Four times in the last 17 years, Peter Shumlin’s fellow Democrats in the Senate have elected him as their leader.

Common sense indicates that they must have thought highly of him. They must have found him capable and energetic. It also follows that most of them trusted him. The party leader is the guy who negotiates with other members of his caucus, as well as with the opposition and the administration. No senator would choose a leader he or she found deceitful.

So why does Brian Dubie keep saying that a survey rated Shumlin the “most ethically challenged” member of the legislature, an allegation now included in a pro-Dubie television commercial?

Because it’s true.

Which is not to say that it’s true that Shumlin is more “ethically challenged” than other lawmakers. It’s just true there was such a survey, and that Shumlin got more votes than any of his colleagues to the “most ethically challenged” question.

Twelve votes to be exact. Twelve of the 30 cast, of the 400 questionnaires that Seven Days sent out to legislators, legislative staff, and journalists. On Vermont Public Radio the other day, broadcaster Mitch Wertlieb called the Shumlin designation “a dubious distinction from a small sampling.” Wertlieb was being much too kind. A better description would have been “total garbage.”

This was not a general public sample, sent to 400 randomly selected voters. The distribution was targeted to 400 insiders, by name. The small minority who bothered to answer the questions knew how to manipulate the results. Even with more participation, the conclusions would have been…well, inconclusive. With 28 real responses (two were apparently thrown out for being absurd), the conclusions are meaningless.

From which it does not follow that Dubie and his supporters should be condemned for using the information, or that Seven Days, by and large a positive voice in Vermont’s public discussion, should be condemned for shoddy journalism. In some paradise to come, a political strategist might look at such a survey, conclude that its results are statistically and intellectually indefensible, and ignore it. We do not live in that paradise. No politician of any party – Republican, Democratic, Progressive, Prohibitionist, Free Soil, or Whig – would look at this information as anything but a fat pitch right across the middle of the plate. You don’t let those go by.

As to the editors at Seven Days, they did not commit bad journalism here because these surveys are not journalism at all. They are promotion.

And what, prithee, is wrong with that?

Nothing. All news outlets, including this one, try to promote themselves. (If you don’t notice it about this one, it’s because the proprietor is no good at it, not that he finds it beneath his dignity). Lots of news organizations, especially alternative weeklies such as Seven Days, use contests and surveys as promotion devices. They’re kind of fun. On occasion, they even produce some useful information. This was not one of those occasions.

(Perhaps because we all knew it was promotion, not journalism, all 17 reporters who got the questionnaire ,including this one, did not fill it out and return it.)

In that same paradise mentioned above, editors might look at their meager results and decide not to publish them, or at least not the ones that can be distorted by political operatives. But it’s unreasonable to expect that the folks at Seven Days would have done that. It was their project, and they were probably gung ho about it.

Besides, almost all of them are likely to vote for Shumlin. They might have reasonably feared that holding back the results of that question could have exposed them to the allegation of political bias. All the folks who did fill out the questionnaire, including 18 legislators, knew the question was on the list. Among the 18 were probably several Republicans who’d named Shumlin the “most ethically challenged. So of course, the paper just published it all.

If Seven Days is to be criticized it is less for running the story than for its effort to explain away what it acknowledged was a meager response.  The 7.5 percent of respondents who replied made the rate “ better than direct mail…and not too much worse than the turnout for a Burlington election, which was 23 percent on Town Meeting Day,” the paper wrote.

But the direct mail comparison is not apt (see above for difference between random sample survey and targeted mailing), and according to arithmetic, 23 percent is more than thrice 7.5 percent, which is, indeed, “too much worse.”

None of which deals with the essential question: Is Shumlin “ethically challenged”?

Of course he is. So are we all, almost every day. “Ethically challenged” isn’t even the right term. It’s pop-psych jargon. The English translation would be “unethical.” The real question then becomes whether Shumlin is unethical, or, more precisely, whether he is more unethical (or unethical more often) than the average person, other members of the Legislature, other politicians in general, Brian Dubie in particular.

And the answer of course is that no one has the slightest idea. The Seven Days survey, even had enough respondents answered to make the results statistically respectable, does not constitute evidence.

What would constitute evidence would be something like a credible account that Shumlin had broken his word to another lawmaker, or promised the same committee chairmanship to more than one senator, or voted for legislation he really found abhorrent to please a big contributor. Were there such credible accounts, the Dubie campaign, thus far showing no sign of subtlety or restraint, would be shouting the news to the mountaintops. The lack of such shouting indicates that the evidence is not there.

