So I caught Annette Smith on the Mark Johnson Show yesterday, and something about it bothered me. Well, more than one thing, but one in particular.

During her appearance, the write-in candidate for Governor ticked off a long list of issues animating her campaign:

The school lunch program, the F-35’s, ridgeline wind turbines, wireless smart meters, forced vaccinations*, the Green Mountain Power merger with CVPS and the $21 million.

*What “forced vaccinations” exactly? Who’s pinning down kids and jamming needles in their arms?

She later added another one: EPA-mandated disinfection of public water supplies.

What’s the common thread that ties all these issues together? I would have said “small isolated groups of single-issue activists brandishing junk science,” but maybe that’s just me. What does Ms. Smith say?

Local control. There are increasing federal mandates, federal burdens, and a government that seems to be much more in league with the corporations than with the people.

…There is this convergence of feeling like we are just completely losing our local control to federal and state mandates, and the people are not being listened to.

If you just read the words, and don’t know it’s Annette Smith talking, what do you think?

I think “Tea Party.”  

Tea partiers are angry about the perceived loss of control over their lives and their subservience to forces larger than themselves. People who want smaller, less powerful government. People who are willing to accept any evidence, no matter how flimsy or suspect, that appears to support their cause. And unwilling to accept any evidence, no matter how credible, that undermines their cause.

I also think “demagoguery.” That may sound harsh, but during the interview Smith compared wind development to terrorism. (The quote: “When you work on the wind issue and you go into these communities, it’s like a terrorist has landed in your community.”) Untethered rhetoric, one of the characteristics of the demagogue.

Riddle me this: Would Ms. Smith be willing to accept any evidence that wind turbines aren’t so bad after all? Or would she continue to oppose them no matter what? And is there a single issue on which she believes that a small group of activists is wrong, and big government is right?

Furthermore, if you’re advocating local control and a diminishment of federal and state power, where do you draw the line? Are you against state and federal health care reform? Single payer must be a nightmare of government overreach, no? Are you against Medicare and Social Security? You don’t like the EPA mandating treatment of public water systems; do you want them regulating pollution? Are you against Act 250, which takes land-use decisions out of the hands of individuals and local governments? If you’re against state and federal mandates in education, are you against Act 60, which forces people in some communities to send a portion of their tax dollars to other school districts?

If not, there’s a fundamental contradiction in the worldview. Unless your guiding principle is “Government is bad when it does bad things, and good when it does good things.” Which isn’t a principle at all.

As a liberal, I see government as a necessary counterweight to the power of corporations and the untrammeled free market. Government certainly doesn’t work as well as it should, but cutting government power isn’t going to usher in a Golden Age of the People; it’s going to allow corporations to gain more control and let the free market run wild.

The problem isn’t that the government has too much power. The problem is that it too often fails to use its power wisely. Annette Smith’s movement is not the answer. I hope her candidacy is a failure, because I don’t want Tea Party-style politics to gain traction anywhere.