I left the Chittenden County Courthouse with the last wave of counters.  What began in tumultuous uncertainty ended rather quietly: outcome expected.  As I headed toward the entrance ramp to I-89, a Monarch butterfly lurched drunkenly past my windshield, braving the cross-currents of car exhaust and prevailing winds.

Here’s what I am thinking this fine evening in Vermont:  I’m thinking “Congratulations” to Peter Shumlin. You won the nomination, fair-and-square. Our efforts to defeat Brian Dubie are yours to command.  Honor the reasonable expectations of all of us volunteers who served the other campaigns and you will have a formidable army of support that will carry you to the governor’s chair and through as many terms as you care to serve.

…And I’m thinking how cynical and counterproductive it would be now to ridicule the recount or the people who called for it.  Certainly, political insiders can tell you six ways ’til Sunday why it was statistically unlikely that the outcome would be otherwise; but a lot of ordinary voters who were deeply invested in their candidate and whom we must hope will carry that investment forward to the nominee, could not have done so enthusiastically without the validation provided by the recount.

Going forward, there will be those who are tempted to blame Doug Racine for every kink and snarl, every rainy day that the campaign encounters between now and November 2.  That’s bogus.  No one could have been more aware of that than Doug himself when he girded himself to request the recount; but he owed it both to his supporters and to the general campaign to clear away any cloud of doubt that might  weaken the united force against Brian Dubie.  

What do you really think would have happened if he had simply conceded to Peter without a recount?  I’ve got a pretty good idea that many of his supporters, having the 2000 presidential recount still burning in their memory, would have seen his acquiescence as a betrayal.  That’s just his supporters!  His detractors, having lobbed plenty of criticism at him for being a “nice guy,” and for what they saw as his relative inability to turn endorsements into dollars,  would have publicly wailed on him, good-and-plenty, for surrendering when the vote difference was so small.  This was a no-win situation for Doug; but not the first he had been dealt in the campaign.  Labor endorsements, high-profile Progressive endorsements, and tremendous grass-roots organizing would seem to the uninitiated to be something to celebrate.  But if they are not accompanied by the requisite amount of expected cash they apparently turn to PR liabilities, so that much of the conversation in the media around Doug Racine’s campaign toward the end seemed to be all about the cash and not about the candidate.  What was everyone expecting in a deep recession from the candidate of the working class, environmentalists and famously underfunded progressives? I don’t know about you, but at my house, we’re having a tough time just keeping the lights on and the mortgage paid.

My final thoughts this evening:  we’ve gotta uncouple this horse from the locomotive.  It shouldn’t be all about the money; not in Vermont; not anywhere in America.   Political campaigns are nothing more than public information vehicles.  In the age of radio, television and the internet, they can and should be conducted with no private funding whatsoever.  And before the “free speech” paranoids jump all over me, tell me who’s protecting the right to be heard of the working class and poor who can’t afford a paid platform?