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.