Outsider in the White House (26 page)

The second Tuesday in September is primary day in Vermont. Voters select the Democratic and Republican representatives they want to represent their parties. This year, except for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor, there's not a whole lot of excitement. Sweetser is unopposed for the Republican nomination. Long is unopposed for the Democrats.

Some Democrats are urging a write-in vote for me. They are strongly anti-Gingrich and are afraid that Long's presence on the ballot could take away enough votes from me to elect Sweetser. As in the past when this same situation arose, I announce that if, by chance, I win the Democratic nomination I will respectfully decline. I am an Independent, and proud of it. On September 10, Long wins the Democratic nomination. With his name on the ballot he receives 9,291 votes. I receive 4,037 write-ins.

Two years before, when the Democrats had no name on their primary ballot for U.S. Congress, the primary turned out to be very serious business. I announced that I would not accept the Democratic nomination and would certainly not campaign for it. John Carroll, the Republican candidate, waged a last-minute stealth write-in campaign to become the Democratic candidate. Fortunately, with no activity on our part, we managed to get a few more votes than he received. If we hadn't, he would have been on the ballot as both the Republican and Democratic candidate. As a result of my victory, there was no Democratic name on the ballot in 1994. That was just as well—in an election which I won by three points, a bipartisan designation could have resulted in a Carroll victory.

In letters to Vermont newspapers, and even in the left-wing national press, I am sometimes criticized as not being a true Independent because I almost always vote with the Democrats. Some reporters view me as a “quasi-Democrat.” People who believe this miss the point. I am not an Independent because my views fall somewhere between the Democrats and Republicans. It's not my goal to vote with the Democrats half the time, and the Republicans half the time. I am an Independent because neither of the two major parties represents the interests of the middle class and working people of this country.

In Congress, you're given three choices on a vote—yes, no, present. I almost always vote with the Democrats because, of the choices available to me, their position is usually better than the Republicans'. That's the reality I live with in Congress.

I read with amusement how some of my congressional colleagues engage in two or three debates during a campaign—sometimes even fewer. That Rose Garden strategy wouldn't work in Vermont and it shouldn't work anywhere else. If you want people to reelect you, you should be prepared to debate your opponents. In a typical campaign, I participate in between ten and fifteen debates all over the state.

Obviously, the most important debates are those that are televised and are broadcast on statewide radio. In the past, all five of the state's major television stations, WCAX, WPTZ, WVNY, WNNE, and VT.ETV, have held debates. Surprisingly, this time around, Vermont Public Television (VT.ETV) is the only major station sponsoring debates—two of them (although Vermont public access TV stations are also holding one). The first is on September 29, at the Statehouse in Montpelier. The second will be held at the very end of the campaign.

The debate at the Statehouse turned out to be controversial—but not because of anything the candidates said. VT.ETV decided to invite only three candidates—the Republican, the Democrat, and myself. They did not invite those running for the Libertarian, Grass Roots, Liberty Union, or Natural Law parties. When the format of the debate was explained to me, I urged VT.ETV to invite everyone who was running. As someone who ran on four occasions on the Liberty Union slate, I knew what it was like to be left out—and I didn't like it. VT.ETV's response was that everybody would be invited to the second debate, but, because this event was part of a national public television event, it could only feature the “major” candidates.

I was in a no-win position. If I refused to attend the event on the grounds that all candidates should have been invited, I would have been criticized for running away from the most watched debate of the campaign. If I attended, I would be criticized for participating in an unfair, undemocratic event. In the end I chose to participate. Mr. Diamondstone of the Liberty Union Party staged a nonviolent attempt to enter the hall, and was arrested. His arrest generated more media coverage than the debate.

I was not overly impressed with my performance that night, in any case. I did alright, but was not in top form. Sweetser, I thought, gave an articulate presentation of her views. She is bright—and got her positions across. Perhaps the big surprise of the night was Jack Long, who demonstrated a keen sense of humor and effectively played the role of the moderate against the “extremists” of the right and left.

One of the key components of Sweetser's campaign is to show that she is a serious candidate who has the full support of the national Republican Party. The clear implication is that, if elected, she will have clout with the powers that be, especially if the Republicans continue to control Congress. On the other hand, Bernie Sanders, as an Independent, will always be out of the loop and unable to deliver anything for the state.

