It’s nearly October in an election year. Which means that somewhere deep within the bowels of Middlebury College, former governor Jim Douglas is waxing nostalgic about the good ol’ days. The days when he was immersed, as he wistfully recalls in a Vermont Public Radio commentary that aired Wednesday evening, in “shaking hands, kissing babies, raising money and running political ads, all to persuade voters to give me the opportunity to serve.”
Only, something has changed in the political world since ol’ Jimbo hung up his hat. Things just ain’t what they used to be. This year, the ex-gov says, he just “can’t wait for the political season to be over” and envies “our Canadian neighbors, who recently ended a campaign that lasted a mere 33 days.”
Why?
We’re enduring a barrage of radio, television and internet ads that are trying to influence our votes. Most don’t offer policy initiatives or visions of the contenders who sponsor them: the majority tell us why the other candidate is no good. Even the positive ads lack any real substance, for fear of offending a key constituency or furnishing fodder to the opposition.
Back when Douglas was running for office, things were different. Douglas kept things positive and stuck to the issues. Like in this ad from his 2008 race against then-House Speaker Gaye Symington and then-radio host Anthony Pollina:
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Oh how I do not miss him at all
You accuse Douglas of being intellectually lazy. Newsflash: equating Douglas with the national Republicans is intellectually lazy. You know there’s a vast difference between any Vermont Republican, and especially Jim Douglas, and the national Republican Party, but you conveniently lump them together. You know what that;s called? Being intellectually lazy.
You have a point that Vermont Republicans are nothing like others in their party nationally, but the reporter didn’t “equate” these. He said “…it was Douglas’ political party that devoted its presidential primary debates to seeing who could out-trash the media.” This is an important point. It is Douglas’s own choice to continue calling himself a Republican even when his party has shifted so greatly. True old-skool GOP’ers in Vermont realize the party they once supported has abandoned them – take Jim Jeffords for example – and therefore call themselves independents, because the party no longer represents them. So long as Douglas continues to support the party, he is aligning himself with its backwards values. That’s his own choice.
Verb
suss (third-person singular simple present susses, present participle sussing, simple past and past participle sussed)
(New Zealand, UK, Australian) To discover, infer or figure out something (often used with out.) (New Zealand, UK) To study or size up something.
[edit] Derived terms
suss out
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/…
Fair point. But we should be encouraging moderate Republicans to stay in their party and moderate it, not abandon it and leave it to the full control of the american taliban.