Come to think of it, though, it would be surprising if there were no grumblings about Shumlin’s ethics, even if the grumbling has remained private. Shumlin has been the Senate leader, which in a way puts him at a disadvantage vis a vis Dubie, whose only real leadership position in public office was as chairman of the Essex Junction School Board years ago. A lieutenant governor is not a leader; he doesn’t have to displease anybody.

Leaders do. They have to make decisions their followers don’t like, and some of those followers then conclude that the leader has acted unethically. The athlete taken off the starting squad, the actor who doesn’t get the part, the applicant who doesn’t get the job is tempted to accuse the coach, the director, the boss of favoritism or some other unethical behavior.

Legislative leaders are constantly negotiating, with their own members, the opposition, the administration. Often, these negotiations conclude with compromise agreements. On both the political left and right – but more these days on the left – some true believers consider compromise unethical. It wouldn’t be surprising if a few of those 12 votes were from Democratic lawmakers who are to Shumlin’s left, and who resent the compromises he made with Gov.  Jim Douglas’s administration earlier this year.

In addition, negotiators sometimes hear what they want to hear rather than what has been said. When the leader says, “I’ll try to get your pet bill to the floor,” the member might hear, “I promise I’ll get your pet bill to the floor.” When it doesn’t get to the floor, the member thinks the leader lied.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that now and then Shumlin did promise to get a bill to the floor, and then not do it, either because he couldn’t or because he didn’t care. But “entirely possible” is not evidence, either, and with no evidence, there is only one word to describe accusing any individual of being unethical, That word is: unethical.

The boys are at it again, with new television commercials assailing each other’s policy positions, plus one television commercial assailing the other guy’s television commercial.

Not, on balance, an impressive display.

Clearly, they have gotten under each other’s skins. At their debate last Sunday, after Democrat Peter Shumlin pronounced himself “concerned about the tone of this campaign,” and promised to run a “positive campaign,” Republican Brian Dubie objected that a new Shumlin ad in which Dubie’s nose grows Pinocchio-style with each alleged misstatement would have to be categorized as “negative.”

Indeed it would.

And what’s wrong with that?

Nothing, if the disparaging information is accurate and meaningful. In this case, the information in the Shumlin ad (“Brian Says”) is not inaccurate. The meaningful part is less certain.

But that Shumlin commercial is not the only sign that Dubie’s ads are irritating Shumlin, and perhaps costing him some votes. The Shumlin campaign has also written the heads of three Burlington television stations urging them to exercise their “ethical responsibility to reject advertising that has been proven factually inaccurate.”

Aside from wondering what led Shumlin campaign manager Alexandra MacLean to suspect that “ethical responsibility” was part of the vocabulary of local television executives, this post will ignore that plea and concentrate instead on the accuracy/honesty/relevance of the political ads, starting with that Shumlin spot comparing Dubie with Pinocchio.

In the ad, Dubie’s nose grows longer as an announcer recounts Dubie saying: (1) IBM will leave the state if Vermont Yankee closes; (2) his Air Force National Guard duties prevented him from attending some sessions of the Senate, over which he, as lieutenant governor, presides; (3) he had a “list of…offenders” who might be released from prison by Shumlin.

The ad is accurate. Dubie was 0-for-3 here, as follows: (1) IBM has too much invested in its Essex facilities to leave because of a modest rise in the price of electricity; (2) his Air Force gig was during Town Meeting week when the Legislature did not meet (and Dubie campaign denials to the contrary, the Associated Press reported that Dubie did at first say his deployment explained some of his absences); (3) That was a list of offenses he held up, not offenders, a distinction with a very clear difference.

As errors go, though, these are peripheral, and could be mistakes, not the lies implied by the Pinocchio comparison. Who cares, for instance, how many days the lieutenant governor presides over the Senate? It’s a ceremonial role, especially when the Lite Gov’s party holds but seven of the 30 Senate seats. And the Dubie campaign quickly acknowledged his error there, and on the “list of offenders,” too.

Not on the IBM move, though. Dubie continues to insist that an IBM executive he will not name told him the plant might go if Vermont Yankee closes down. Dubie seems to believe that it will, even though two IBM executives have openly said the company has no such plans. This, however, is not a sign of dishonesty; it is a sign of stubbornness.

