Culture Vulture

Our apologies to Neil Diamond, but the parallel between one of his many classic tunes and the situation with Caroline Kennedy was a natural match up.

With the financial crunch so severe in Montpelier these days - the Governor and the Legislature are struggling to come up with about $37 million in immediate cuts to the current budget to offset lower than expected revenues – it’s tempting to take a break from state politics here in Vermont to reflect on one of those wonderfully complex situations that only our neighboring state of New York seems capable of producing. It’s tempting, and so we will.

Illinois, of course, is running a close second in that regard right now, with its Governor, Rod Blogojevich, in much legal hot water over his apparent inclination to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s former Senate seat to the highest bidder. Happily, for fans of a good political fight tainted with a whiff of corruption in the good, old-fashioned, bare knuckles style of politics we occasionally worry has gone completely out of style in our new age, feel good era, the good Governor is digging in and vowing to fight the allegations “to his last breath.” Go, Rod. That will make the ultimate disposition of that Senate seat even more interesting. Clearly, if Rod were to throw down the gauntlet and nominate somebody that would give the term “poisoned chalice” a whole new meaning. But Rod could turn the tables on everyone and nominate someone such as Tammy Duckworth, a crippled Iraq veteran and state politician, who would command a lot of support. Or we could have a special election to insure clean hands at work. We’ll see just how craft the not-so-good Governor turns out to be. But we digress.

New York, New York. Only someone who has spent a certain amount of time living there can truly appreciate the delicious twists and turns the saga of who will be named to fill Hillary Clinton’s unexpired Senate term, but for the rest of you, we’ll try.

Hillary, wife of former President Bill Clinton has been nominated by Obama to be our next Secretary of State. That appointment, pending confirmation by the full Senate (a foregone conclusion) will have its fascinating dynamics as well – it reminds one and all of the old expression “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” But who knows – she may be great at it. Her management performance shown by her attempts to shepherd a much-needed health insurance bill through Congress in 1993-4 and more recently, the floundering of her unsuccessful presidential campaign lead one to wonder how she’ll master the sprawling bureaucracy over at Foggy Bottom, but that’s a story for another day.

Meanwhile, back home in the Empire State, Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the late President, has thrown her hat in the ring for Hillary’s former seat. She has all the name recognition anyone could want and presumably a network of financial backers ready and willing, despite all the recent turmoil on Wall Street and elsewhere in the “real” economy, to finance not one but probably two necessary races. She’ll need to run again in 2010 and then again in 2012, assuming she wins the first one. The only Republican with a ghost of a chance of knocking her off might be Rudy Guiliani, who ran a pretty pathetic campaign himself for the Republican nomination for president, but in certain circles is still widely respected for his 9-11 work.

Caroline has kept a low public profile for most of her adult life, opting, and understandably so, given her father’s tragic death and her mother’s lightning rod-like attractiveness for the new media, both of the gossip and so-called “serious” news gathering crowd. What qualifies her, all of a sudden, to be a U.S. Senator, is a good question. She seems like a reasonably sharp lady who has probably followed politics up close and personal for all these years, and she might not be a bad choice. There’s simply nothing in the public record that is there to give us a clue one way or the other. She had the incredibly good judgment to come out early for Barack Obama, when her endorsement carried some real weight and value. So maybe there is some of the Kennedy political DNA kicking around, and she’d have Uncle Teddy, assuming his brain tumor doesn’t force his retirement, around to help show her the ropes.

But, Caroline isn’t the only one with an interest in the Senate seat. Andrew Cuomo, former governor Mario Cuomo’s son and presently the state’s Attorney General, has also been mentioned as a future Senate possibility. Andrew, who is said to be happy for the moment in Albany, where he’d have a good chance of unseating the present New York governor, David Patterson, who himself was appointed to fill out former governor Elliot Spitzer’s term when Elliot, as we all remember, made an unfortunate choice of tryst mates while on state business in Washington, D.C. last year. Andrew is said to be keen to step into his father’s former office at the statehouse, but the allure of a Senate seat could be too powerful to resist. That would suit Gov. Patterson handily, avoiding a potentially divisive and expensive primary fight and ensuring him an easier time at the polls in 2010. And to make everything even more delicious, Cuomo used to be married to one of Caroline’s cousins, another member of the vast Kennedy tribe, but isn’t anymore. You can’t make this kind of stuff up – no one would believe it if it were a movie or a TV show.   

And those are only two of five Senate seats that will require special appointments or elections to fill, as President-elect Obama has culled from his former colleagues to fill Cabinet posts in his incoming administration. Stay tuned for more fun and games.

Posted by Andrew McKeever at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the best ideas we’ve heard so far for trying to right-size our educational infrastructure – the number of school buildings in particular along with consolidating the number of supervisory unions – is one pioneered a few decades back when the federal Department of Defense was in the early stages of cutting back on the excessive number of military bases it had accrued coming out of World War II and the Cold War that followed.

Newer technology and a diminishing threat from the Soviet Union made having so many airbases or military facilities of some sort or another unnecessary and costly after a time. But justified or not on national security grounds, such bases were politically and economically significant to the communities they were located in. They meant jobs and a sense of vitality for those communities, many of who feared they would turn into ghost towns if the air force or the army moved out.

Many of those facilities were successfully transformed into industrial parks or put to other uses, even if a few years of painful adjustment came first. That’s easy to say, but not easy for the people who lost jobs in the short term. But in the long run, it was the right thing to do.

One of the techniques used to decide on which bases would be shut down was through a bi-partisan, blue ribbon commission that studied the options and came up with a recommendation that Congress had to endorse, straight up-or-down. No wiggle room for backroom politicking by influential legislators to save the base in their home state or district. All or nothing.

As has been repeatedly said in recent years, Vermont has an unsustainable trajectory in education spending going on. We are spending more money to educate fewer students and employing more teachers to do that. At more than $1.4 billion in expense, that soaks up about half of all tax revenue in the state. That was a bad deal two years ago, and it’s a worse one now. We need to find another way to deliver high quality educational services at an affordable price.

Expecting communities to voluntarily give up a local school is a pipedream. Because of Act 68, this is a state problem. The state should take the lead in determining which schools make sense to run and keep open, and offer some kind of carrot to those communities whose schools will be shut because they aren’t needed anymore or because other alternatives are available. A respected commission of credible citizens, educators and experts should be able to explore, county-by-county, which schools no longer make sense to run. They should be tasked with preparing a list of schools the state no longer needs, and the legislature should vote that in or not as a total package.

Such a strategy takes the poisonous local politics out of it, whereby a majority of the legislators can take a “big picture” view of what is right for the state as a whole. And if in its wisdom the legislators vote such a package down, voters will know who to punish at election time for taking money out of their pockets.

Such a commission could also take a look at Vermont’s excessive number of supervisory unions with an eye towards trimming them down from a ridiculous 63 to something more like 14 or 15. Maybe Chittenden County has a big enough population to rate two SU’s, but the rest of us should be able to survive nicely on one per county, and reap a few million dollars in savings on salaries, supplies and heating fuel, for starters. That may not seem like a lot of money, but right now the state is looking at a $66 million budget shortfall. A million here and a million there adds up to something, eventually.

Posted by Andrew McKeever at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)