by William Eginton

As we enter the election’s crunch time, and Vermont’s economic, demographic and education problems metastasize, one candidate for governor has zero life experience with the issues at hand.

That candidate has never had a job — her resume is a mishmash of NGO stints (which we know are just money laundering mechanisms to employ progressive idealogues in feel-good luxury belief systems); she’s never hired and paid wages to a single human being; she’s never owned property in Vermont, so has no visceral understanding of the existential danger imposed on any working family by property taxes; has no children and thus has zero direct experience of the challenge of educating children in one of the oldest states in the country — which state simultaneously sponsors the most powerful (read: coercive) teachers union in the country.

This candidate lacks the liberal, critical thinking skills — and life experience — to lead. Hers is a campaign of narcissistic condescension, a presumption that collecting merit badges in school and socialist enterprises like the UN, comprise expertise. She’s never written a budget; she’s never *cut* a budget; does she know the difference between cost-plus budgeting and zero-based budgeting?

She even thinks one can reduce property taxes by transferring NEA health plans to the population at-large. Hello. Moving an expense from column A to column B does not reduce cost to citizens. It merely socializes an interest group’s income in a different way.

When I query politicians on ag policy, I want to know if they can run a backhoe, bucket loader or a Steiger. 

When I query a politician as to our schools it would be good to know if the candidate has ever taught in a country school or has any idea what school consolidation does to small towns. Does the candidate even know how many incorporated towns exist in Vermont?

If I query a candidate on fostering business formation and growth, hence organic development, it would be great if she, you know, actually knew someone who built, operated and sold a company — and then did it again. If she had ever met payroll. If a candidate waxes, covetously, about taxing the heck out of seasonal residents — a bill of attainder if there ever was one — it would be really great if she had done the actual spreadsheet: her party describes this scheme as though it will rain dollars instead of pennies from heaven. N.B.: Her party overstates state revenue potential here by a factor of seven. We won’t be singing in the rain of discriminatory taxation; we will be running deficits.

Platitudes about “listening” and “feelings” are how we teach kindergartners to get along without crying jags or slapping each other. Vermont’s voters are not kindergartners.

As our favorite son, Silent Cal (who cut the US Federal budget three years out of four during his one elected term) said, in his innate modesty, while running to be mayor of Northampton, “I want your help, I need your help, I appreciate your help”. In short, he stated: “I am running to be your subordinate.”

Democrats and Republicans voted for Coolidge, as they later did for the Statehouse, for Lieutenant Governor, for Governor, for VP, for President. While a lawyer and a classics major at Amherst, he was now someone to be trusted. Amity Schaes notes: “He enjoyed the advantage of being raised on a farm; he knew when a farmer was watering the milk and when he was giving a customer extra.” He was real.

Talking in op-ed page lingo, folding in therapeutic society diction, is neither an understanding of the issues of the day nor a plan for tomorrow. One must pay dues  to write strategy and policy, and to execute them.

Historian Daniel Boorstin famously invented the term “pseudo-event” to describe the first televised presidential race (Kennedy v. Nixon). We now are afflicted by pseudo-politicians. Consultants insert “caring” tropes and promise the wisdom of institutions, of resume-padding. And, behind the mechanical snickering of the self-anointed, the moral grandstanding, like the world, is without end.

Coolidge’s lifelong friend from Amherst, Dwight Morrow, later ambassador to Mexico and elected Senator from New Jersey, summed up Coolidge’s character: “For the last year I have been abroad dealing with all sorts of government officials. Some of them have been Socialists like Thomas, the great socialist leader in France. Some of them have been from old conservative families. …I have about come to the conclusion that the division of the people in the world is not between conservative and radical, but between people that are real people and people who are not. …He [Coolidge] really wants to make things better, not to pretend to make them better.”

Let’s not pretend. Let’s not elect more pseudo-politicans practicing a politics of pseudo-events. Our lives, our homes, our schools are real.

William A. Eginton is a retired CEO who started, built and sold multiple companies in technology, intelligence and risk. He now lives in Wallingford, is a substitute teacher in public and independent schools and is running for Wallingford Justice of the Peace. His wife Stephanie Gutmann is the chair of the Wallingford Republican Party.