Dubie’s new commercial, “Vermont Has a Choice,” also levels three allegations at Shumlin (three insults per commercial seems to be the political norm).

Two of them are projections and interpretations of the possible consequences of Shumlin’s health care proposal, but they are plausible projections and interpretations, so they are not demonstrably incorrect.

Those two are that the “single payer” health care system Shumlin prefers is “a mandatory government-run health plan,” that would require “a $1 billion tax hike.”

A single payer plan would be government-run, and though Shumlin has not spelled out the details of his proposal, it would probably be pretty close to mandatory.

But then so is the new national health care law Dubie praises at every opportunity. Besides, to a very substantial extent, health care has been “government-run” for decades.

Just where the billion-dollar estimate came from is not clear, but neither is it outlandish. If a government agency paid for every Vermonter’s health care, it would have to get the money from somewhere, and the obvious place would be new taxes, perhaps adding up to a billion dollars.

An honest assessment, though, would have to subtract from that total. Subtract first a large property tax reduction. Now, the health care premiums of teachers, cops, the guys who drive the snowplows, and the town clerks are paid by local government, meaning mostly by property taxes. If those workers are all covered under the single-payer system, the property tax burden goes down substantially.

Subtract even more the “tax” we don’t call a tax. We call it health insurance premiums. Technically, it’s not a tax because no one is compelled by law to pay it. One is merely compelled by common sense and by a minimal responsibility toward one’s family, if one has a family.

Under a single payer system, this “tax” might be eliminated entirely. More likely, it would remain, at a far lower level, as beneficiaries of the new single payer system, like beneficiaries of the largest existing single payer system (Medicare), bought supplemental insurance to cover what the universal plan did not. They’d still save a lot of money.

The third charge in the Dubie ad has been dealt with here before, and it is just as false this week as last. Falser, because any excuse that the Dubie campaign was simply confused by Shumlin’s somewhat vague wording is no longer valid. Now, the assertion that Shumlin has proposed “releasing 800 prisoners early” is simply and indisputably incorrect.

It’s incorrect even if Dubie and his advisors sincerely believe it to be true. Sincerity contradicted by evidence is no defense. A candidate should not hold up his opponents’ campaign document as proof that the opponent has proposed releasing child abusers and drug dealers before their terms expire (and this is what Dubie did) unless that document actually makes that proposal. Shumlin’s does not. Dubie’s claim that Shumlin really intended to release all those prisoners because other people thought he did is, to say the least, unimpressive.

Again, this is probably not dishonesty as much as stubbornness. But almost everyone who runs for major office is stubborn. Shumlin is, or he would have acknowledged that his vague language about “transitioning” hundreds of prisoners did confuse some people, including, briefly, the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor.

There’s more than stubbornness involved in Dubie continuing to say things that are not so. It’s worth a separate examination. Tune in soon.

Finally, thanks to the Vermont Press Association and St. Michael’s College, the “other” candidates for governor, the ones who had been “blocked out or blacked out,” as one of them said, got to participate in a debate Sunday, allowing them, as another put it, to “broaden the conversation beyond what the Republicans and the Democrats are telling us.”

When it was over, the two-party system never looked better.

It wasn’t that the four “minor” candidates had nothing at all to say. At the very least, a couple of them got off a good line. Asked about the unusually antagonistic tone of the campaign between frontrunners Brian Dubie and Peter Shumlin, Cris Ericson of the U.S. marijuana Party said, “when you put two bull studs in a small cow pen, what can you expect, folks?”

And at one point, independent candidate Dan Feliciano observed that, “people are like corn. You don’t really know them until you add a little heat to them and they pop.”

Some of their serious points were worth hearing, too. Ericson suggested that every state agency “post its budget on line,” a requirement she would also impose on non-profit organizations that receive state money. Responding to a question about crime,  independent Emily Peyton asked, “what about the crimes of the federal government” Dennis Steele, the candidate of the Vermont secessionist movement, argued that the two major candidates “are not willing to address Vermont’s pro rata share of the (national) defense budget,” which he put at $2 billion a year.

To some extent, then, the minor candidates did what minor candidates ought to do. They talked about issues the major party candidates won’t discuss and took positions that Republicans and Democrats don’t or won’t take.

