Governor Stuff #1. From VPR, emphasis added:

The gubernatorial campaign of Progressive Anthony Pollina says it’s raised $100,000 in contributions and pledges in the last two months.

Heh. “And pledges.” Wonder what the ratio of contribution-to-pledge is, and how conditional those pledges are…

But I’m not trying to mock. If there’s one thing that’s been consistent about the Pollina campaign, it’s how, since November-ish, they’ve made all the right moves.

One gambit – putting out the uber-reasonable sounding word that they would back off if a “top tier” Dem was interested – backfired a bit when a top tier Dem (Racine) actually did show strong interest (woops), but you can see why they took that rhetorical gamble. The only serious stumble has been Pollina’s apparent unwillingness to pro-actively press the flesh among the grassroots Democratic organizational structure (Town and County committees), despite many folks (myself included) urging his people that he should do just that, if they indeed were serious about a unity paradigm on the left. Frankly, it seems like the obvious step (unless, of course, he really does still find Dems to be too icky). If he’d gone that route starting back when he suggested he wanted to reach out to rank-and-file Dems, he’d be in a dramatically better position already. Very odd, that.

Governor Stuff #2: VPR’s Vermont Edition also had Peter Galbraith on, talking about (among other things) a possible run for Governor (which he says he is “seriously considering”), and he will also be appearing before the Democratic State Committee on January 26th discussing the same topic. He says he is currently “traveling around the state, meeting with people.”

I guess he missed the word from Freyne way back in November that he’d already “ruled it out.”  

(Good news for proponents of IRV – promoted by JulieWaters)

(Cross posted with minor edits from VermontIRV.)

Vermont Speaker of the House Gaye Symington says she supports instant runoff voting, is well aware of S.108 and wants to see that bill passed out of committee.

The ‘Q’s are questions I submitted to Speaker Syminton, and the ‘A’s are her responses in her own words.

Q. Are you familiar with IRV and what it does?

A. Yes.

Q. Are you familiar with S. 108 and what it does?

A. Yes.

Q. Do you support IRV?

A. I am in support of IRV. If IRV were implemented it would empower voters and save Vermonters money.

Q. Do you support sending S.108 to the floor of the house for a vote?

A. (The following has been edited to reflect what the Speaker meant. Original text: “I have asked the Democratic caucus for their support in passing this bill.”) I have asked the House for its support in passing this bill.

Q. Are you aware IRV is used by local communities and states throughout the U.S.?

A. I am certainly aware that Vermont legislators are not alone in their support for IRV. It is my understanding that jurisdictions in Maryland, Minnesota, Washington, California, Colorado and Florida have already adopted IRV.

Q. Are you aware Hendersonville, NC recently used IRV in a multimember district race?

A. I was not aware of this.

Q. Are you aware four post IRV election surveys have been done with results released to the public?

A. I am not aware of these specific surveys. However, I am certainly aware that the response in Burlington to IRV has been very positive and that Burlington voters approved a charter amendment to adopt IRV.

Q. If you favor IRV what can folks do to move IRV forward?

A. I would encourage supporters of IRV to talk to their State Representatives and urge them to vote in favor of IRV. I would also encourage IRV supporters to write letters to the editor outlining the reasons why they support IRV.

Per today’s Brattleboro Reformer:

If Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant is closed in 2012, an Entergy spokesman said, it will be at least a decade after that before the decommissioning fund reaches the level necessary to pay for cleanup of the site.

But if it closes in 2032, the fund will have grown to the point that cleanup could start right away. In fact, there would be so much money left over after cleanup that every household in Vermont would get a refund check.

In other words, if you let us stay open we’ll be able to pay for closing the plant, but if you don’t, you’ll be stuck with the bill.

Now here’s the thing: it’s not that Entergy doesn’t necessarily have the money for this cleanup.  It’s that they don’t have it in their allocated fund.

Let me present a simpler example:

I make a deal with a local farmer, telling him “I’d like to use your land for a composting project for the next five years.  It will be a mess, but I’ll clean everything up when I’m done.”  He asks “how can I be sure you’ll clean it all up?”  “I’ll set aside a portion of the profits for the cleanup so I’m sure it will be fine.”  

Then, five years later, I tell him “well, there isn’t enough money in the portion I reserved for the cleanup to do it right, so it will take another ten years for me to get that fund to where it needs to do the cleanup properly.”  

