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Politics : John EDWARDS for President -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (392)	2/21/2004 2:23:18 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1381

was watching c-span last nite on the presidential grave site visits. Last nite, the historical study group visit Calvin coolidge grave in Vermont Tour inside.c-spanarchives.org:8080/cspan/cspan.csp?command=dprogram&record=174973254 Presidential History Tour: Calvin Coolidge C-SPAN Plymouth Notch, Vermont (United States) ID: 180571 - 7 - 11/01/2003 - 0:51 - $29.95 and today: As Dean and the Media Pull Out, A Small-Town State Mourns a Dream Saturday, February 21, 2004; Page A06 BURLINGTON, Vt. -- Peter Freyne, an astute political columnist and one of this state's eminent eccentrics, recalls when he first decided that Howard Dean could become president. "Everyone thought I was mentally ill," Freyne said. "Then he took off and I was sane." Alas, the Dean campaign flat-lined this week and Freyne is back where he started. "Everyone thinks I'm nuts again." In the days after Dean's fall from presidential grace, conversations in this state took on a crestfallen tone. Bisected by the Green Mountains and populated by fewer than 700,000 people, Vermont has a familial feel -- and so do its politics, with all the affection, annoyance and occasional dysfunction that implies. Dean ruled as governor for 11 years and had become communal property. In Fairfax in northern Vermont, teenager Amanda Bryan talked of striking up a conversation with Dean's son at a hockey game and of her dashed hopes of voting for his dad for president in November. A Burlington woman told of offering her sympathies to Dean's wife -- who is her doctor -- while on a table getting a medical exam. An assistant librarian at the Fletcher Free Library knows Dean and gives a learned disquisition on his campaign. And in Vergennes, a handsome little (pop. 2,700 or so) city that sits halfway between Burlington and no place in particular, the talk was of what almost was. Walk into the Eat Good breakfast place on Main Street and mention Dean's name and you hear a sound not unlike a balloon deflating. "Ohhhhhhh, it's so sad," said Tara Vaugnan-Hughes as she rang up the cash register. "He was thoughtful, he was fiscally responsible." Her mother, Sandy Short, nodded agreement. "Dean had integrity and he was ours." In Montpelier, a pearl of a capital city tucked in a fold of the Green Mountains, some admitted to West Wing whispers last summer. Let's just say he does win -- who goes? Will he take his alternative-energy people? What about the men and women who labored on Doctor Dinosaur, the state's universal health insurance program for children? Should they start enquiring about Adams Morgan co-ops? "I'm a political hack and a fifth-generation Vermonter, so I wasn't going anywhere," said Elizabeth Ready, the state auditor. "But I was secretly hoping that some of our top environmental people would go to Washington. The country might do better if it functioned more like Vermont." Vermont has perhaps more than its fair share of socialists and llama farms and crystal-and-organic-radicchio stores. But its hippie-dippyness has been overstated by the media. The average Vermonter (a mix of multigenerational woodchucks and newcomers known as flatlanders) is a sensible sort, in a leave-me-alone kind of way. "When I travel, people used to ask me what state Vermont's in," said Peter LaPierre, a heavily bearded wood-chipper operator whose children receive health insurance thanks to the program Dean pushed through. "I'd tell 'em we're somewhere south of the Arctic Circle. Howard's finally put us on the map of the United States." None of which is to suggest that the ex-governor is universally loved here. His acerbic I'm-the-doctor-and-I'll-tell-you-what's-wrong-with-you approach was not a persona confected on the campaign trail. More than a few liberals did not care for him when he was governor. And Dean's decision to sign a bill legalizing civil unions for gays and lesbians enraged many in the craggy, predominantly Catholic-populated farm belts northeast of Burlington. John Hodgson, a burly welder from Waterville, stepped into the mud outside the Cambridge Village Market near Mount Mansfield and shrugged. "You take someone from a small state and put 'em on a national stage and more or less you admire it," he said. "Still, I can't help but put him down on the civil union stuff. Howard Dean had good ideas, but he never should have touched that." That said, it's striking how many Vermonters closed ranks tight around their favorite son, to the point that heretics had a hard time. University of Vermont political scientist Garrison Nelson has crafted quotable quotes for national reporters for several decades. But he is no fan of Howard Dean, and when he said that -- quite colorfully -- he reaped some cold stares. "I could not go a day in Burlington without having my chops busted," Nelson said. "I had a friend walk up on the sidewalk and ask: 'How could you do this to our Howard?' I replied: 'Just when did this humorless little man become 'our Howard'?" Vermonters tend to be fair-minded in their autopsy of Dean's campaign: They apportion some blame to the national media but do not spare Dean. Mark Delorme talked of the Dean's descent as he loaded a furniture truck at Bub's Barn outside Vergennes. "I think Dean's troubles came after his little AAAARRRRRRGHHHHHH!" Delorme loosens his loudest and best imitation of Dean's campaign yell in Iowa on election night. "Unraveled for him right there, it did." So where now for Vermont? After Dean and civil unions and Sen. Jim Jeffords's switch from the Republican Party to independent caucusing with the Democrats, is it back to marketing maple syrup and apples, Ben & Jerry and some wicked ski trails? Some Vermonters hold fast to their presidential daydreams. Maybe Dean will run again. They rattle off the rather short and obscure list of Vermont presidents -- Chester A. Arthur and Calvin Coolidge (although Arthur had to become a patronage dispenser in New York and Coolidge had to be elected governor of Massachusetts before they could run for the White House). Commentator Freyne doesn't see it happening. Earlier this week, he peered out his office window in Burlington at a frozen lake and piles of snow and mastodon herds of media satellite trucks. "Will we ever see this again in Vermont? I don't know about that." -- Michael Powell