Alas, they did not discuss the issues intelligently, knowledgably, or, in some cases, rationally. This is not an attack on their decency, character, or intelligence. It is, though, a criticism of the breadth (and the level-headedness) of their knowledge.  At least some of them seemed to be engaged in a quest to assuage some personal demons, rather than to engage in serious political discourse.

There is honor in being a rebel, in challenging convention and mainstream assumptions. Candidates who are daring and different really do, as Peyton said, “broaden the conversation.”

But there’s no reason a rebel shouldn’t know what he or she is talking about. There is a good case to be made for the belief that Vermont’s (and America’s) political discussion ought to be expanded to include options that have been ruled out of bounds by “respectable” officials and news organizations. But there’s a better case to be made that this expansion should stay connected to reality.

The expansion as attempted by four of Vermont’s independent candidates (a fifth, Ben Mitchell, did not appear) did not always meet this test. Ericson, for instance, used her opening statement not to argue for legalizing marijuana (an entirely rational position which might have more grass-roots support than usually thought), but to accuse Vermont doctors of illegally forcing disabled patients to sign a “pain contract,” and of sending “fraudulent medical bills.”

Who knows? There might even be something to this allegation.  On a Sunday evening, it was impossible to reach advocates for the disabled. But there are such advocates, and they are not shy about calling attention to injustices visited on blind, crippled, or mentally challenged Vermonters. They don’t seem to have called any attention to this one.

Candidate Feliciano didn’t say anything all that unreasonable because he didn’t say much of anything, except that he was a “strategy and change consultant,” whatever that may be, and that he knows “where the money is hidden in the budget.”

Emily Peyton often seemed confused. She kept losing track of her thought, and when she found it, she didn’t always make sense. At one point she complained that Vermont did not have complete control of “our monetary system (because) the Federal Reserve dictates to us.”

Actually, Vermont doesn’t have a monetary system. It’s part of the United States, where, as she noted, the Federal Reserve is in charge of (or perhaps “dictates”) the monetary system, a situation which will not change as long as Vermont remains part of the United States, a state of affairs Peyton does not propose to change.

Steele, of course, does. He started off calling the U.S.  “the most corrupt, most destructive empire of all time,” at least raising the possibility that he has never heard of Caligula, Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. Challenging American foreign policy is understandable – perhaps useful – even in the context of a campaign for governor. Demonizing the United States as history’s greatest villain is bad politics, and worse history. Possibly bold, but unmistakably ignorant.

The News Guy is treading gently here because he recently enraged the secessionists and is not interested in prolonging the conflict. They became angry when, on Vermont Public Television’s Vermont This Week last month, he noted that the secessionist hierarchy (though not, he made clear, Steele or the movement’s other candidates this year) was infected by the “tinge of racism.”

Inspiring Vermont Commons, the movement’s (apparently illiterate) journal, to proclaim that the News Guy “falsely accuse(d) ten secessionists candidates of racism.”

And every other pro-secessionist Vermonter, too, although the spoken remarks had specifically referred only to some of the movement’s leaders.

How can we be racist, Vermont Commons said, when the slate of secessionist candidates includes an Abenaki (Steele), an African-American, an Italian-American, and  a Jew?

Here’s how. By being part of an organization whose leaders regularly consort with the neo-segregationist League of the South, which wants to reestablish “the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Celtic people and their institutions.”  By having a leader (Thomas Naylor) who is closely allied with League of the South member and Emory University philosopher Donald Livingston, who believes that “the North created segregation” and that Southerners fought during the Civil War “because they were invaded.”

(For documentation, see this 2008 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center)

At any rate, no one has suggested that Dennis Steele is any kind of a bigot. Except perhaps Dennis Steele, who said at the debate that  U.S. foreign policy is “orchestrated from Tel Aviv.” and has earlier said that the federal government is “owned, operated, and controlled by Wall Street, Corporate America, and the Israeli Lobby.”

Now, the suggestion that the policies of the White House and the State Department are “orchestrated from Tel Aviv,” can be dismissed as nothing but rampant ignorance. As to the “Israeli lobby,” well, there is no such monolithic entity, but there are pro-Israel organizations that do exert powerful influence in Washington. Criticizing this influence as often not in the best interests of the United States is quite reasonable. It is even quite common.

But singling out this lobby as uniquely more influential than, say, the gun lobby, or Big Pharma, or the health insurance lobby is…well, maybe it’s just more rampant ignorance.

But one has to wonder.

Democrats and Republicans may be too limited and too restrained. But there’s something to be said for restraint and limits.