To prove how well connected she is, Sweetser brings a long and impressive list of Republican heavyweights to campaign for her in Vermont: Representative Dick Armey, majority leader of the House; Representative Bill Paxon, chairman of the Republican National Congressional Campaign Committee; Steve Forbes, former Republican presidential candidate; Haley Barbour, national chairman of the Republican Party; Representative John Kasich, chairman of the House Budget Committee; Representative Susan Molinari, keynote speaker at the Republican convention; and Representative Deborah Pryce. There is a Republican invasion of the state.

The goal of these visits is not only to show Sweetser's clout within the party, but to raise money at big-dollar fundraising events and to generate news coverage. Armey raises $30,000, Paxon $40,000, and Kasich $25,000. The others raise lesser amounts. Representative Bill Paxon, on his visit, tells the party faithful that the national GOP will kick in the maximum amount allowed by law—$123,600. He expresses the sentiments of his national party when he states, “We're going to pull out all the stops” to defeat “that god-awful Bernie Sanders.”

Will all of these endorsements by big-name Republicans have an impact on the campaign? I have my doubts. While they generate a great deal of publicity for Sweetser, I don't think endorsements mean a whole lot in Vermont, where people know more about the candidates than in most other states. (I speak here from experience. In the past I've endorsed candidates who've ended up doing terribly.) Also, I think Vermonters may resent all of this heavy hitting coming from Washington. I note with interest that when John Kasich endorses Sweetser he doesn't criticize me. John and I have worked together on some issues regarding corporate welfare.

One Republican endorsement does bother me, however. I'm not surprised that Jim Jeffords, Vermont's Republican junior senator, came out in support of Sweetser. He had signed a fundraising letter for her early in the campaign and, as the leading Republican in the state, it would have been odd if he had not endorsed her. What disturbs me, however, is the tone of some of his comments. Frankly, I had knocked my brains out to see that the Northeast Dairy Compact, legislation vital for Vermont farmers, was passed. And Jeffords knew that. Our staffs frequently communicated on the issue. While almost all of the action took place in the Senate, and Leahy and Jeffords did an excellent job there, I did all that I could in the House to see the Compact pass, and helped lead the effort there. I really do not appreciate Jeffords's assertion that I am claiming credit for something I didn't do. It is a cheap shot.

One month remains before the election. According to various statewide polls and our own polling, we are now ahead by fifteen to twenty points. Further, Sweetser's negative ratings are quite high. As they say in the trade, this is our election to lose.

At this point in the campaign, the most important thing we can do is go back to the basics—and try to avoid any stupid mistakes. We have our game plan and must play it out effectively: focus on our issues, respond strongly to inaccurate statements about my positions in either the free or paid media, get around the state as much as we can, motivate our volunteers, be well prepared for the debates, keep raising money, and make certain that our advertising campaign—TV, radio, newspaper, and tabloid—is effective. All this is a lot easier said than done.

We are operating now with a major gap in our campaign staff. In August, my wife, Jane, left the campaign to become provost of Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. The president of the college had resigned amid a great deal of on-campus controversy. Jane, who had been chair of the Goddard board of trustees for the past five years, had been asked to replace him.

Before making a decision about this, Jane and I talked at great length. She had been the nonpaid chief of staff at the congressional office, and had then moved over to a key position in the campaign. She has a very good sense of practical politics, is excellent with details, and does a much better job than me in communicating with the media. But it was clear that this was an opportunity of a lifetime for her. In 1980, she had graduated from Goddard as a single mother with three kids and no money, and the college had always remained an important part of her life. She is great with young people, enthusiastic about education. It is an offer we cannot refuse, but the job will be more than full time. While Jane can still play some role in the campaign, Phil Fiermonte and Tom Smith will have to pick up a lot of the responsibilities she is leaving. I will have to spend more time on the administrative end of things.

I have no intention of trying to compete with Sweetser in bringing “big names” to Vermont for the campaign. But we do bring some people up. In August, Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts joins me in Burlington and Brattleboro. In Washington, Barney serves with me on the Banking Committee. While we have some political differences, he is a good friend and one of the smartest members of Congress. He is also very funny—his acid wit has sent many a Republican running for cover during debates on the House floor.

Barney is here not only to campaign for me but also for Ed Flanagan, Vermont's auditor of accounts. Ed has recently announced that he is gay, and he is now the only openly gay statewide-elected official in the country. Barney, who is also gay, is one of the leading gay rights advocates in Congress and has acted very courageously in forcing some of our colleagues to act with a modicum of decency in this area. The turnout for the Frank event was terrific in Burlington, but not good in Brattleboro. The media coverage in both areas was excellent. I am also talking to Representative Pete DeFazio about coming up. If his schedule allows he will make the visit, but it's a long way from Oregon to Vermont.

