by Gerald Malloy
I would like to share some thoughts and observations as I have been campaigning for US Senate across Vermont. First I want to say thank you for the incredible support and interest I have been receiving. BLUF, statewide that indomitable spirit of liberty is alive and well.
One of the reasons I am writing is that we are about to celebrate our Nation’s 248th birthday on Independence Day. I am looking forward to parades in Montpelier and Colchester and Brownsville, the Coolidge Cup (happy birthday President Coolidge), fireworks, barbecues, and happy faces. I remember going to the Esplanade Hatch Shell with my entire family, all 10 of us, for the Bicentennial 4th of July with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops in 1976, a fond memory, a different time.
Back to the present, about a week ago I heard the song “Crossroads”, the 1968 Cream live version, and that has led me to many thoughts, past present and future, about Vermont and our Country. I first spoke about Vermont and the United States being at a crossroads, not being on a good path, over two years ago in a speech in Castleton, and now just within the past few months I have had several speaking engagements that led to discussions about Vermont over the past 50+ years. When I heard “Crossroads”, and in thinking about Independence Day, I decided to dig a little deeper.
I re-read the April 1972 article “Taking Over Vermont“ by Richard Pollak and I read the 1970 paper “Jamestown Seventy” by James Blumstein and James Phalen. I would urge every Vermonter to read them both.
Messrs. Blumstein and Phelan propose political migration to a single state for the purpose of gaining political control and then establishing a living laboratory for experimentation. Mr. Pollak takes that idea and applies it to Vermont.
I think a Vermont reader today will be surprised, maybe even shocked, at the prophetic nature of both articles. I certainly was, particularly with “Jamestown Seventy”. To get right to the point, I read “Jamestown Seventy” very closely and frankly I fully agree with the ideas of state rights, decentralization, and state innovation; and the article lays out many of the pitfalls and problems associated with implementation.
And that is where Vermont is today, with a supermajority in the state legislature and in its congressional delegation. We’ve seen 12 common-sense vetoes from our very popular Governor overridden in the last 13 months. Vermont has become unaffordable and unsafe and a place to leave. The experiment is failing badly for many reasons, including fentanyl now pouring in on the “open borders”, but primarily because the movement shifted from ‘ideas’ to an centralized no-deviation Agenda, and Vermont lost ‘balance’.
I have sought to engage Mr. Pollak and Messrs. Blumstein and Phelan. I did want to share that I was successful in engaging Mr. Blumstein. He is now a Distinguished Law Professor at Vanderbilt University and has taught at Dartmouth and Penn. I had emailed him and to my surprise shortly thereafter I got a call from the 615 area code.
More to my surprise, Professor Blumstein immediately told me that he had already supported my campaign. I had no idea of this. We spoke for a long time and he relayed some regret with his paper, talked about the paper’s ‘rhetoric’, input from a law student named Hillary Rodham, and growing up in Brooklyn where his father taught math at James Madison High School. He has an amazing body of work and was a pleasure to speak with. I discussed the status quo in Vermont, crime/drugs/a 14% tax hike and other cost burdens/exodus, and how the ‘experiment’ had gone off the rails with the supermajority and a lack of balance.
I also did some research on “Crossroads” as the song has a long history and different interpretations. I found some comments by Eric Clapton himself: “…a world where there is little hope…the crossroads is about choosing which path to go down. It’s about the moral decisions you make every day.”
Many in Vermont have heard me say ‘May the fourteenth star shine bright’. Right now we are not shining bright, we are on a bad path, we do not have balance or “Unity”, we are at a crossroads. Vermonters will decide the path for Vermont this November. I meet Vermonters every day that are ready to change Vermont itself for the better – and that really is what the article and paper are all about in the first place.
Happy 4th of July!
The author is a Perkinsville resident running for U.S. Senate as a Republican.