“Okay, I’ve had it,” he tells me, “just clean this stuff up and get off my land.”  

“But if I do that,” I tell him, “I won’t have the money to do the clean-up.  I need to keep the business open for another ten years to be able to pay for it.”

“Don’t you have any money from other sources to clean it up?”  

“Well, sure,” I explain, “but that’s not part of what I put aside.”

“You can’t use that other money to clean up my land?” he asks.

“Of course not!  All that money is in different funds.  If I use that money to clean up your land then I won’t be able to pay for the clean up over at Mrs. Henderson’s place.  That’s just the way it is.  If you don’t like, you’re screwed.”

“Maybe I should sue you.”

“I’ve got five lawyers in my family and if you try to sue me over this, they’ll keep it tied up in court for the next ten years.  Better to just let me keep operating for those ten years.”

You get the idea.

Just a couple of points from my perspective:

1) I turned it off after about ten minutes for two reasons. First I was disgusted with MSNBC going to extremes to keep Kucinich out of the debate.

2) The whole first ten minutes was about Clinton v. Obama “race baiting” and Clinton’s “emotional moment”.

These two points leave me with a question. Why didn’t the three of them walk off the stage?

If the Democratic Party and it’s leading applicants for the Presidency favor democracy and the little people so much, why didn’t they stand up for Kucinich and walk off the stage?

Why didn’t they walk off the stage as soon as the “race baiting” and “emotional moment” were brought up?

In the end this helps to illustrate why I don’t think we’re going to see any real difference between and Democratic and Republican president. The words are great and highly effective when it comes to getting votes, but the actions make a lie of those words.

It is, after all, actions that make the words honest or not.

Former Governor Kunin (a Hillary Clinton supporter) has an op-ed in the Washington Post (h/t Hemingway) that would seem to reduce the entirety of the New Hampshire primary results to a very simple calculus:

Women came out in droves for the recent Democratic voting in both New Hampshire and Iowa. The numbers in the two states were nearly identical — 57 percent women and 43 percent men. But in New Hampshire those women supported Sen. Hillary Clinton over Sen. Barack Obama 46 to 29 percent, while in Iowa they backed Obama 35 to 30 percent.

Why the difference?

Aside from having elected a woman as governor, New Hampshire has become accustomed to seeing women wield the legislative gavel…. electing women is contagious. The more you see, the more you get…

They have the further effect of demonstrating to the voters that the diversity that women bring to the political process has its rewards: new ideas, priorities and leadership styles….

The difference became clear when Clinton’s voice quavered and she showed deep emotion while meeting with a group of women at a diner. It was a “just us girls” moment, when she felt she could let her hair down and they would understand.

A lot of New Hampshire women apparently did.

It’s easy to infer while reading this piece that Kunin is looking at a piece of the NH equation discretely, until she applies her theory without qualification or contextualization on the upcoming primary states:

When the campaigns turn to Nevada, South Carolina and beyond, will women continue to turn out for Clinton in large numbers? South Carolina will be tough. It has the distinction of ranking at the bottom in the percentage of women in its legislature: 8.8 percent. There are not many female role models to guide voters, and the tradition that a Southern woman’s place is in the home still lingers in some quarters….New Hampshire is ready. As for the rest of the nation, the next primaries may give us the answer.

Kunin starts by laying out a common-sense, positive point that can’t be repeated too often – diversity is in and of itself a desirable goal in institutions – particularly government.

But from there, she makes an astonishing projection onto the entirety of the Presidential Primary process: a State’s vote for Hillary Clinton is a metric of its level of gender equality and justice. If Clinton wins, it means your state has no problem with women in positions of power. If she loses, it’s because your state is still too prejudiced to accept women in power. The Clinton vote will “give us the answer” as to which states still believe that a “woman’s place is in the home.” Change in X equals change in Y.

Much as I’m trying to read otherwise, that seems to be the message. Kunin’s argument is to wholly reduce the Democratic primary to a gauge of our social construction of gender. There is no room given for a dialectic that considers the candidates as individuals, or their policies.

It seems to me that this makes for a simplistic and reductive analysis, and is couched in terms that run the risk of being essentializing.

What do you think? Does Kunin have a point? Does she have a piece of a point? Is she entirely off base? As a poster at dKos just put it, does this reasoning suggest that a state’s readiness for a black leader and a state’s readiness for a female leader are inversely proportional?