Bad news. What we had feared and anticipated has now begun. Sweetser is running negative TV commercials—big time. In politics, media consultants have a tried-and-true formula. It's ugly, but sometimes it works. When your candidate is behind with high negative ratings and is going nowhere in a hurry, your best chance of success is to try to destroy the credibility of your opponent. That way, you leave voters with what is perceived as two bad choices, and you have a shot at winning in a lesser-of-two-evils contest. That's what they're trying to do now.

The ad that they're running is a blatant lie. In the past, I would probably have shrugged my shoulders, assumed nobody would believe it, and left it at that. Not now. Early in this campaign I decided that I would respond vigorously when people distorted my record. Sweetser and I have strong philosophical differences. There is more than enough room for her to distinguish her views from mine without distorting my record.

The ad states: “After raising our taxes … on gasoline … small businesses … and on farm families … In 1993 Sanders cast the deciding vote for the largest tax increase in history.” An accompanying chart suggests that every Vermonter now pays $5,178 in federal taxes, compared to $4,209 in 1993. The ad continues: “The result: a higher per capita tax burden of almost $1,000 for every Vermonter. Thanks a lot, Bernie.”

Well, if I had raised taxes for “every Vermonter” by almost $1,000, as the ad implies, I wouldn't vote for me either. But what are they talking about?

Obviously, they are referring to the Clinton budget of 1993, which passed the House by a vote of 218 to 216. Of course, they don't mention Clinton's name in the ad because he is now twenty-five points ahead of Dole in the last Vermont poll.

The big lie that the Republicans are peddling here, and all over the country, is that Clinton's 1993 budget resulted in a large tax increase for
all
Americans. What they have done is simply added up the total increase in taxes in the 1993 budget, and divided it by the population. Mr. Jones pays $1 million in taxes. Ms. Smith pays zero in taxes. On average, per capita, they are paying a half million in taxes, say the Republicans. But, clearly, the
impact
of the tax burden is a little bit different.

The truth is that Clinton's 1993 budget included a largely
progressive
tax proposal which fell disproportionately on the wealthiest people in the country. Ninety percent of the total tax increase fell on the
upper
4 percent, those people then earning $100,000 a year or more. Only the top 1.2 percent saw an increase in income taxes. In fact, as a result of a substantial increase in the earned income tax credit included in that budget, 20 million low-income families, including 26,000 families in Vermont, saw a
decrease
in their federal income taxes. For the middle class, and the vast majority of Vermonters, there was almost no tax increase at all, certainly not $1,000 a head as the ad implies.

Unfortunately, there
were
elements of regressive taxation in that proposal, including a 4.3 cent increase in the gas tax. That's about $30 a year for the average Vermonter, not much but still regressive in that it hits the average working stiff who travels a hundred miles a day to and from work. Clinton also increased the amount of taxable Social Security income. That hike affected the upper 13 percent of Social Security recipients, many of whom live on only $44,000 a year. I opposed these aspects of the legislation when it was debated because I have always been a strong proponent of fair taxation. I also knew that the opponents of that budget would sooner or later exploit the issue, which is precisely what they are doing now.

There is a lesson here: if you raise taxes on the rich, raise taxes on the rich. Keep it simple. And if your opponents want to oppose taxes on the rich, let them do it. But don't include
any
taxes on working people, even if it's only a tiny amount, because your opponents will distort the reality of the situation.

When I met with Clinton in the Oval Office in the summer of 1993, I told him about an experience I had the day before at the Washington County Fair in central Vermont. The media in Vermont and nationally was then playing right into the Republican Party's hands. They were talking over and over again about the aggregate sum of the tax increase that Clinton was proposing, the so-called “largest tax increase in history,” but no one was talking about
who
would be paying the increase in taxes. I asked person after person at that fair if they understood what was in the tax proposal, and only one out of twenty people did.

Clinton acknowledged to me that he was having a very difficult time getting the information out. Shortly afterwards, he organized what I thought was a successful press conference with low-income workers who would be getting a
reduction
in their taxes. Meanwhile, I had to actually raise my voice to a reporter in Vermont just to get him to identify in his story who would actually foot the bill for the tax increase.

This is an issue of enormous consequence, well beyond the ad that is currently being thrown at me. If the media refuses to differentiate between a progressive tax proposal that hits the wealthy and a regressive tax increase that hits working people, and simply defines the proposal as a “tax increase,” no president is ever going to raise taxes—no matter how appropriate that may be. No member of Congress is ever going to support a tax increase. In order to balance a budget it will always be easier for elected officials to cut back on Medicare, Medicaid, education, the environment, and other important social programs.

