Outsider in the White House (8 page)

Meanwhile, the deepest and most profound issues facing the country rarely get discussed because they don't fit the format. Several years ago, I attended a meeting with the head of a network news division. He described the extraordinary commitment of labor and money to coverage of an airplane crash—routine procedure for a disaster story. Someone asked him about his network's reporting of the savings and loan scandal (a real disaster). His reply: “We didn't do much. It wasn't good television. Too boring.”

Every night, television news offers colorful, fast-paced, and exciting coverage—but of what? Ultimately, Americans who depend on TV for information learn very little about how and why things really happen in their country. Good entertainment? Yes. Knowledge for a democracy? No.

There is no question that Sweetser's people will be doing a lot of instant response “spin.” Pretty sophisticated stuff for a small state like Vermont. Much better than I've done in past campaigns. I didn't even know until later that her campaign manager was at my announcement with a tape recorder. It is now clear what their strategy will be. Every time I speak they will be there, almost literally “in my face.” On the other hand, whether that sort of attack strategy will succeed in Vermont remains to be seen. Vermont is not California or New York. I'm not so sure that Vermonters will enjoy the spectacle of an in-your-face style of campaign.

While my opening announcement was poorly covered by television, the newspaper coverage was excellent. The three major print media, the
Burlington Free Press
, the Vermont Press Bureau (representing the second and third largest papers in the state, the
Rutland Herald
and the
Times-Argus
), and the Associated Press (which covers for all the papers), described the event accurately on their front pages and provided ample coverage of my remarks. In print, Sweetser's statement that “Bernie Sanders represents the tired failed ideology of left-wing extremism” didn't play as well as it did for the television cameras, especially given that I was surrounded by representatives of the vast majority of the people of Vermont. Her attack on my support for the needs of working people and the middle class sounded as if she were unaware that a majority of Vermonters are not as supportive of Gingrich as she is.

I wish I could say that I was enthused once the campaign had begun officially. After all, it was great to see so many old friends show up, people who have been with me through so many struggles. But even that had its down side. It reminded me that a major challenge of this campaign is not only to get people involved, but to get them involved in a meaningful way. In the 1994 campaign, we recruited very few new campaign workers. No one wants to sit around an office waiting for orders from on high. How do we develop a structure that attracts volunteers and gives them significant work to do? How do we develop a sense of excitement? That's tough. But we must do better than in 1994.

It's also tough being an incumbent. Yes, I know. You're not feeling sorry for me. Incumbents, you say, have all kinds of advantages. You're right. We have staff, access to information, an ability to make news and play the “Rose Garden strategy” by simply doing our jobs. That's true. But there are also serious disadvantages.

One of the very real problems I have in this campaign, one I felt severely two years ago, is that I have to spend much of my time in Washington while my opponent has seven days a week in the state of Vermont. She's on local radio shows. She's constantly talking to groups. She's getting interviewed by reporters in small towns. Meanwhile, I'm stuck in Washington, dealing with congressional business (my job, after all) that isn't likely to be reported in the local news, or facing tough votes which will offend one or another constituency.

But I'm not the only member of Congress having to worry about the incumbency predicament. Gingrich's freshman class of “revolutionaries” want to go home too. They're in trouble, and they want to campaign in their districts. The good news, therefore, is that we may get out of the Capitol earlier this year than last election.

*      *      *

The recount was completed two weeks after the election. My lead dropped from fourteen to ten votes. But still, I am elected mayor of Burlington, the only candidate in America to buck the two-party system, the only socialist mayor in the country.

I was inaugurated in April 1981, before a huge crowd at City Hall. I was pleased with the speech I delivered, tying local issues to the broader national and international context. For the first time in anyone's memory, local radio carried a mayor's speech live. Later, a reporter asked me for a copy of the speech, and I handed her my pages of scribbled notes on a yellow legal pad. That's too bad. I wish I had that speech today.

Hysteria reigned. The establishment was in total shock. The director of the hospital later wrote that when he heard the news on the radio, he nearly drove his car off the bridge he was riding over. The local bankers, who had scheduled a meeting for the day after the election, tried to figure out how they would communicate with the new mayor. Did anyone know this guy? I got a call from the Democratic lieutenant governor. “Don't do anything rash,” she said.

I became a celebrity, of sorts. The local media was ecstatic: this election was the biggest Vermont political story in years. And it went beyond Vermont. The
New York Times
, the
Boston Globe
, and many other national papers featured stories on the “socialist mayor.” Phil Donahue invited me to be on his show for a full hour. I declined, choosing not to be the spokesperson for the American socialist movement. I did accept NBC's offer to fly Jane and I to Chicago for a ten-minute Donahue interview on the
Today Show
. And there was Canadian television, and the BBC. Somebody told me that I was even broadcast on Chinese radio.

Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame came to Burlington and we had breakfast together. This was just after the Socialist Party and François Mitterand had taken power in France. Not long after a Doonesbury cartoon appeared that read, “As goes Burlington, so goes France.” And then there were T-shirts, with several variations on “The People's Republic of Burlington.” All and all, it was a very heady experience for a guy whose last bid for public office garnered only 6 percent of the vote.

An immediate crisis involved purchasing clothes suitable for a mayor. At the time, I didn't own a suit, just one or two corduroy sports jackets and a few ties. While it wasn't my intention to become the best-dressed mayor in America, or even to wear a tie all that often, I thought a little sprucing up wouldn't hurt. Overnight, my wardrobe doubled.

More importantly, I had to put together an administration. Under Burlington's charter, the mayor has the right to appoint a city attorney, clerk, treasurer, constable, and a number of other positions. I needed to find competent, experienced people who shared my political views. And beyond this more immediate concern was the monumental task of transforming city government.

