”

Even these, though, will have to get permits by next January, according to David Englander of Fish and Wildlife, who said the permits will be granted only if the hunting preserves meet “very specific objective requirements” about the size and strength of the fences they put up to keep the captive elk in and the wild deer out. And if the fences don’t work, “if there are repeated intrusions or escapes,” the Department can order further steps.

In addition, there are several farms that raise elk (but do not allow hunting of them) in the state. These are under the jurisdiction of the Agriculture and Markets Department, which also imposes regulations designed to keep elk from mingling with wild deer. There have been no reports of CWD in Vermont, but at least one case was reported at an elk farm in nearby upstate New York.

So beware of artificial concentrations of swine, cervids, fish, fowl, and quite possibly, humans.

The political news also affects Vermont indirectly, but sweepingly. It illustrates a reality somewhat obscured within the state’s borders: the Republican Party is close to dead in the Northeastern corner of America.

The obscurer, of course, is Gov. Jim Douglas, who has won every election here since the Pleistocene (OK, it only seems that way) and looks like the early favorite, if by no means a cinch, to win a fifth term next year.

But look at the rest of the region. In the ten New England and Middle Atlantic States there are three surviving Republican senators. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire will not seek re-election next year, and is likely to be replaced by a Democrat. That leaves the two ladies from Maine, Olympia Snow and Susan Collins, now lonelier than ever as Republican moderates.

They know it.

“I’ve always been deeply concerned about the views of the Republican Party nationally in terms of their exclusionary policies and views towards moderate Republicans,” Snowe told a Huffington Post reporter yesterday. And to Politico, she said “Ultimately, we’re heading to having the smallest political tent in history, the way things are unfolding.”

Snowe said she would remain a Republican, but she sure didn’t seem enthusiastic about it. No one should be surprised if she or Collins or both do what Jeffords did in 2001, leave the GOP to become an independent. The Jeffords switch did not set off a general Republican exodus as some predicted. But that was largely because the September 11 attacks a few months later gave President George Bush the opportunity to rally the country behind him (and because the Democrats then entered some three years of befuddlement).

There is now not a single Republican member of Congress from New England, and only a handful from the entire Northeast, one less now that a Democrat just won a special election in an upstate New York Congressional district that was drawn to be overwhelmingly Republican.

Specter’s switch was an act of self-interest. Had he stayed a Republican he would probably have lost a primary to a candidate who would then have lost to any Democrat who could breathe and who had not been indicted.

But the political reality behind that likely outcome illustrates what Specter meant when he said that the Republican Party had moved too far to the right. Not long ago Pennsylvania was a swing state. It now appears reliably Democratic. It is also (unlike Vermont) a party registration state where only registered Republicans can vote in Republican primaries. Over the last few years, as Specter pointed out, some 200,000 Republicans have re-registered as Democrats or independents.

This leaves the Republicans – and not just in Pennsylvania – an increasingly conservative party in an increasingly not so conservative part of the country.

Douglas stays in office and retains fairly good (though slipping) approval ratings partly because he’s faced three straight weak Democrats, but also because he’s not all that conservative. But because he has been so successful, it’s easy to lose sight of how heavily (totally?) the Vermont Republican Party depends on him. After him, for the GOP, comes not the deluge, but the draught. It isn’t just that there seem to be few if any good candidates to replace him; there seems to be no spark, no energy, no pizzazz.

And not much in the way of ideas. Nor is it just the politicians. Take a look or listen to the Republican-leaning commentators, academics, or activists. It would be somewhat unfair to suggest that they have nothing to say. It would be reasonable to wonder whether what they say has much relation to reality.

Not that the Democratic-leaning commentators, etc, are always models of restraint and accuracy. But they are (usually) coherent and comprehensible. The Republicans often seem to be stuck in another world. Now that the real Alan Greenspan has conceded that market fundamentalism was a mistake, why can’t his one-time idolaters figure that out?

In a sense, the Recession has helped Douglas, and it could help the Vermont Republicans. With revenue so short, the state either has to cut deeply into its programs or raise taxes. The Democrats have opted for the latter, and being against tax increases is never without some political advantage.

But the advantage could prove fleeting. Or non-existent. It’s quite possible that a majority of Vermonters would rather cough up a few more bucks in taxes than see all those programs get slashed.

Besides, even Jim Douglas will not be governor forever. When he isn’t, his party in Vermont could be in even worse shape than the one Arlen Specter just left in Pennsylvania.