Three for Monday
FIRST, A POLITICAL BULLETIN: Paul Beaudry, the conservative radio talk show host on WDEV in Waterbury, has resigned from True North Radio and is preparing to run for Congress.
“I have given my two weeks notice,” after four years hosting the call-in show, Beaudry said in a telephone interview Sunday evening. Though he said there was still some chance he would decide against running, he described himself as “super-strongly considering it, and doing all the things necessary” to prepare.
That included, he said, laying the groundwork for raising money and hiring staff for a campaign to defeat Rep. Peter Welch, the heavily favored Democrat who will seek a third term in November.
First, Beaudry would have to win a primary against Keith Stern of Springfield, but even Stern’s campaign manager conceded that Beaudry might be the favorite.
“Because Paul is well known he’s going to have some financial support we don’t have,” said Andrew Glover, “and unfortunately money wins the election.”
To counter Beaudry’s name-recognition and financial advantage, Glover said, the Stern campaign would argue that Beaudry is too “ultra-conservative” to have any chance against Welch.
“Keith can get the swing voters, Glover said. “Paul can’t.”
Beaudry, who is 47 and lives in Swanton would almost certainly be the most conservative Republican statewide candidate in years. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t win the primary. In Vermont, as elsewhere in the Northeast, moderates have drifted away from the Republican fold, some affiliating with the Democrats, others redefining themselves as independents. As a result, a larger proportion of the GOP primary electorate is well to the right of center.
Beaudry said he would run as a “staunch conservative” to balance Vermont’s “bunch of liberals down there” who only want to “spend and spend and spend.”
Beaudry has been a firm supporter of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. He has also devoted several programs to attacking the proposed Wild and Scenic designation of parts of the Missisquoi and all of the Trout River, calling it a “big government land grab.”
The radio program will apparently go on with another host. Beaudry said the owners of True North Radio, whom he would not identify, were already working with a potential substitute for him on the program. Ken Squier, the President and CEO of WDEV, who said he heard of Beaudry’s plans just the other day, also said the program would continue Like some other shows on WDEV, the station itself does not produce True North Radio, but simply sells it air time.
NEXT, A BIT OF PEDANTRY: On Vermont Public Radio’s Vermont Edition last week, Ken Page, the executive director the Vermont Principals’ Association, had some incisive comments about the school and school financing situation.
He also said – not once, not twice, but thrice – that there were “less students” in Vermont public schools these days.
Okay, we all know what he meant: there aren’t as many students as there were a few years ago. But it’s reasonable to expect a senior educator say what he means in proper English. Otherwise, why expect the kids to use proper English?
There are fewer students than there used to be.
That’s not hard, is it?
And it isn’t just pedantry, either. There are no doubt several reasons why English-speaking men and women have made contributions disproportionate to their numbers in science and literature. But surely one of them is the language itself. Its vast and ever-expanding vocabulary gives English-speakers the power to express themselves with more precision and nuance than perhaps any other language.
Maintaining the distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’ is important because maintaining distinctions keeps one in the habit of…maintaining distinctions. And that’s key to precision and nuance.
FINALLY, AN UPDATE: For those who may not have noticed, Gov. Jim Douglas did what the News Guy predicted he would do (see Broken Date, March 26) and did not veto the bill moving the date of this year’s primary from September 14 to August 24.
No, he didn’t sign the bill http://www.leg.state.vt.us/docs/2010/bills/Passed/S-117.pdf (S. 117), either. He just announced last week that he would let it become law without his signature. That way he gets to express his displeasure with the new law without doing anything to stop it.
Doing anything to stop a bill that had overwhelming support of the Democratic majorities in both houses might have upset “the general collegiality of the (Legislative) session so far,” the Governor said.
He didn’t say, but probably knew, that refusing to move the date could put the state out of compliance with federal law, risking a voting rights suit from the U.S. Department of Justice and other messy complications.
He did repeat his earlier contention that turnout would probably be lower in August, and that it was not “in the best interest of our representative democracy to have a summer primary.”
He’s right, even if September 14 is still in the summer, scientifically speaking; the autumnal equinox doesn’t occur until September 22 at 11:09 PM. But socially speaking summer ends on Labor Day, September 6 this year. Before then, lots of people are still away on vacation, and even though absentee voting isn’t that complicated, the turnout for an August primary is likely to be dismal.
So why was there no discussion about moving future primaries (too late for this year) to the spring? A majority of states have their primaries before mid-June, when the summer gets under way. Another six states vote earlier in August, and three other states – Alaska, Arizona, and Florida – will be voting the same day as Vermont. The old argument against spring primaries was that they made the election campaigns too long. But these days the campaigns are long anyway. May or early June is a convenient time for the voting public and would give the winning candidates enough time to organize their general election campaigns.
Tags: Jim Douglas, Keith Stern, Ken Page, Paul Beaudry
April 12th, 2010 at 8:57 am
Three cheers for pedantry!!! I am certain that I have made the same mistake as Ken Page, but perhaps not as publicly. It reminds me of an incident in 1991, when the Vermont Department of Education staff sent a three-page memo to Gov. Snelling’s office. The document was riddled with typos, poor syntax and grammar. Agreement between subject and verb seemed merely coincidental. I sent the thing back to then-Commissioner Rick Mills, who called me to express his embarrassment. I replied, “If this is what we get from the Department of Education, what does that say about our education system?”
That little story is only an introduction to another word that I find it horribly misused: penultimate. I once heard NBC-TV football announcer Dick Enberg called Kellen Winslow, who used to play for the San Diego Chargers, “the penultimate tight end.” Brian Burke, presently GM of the Toronto Maple Leafs and someone who fancies himself as a real thinker, was being interviewed a few years ago on Hockey Night in Canada and called hockey “the penultimate sport.” So, if Winslow is the next to last (the meaning of penultimate) tight end, who might be the last?
Finally, I recall Duane Thomas, a former star running back of the Dallas Cowboys. After a Super Bowl victory by the dreaded Cowboys, an interviewer asked Thomas in the locker room, “Wasn’t this the ultimate game?” Thomas was normally laconic, and his reply was priceless. “If the Super Bowl is the ultimate game, ” he asked, “why is there another one next year?”
April 12th, 2010 at 6:31 pm
Precisely. If there were fewer grammatical mistakes being made, comments would be far less irritating. I also take umbrage at butchered expressions. A article recently quoted a citizen commenting on a defeated school budget as saying it was going to be ” a tough road to hoe”….. Think about these things, people! Any road is going to be tough to hoe, really tough! Hint- the expression has an agricultural basis, it is a tough ROW to hoe. That makes sense. It is like hearing about ‘water under the dam’. Now, that isn’t letting bygones be bygones, its a real disaster.