But the truth of the matter is that the vast majority of the people do not stay up nights worrying about tax increases on the rich. By and large, given the unfair distribution of income and wealth in this country, and the fact that tax rates for the wealthy have declined dramatically over the last twenty years, most people think it's quite reasonable to ask upper-income people to pay their fair share of taxes. Several years ago, my campaign did a poll and we asked Vermonters if they would prefer Congress to increase taxes on the rich or cut Medicare. Eighty percent replied,
TAX THE RICH
.

In any case, one day after Sweetser's negative ad was aired, I hold a press conference refuting its bogus allegations and demanding that she take it off. “Susan Sweetser is a tax lawyer,” I say, “and she knows full well that 90 percent of the tax increase fell on the upper 4 percent of income recipients, those people in 1993 who were earning $100,000 or more.” Sweetser responds, “I'm not going to take off ads that I believe are truthful, that I believe are comparative, that I believe are depictions of his record. The fact is, Bernie raised taxes on Vermonters.” She then issues a long press release attacking the TV ad that
I
had just put on the air as “misleading and unsubstantiated,” containing a “disingenuous” statement that is “not accurate.”

Now, for all of you readers who are interested in seeking political office and don't want to pay media consultants huge sums of money for advice on how to do it, let me explain how you proceed. The first thing is that before you go negative, attack your opponent for running a negative campaign—then, after your ads are on the air, and your opponent responds in righteous indignation, you can expect that much of the media will describe how both sides are attacking each other for negative campaigning. That's Sleazy Politics 101. And it works quite often because the media wants to be “evenhanded.” For example, after my press conference, the large headline in the
Burlington Free Press
reads, “Sanders, Sweetser attack TV ads.” Needless to say, the issue is far too involved and complicated for the thirty-second TV coverage it receives.

Fortunately, however, this approach isn't working for Sweetser, because reporters at the Vermont Press Bureau (who write for the second and third largest papers in the state, the
Rutland Herald
and the
Montpelier Times-Argus
) actually checked the facts, concluded that Sweetser's ads were dishonest and misleading, and wrote intelligent articles on the subject. Diane Derby of the Press Bureau wrote, “Smulson [Sweetser's press secretary] conceded that Sanders' vote on the deficit reduction bill did not result in a $1,000 tax increase for every Vermonter, as the ad's chart says. But he said the ad's narrative use of the words ‘per capita' was intended to
clarify
for viewers that the figure represented only an average.” Clarify? Right!

Jack Hoffman, wrote a long Sunday column for the
Herald
entitled, “Sweetser's New Ad Doesn't Let Facts Get in the Way,” dissecting the ads contents: “The $1,000 figure is absurd on its face, and the ad is another example of how far political candidates are willing to distort the truth to try to make an opponent look bad.” The
Rutland Herald
also ran a front-page story titled “GOP's Figures On Tax Off Base,” which noted, “The Vermont Republican Party and congressional candidate Susan Sweetser are using incorrect figures to describe the effects of 1993 tax law changes on Vermonters, according to a spokesman for the organization that prepared the information being used by the Republicans.”

I won't let up either. In virtually every public appearance I hammer away at the dishonest ads saturating the airwaves. Even at a speech before 500 people at a conference on mental health, I talk about the ads. This is something I never would have done in the past. Obviously, there is self-interest in my actions, but I honestly believe that if candidates can get away with blatant lies in TV ads, then the political process in America is in very deep trouble.

In January 1994, the Republican Party took control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years. Newt Gingrich, a brilliant, articulate political strategist and right-wing ideologue, was elected Speaker of the House and, in a very bitter moment for the Democrats, Dick Gephardt handed the Speaker's gavel over to him. I disagree with everything that Gingrich stands for, but I was impressed by the scope of his vision. He thinks big.

The Democratic loss in 1994 was devastating. In an election in which 38 percent of the people voted, thirty-five incumbent Democrats lost their seats in the House. Not one Republican incumbent was defeated. The Republicans went from a minority of 176 members in 1992 to a majority of 230 members in 1994. Seventy-four new Republicans were sworn in, a huge freshman class. Gingrich became the darling of the media, on the front pages every day. As the leader of the new American revolution, he proclaimed, as had Franklin Delano Roosevelt sixty-two years before, a period of “one hundred days” in which Congress would enact landmark legislation on its way toward fulfilling his “Contract with America.”