How would we implement our campaign promises? How would we democratize Burlington politics and open up city government to all the people? How could we break our dependency on the regressive property tax? How could we protect the environment and stop unnecessary road construction? How would we address the needs of low-income and working-class neighborhoods? How would we bring women into a city government that had been dominated by an old boys' network? What could we do for the kids and teenagers of the city, and for the seniors? How could we treat city employees fairly, not only through decent wages and working conditions, but by involving them more in the decision making of their departments? How would we make Burlington a city in which all people have access to the arts, not just those with money? Above all, how could we accomplish all of this with only two supporters on a thirteen-member City Council, and virtually no support on the various commissions that directed most of Burlington's departments?

My “shadow cabinet” and I organized a series of task forces to begin addressing these questions. Essentially, we opened the doors of City Hall and invited all interested people to come in and suggest the best ways forward. We were delighted by the response. Hundreds of people from all walks of life attended a wide variety of meetings. Many of them had great ideas.

Out of these task forces came a number of Mayor's Councils: on youth, the arts, women, senior citizens, health care, and tax reform, among other issues. Over the years, and after great political struggle, some of these councils were incorporated into the structure of city government. In the early days of my administration, however, they served almost as a parallel government.

Those early days at City Hall were exhilarating, but very tense. To be more accurate, there was a civil war taking place in Burlington city government. Conservative Democrats had controlled Burlington city government for decades and, with their Republican allies, they were surely not going to give up their power without a fight. The Board of Aldermen (as it was then called) consisted of eight Democrats, three Republicans, and two supporters of mine—Terry Bouricious and Sadie White.

At twenty-seven, Terry became the first Citizen Party candidate in America elected to public office. I had known Terry since his student days at Middlebury College, where he participated in the Liberty Union and helped in my 1976 gubernatorial race. While Terry ran his aldermanic campaign more or less independently of my mayoral race, he was a strong socialist and a natural ally, and he is a leader of the Vermont progressive movement to this day. After five terms on the Board of Aldermen, Terry was elected to the state legislature, where he is now serving his fourth term.

Sadie White, at seventy-nine, also defeated the Democratic machine to become an alderwoman. But her story is quite different from Terry's. For many years Sadie had been a Democratic state representative in the legislature. Her independence and willingness to stand up for her working-class constituents earned her the enmity of the machine, and they dumped her. Sadie had the last laugh, however. She came back with a vengeance, winning election to the Board as an Independent. Despite enormous pressure to return to the Democratic Party fold, she has remained an unwavering ally and good friend, during her stint on the Board and to this day.

At my first official meeting as mayor, the Board of Aldermen fired my secretary, the only person I had been able to hire. They claimed I hadn't hired her in the proper way. (They allowed me to rehire her soon after.) Two months later, on the day that the mayor formally announces his choices for administration posts, the Board rejected all of my appointees. The situation was absurd: I was expected to run city government with the administration of the guy I had just defeated in a bitter election, and a group of people who vigorously opposed my political goals. We were outflanked by the opposition on every major decision. The votes were always the same: eleven to two, the eight Democrats and three Republicans on one side, Terry and Sadie on the other.

The Democrats' strategy was not too complicated: they would tie my hands, make it impossible for me to accomplish anything, then win back the mayor's office by claiming that I had been ineffective.

And what was our strategy? First, we were going to do everything that a mayor could possibly do without the support of the City Council. Second, we were going to expose the local Democrats and Republicans for what they were—obstructionists and political hacks who had very few positive ideas. Third, and most important, we were going to build a third party in the city to defeat them in the next election.

During this first term, I discovered that the city was wasting substantial sums of money on its insurance policies. Local companies, year after year, were getting the city's business at substantially higher than market rates. I instituted a radical socialist concept, “competitive” bidding, which saved the city tens of thousands of dollars. We were showing that to be “radical” did not mean that we wasted taxpayer dollars. Quite the contrary. For those of us committed to the idea that government should play an important role in the life of our community, it was absolutely necessary to show that we could run a tightfisted, cost-effective administration. There is no excuse for wasting taxpayer money.

We also started a successful Little League program in the city's poorest neighborhood, and began what was to become a citywide tree-planting program that transformed block after block in Burlington. We began a very popular summer concert series which drew thousands of people to a beautiful waterfront park, where they listened to great music and watched the sun set over Lake Champlain. We did all this and more by scratching together a few bucks here and a few bucks there.

As the year progressed, it became clear that the only way we could carry out effective policy for the city was by electing a majority of Progressives to the Board of Aldermen—which meant the creation of a new political entity. In the beginning we called it the Independent Coalition. Later, it was renamed the Progressive Coalition. The Coalition existed only in Burlington. While not a political party under state law (because it is not a statewide organization), it operates in Burlington as if it were exactly that.

In the winter of 1981–82, we recruited aldermanic candidates from each of the city's wards for the election in March. Rik Musty, a psychology professor at the University of Vermont, was our candidate in Ward 1; Zoe Breiner, a young worker at IBM, in Ward 2; Gary DeCarolis, a mental health worker for the state, in Ward 3; Jane Watson, an attorney, in Ward 4; Joan Beauchemin, a long-time community activist, in Ward 5; and Huck Gutman, coauthor of this book and UVM professor of English, in Ward 6.

It gets very cold in Vermont in the winter, with lots of snow and ice. Frankly, it's not always fun knocking on doors when the weather is below zero. But that's what we did. Without exception, all of our candidates mounted vigorous campaigns, knocking on almost every door in their wards. I went out with our candidates as often as possible. We were motivated, to say the least. The themes of the campaign were crystal clear. First, our candidates ran on a progressive platform. Second, they were taking on Democrats and Republicans who were preventing the mayor from doing his job.