Thus my life as a participant in this democracy began. Tonight, I was back at Memorial Auditorium as a participant in the process once more. Standing there, holding my caucus ballots in the exact spot I’d taken Vermont’s Freeman’s Oath 23 years and eight months prior, I couldn’t help but feel a little giddy at how awesome Vermont politics are. I mean, Town Meeting, right? That process alone makes Vermont so much cooler than the other 49 states, politically. But even in Burlington, where we eschew Town Meeting for a more traditional election day, it feels really personal and meaningful in a way I imagine most other Americans have never experienced.

Case in point: today’s Democratic Mayoral Caucus.

Here’s the deal, for those of you not tuned into the nitty gritty of BTV politics:

Burlington is really a three-party town. There are the Democrats, Republicans and Progressives. The Progs are the new kids on the block but they wield real political power in Vermont and Burlington’s current embattled mayor, Bob Kiss, is a Prog. The 14-member City Council is dominated by Dems but has GOP, Prog and Independent members too.

Due to a series of debacles that I won’t get into here, the current administration is foundering. Democrats see an opportunity to reclaim City Hall. If they nominate a really good candidate, the argument goes, they can unite left-leaning Burlingtonians and win the mayor’s office in March. But the Progs haven’t said what they’re going to do. If Mayor Kiss runs for reelection or if he doesn’t and the party nominates a strong candidate, liberal and progressive Burlingtonians will be split and perennial Republican Mayoral candidate, Kurt Wright, is waiting in the wings to swoop in and take advantage such a situation (it’s worth noting that this is the first mayoral race since BTV voters decided — stupidly, IMO — to kill IRV, meaning a so-called “spoiler” candidate can take advantage of a three-way race and win without a majority of the support of the voters).

So going into today’s Democratic Mayoral Caucus there were four strong Dem candidates: Tim Ashe, Bram Kranichfeld, Jason Lorber and Miro Weinberger. The caucus works like this: you show up and register. Any registered Burlington voter can participate, regardless of party affiliation. Then you vote in the first round. Then they count all the first round ballots and announce the results, right there. As soon as a candidate gets more than 50% of the total votes cast, that candidate becomes the Democratic nominee for mayor. Simple, right? In this case, just over 1,000 votes were cast in the first round and with four candidates, nobody got more than 50%, so we went to a second round. At that point, Jason Lorber (a friend of mine and a real mensch), who was the lowest vote-getter in the first round, dropped out voluntarily, leaving three candidates competing in round two.

We still lacked a nominee after round two. Bram Kranichfeld (the candidate I supported, BTW), received the least amount of votes in round two and he dropped off the list leaving only Ashe and Weinberger to battle it out in round three.

At that point, with our man out of the running, Emily and I cast our round three votes (my ballot was for Tim Ashe, my second choice going in) and headed back to the car and home. Apparently, a whole lot of people did the same thing, assuming that getting a 50% majority with only two candidates remaining was a sure thing. Ha. Famous last words.

Once home, the #BTVmayor hashtag on Twitter lit up. 1,085 ballots were cast in the third round, meaning 543 votes were needed to win. The final count was Ashe: 540 to Weinberger: 540, with 5 ballots spoiled for one reason or another.

What I’m still not clear on is why the caucus didn’t then go to round four. The ballots had already been printed and handed out in anticipation of a fourth round. I know a lot of people (including me) left the auditorium after the voting in round three, but it was made perfectly clear up front that if anyone left and wasn’t present to vote, they were SOL. The Dem leadership decided to wait and hold a run-off caucus at some future date to decide the winner, but it’s unclear who will vote in that or who will be eligible to be on that ballot or how it will all be handled. There was a process in place and the decision was made to abandon that process following the tie. I wasn’t there and I don’t like Monday morning quarterbacking, but I’d sure like to know why they didn’t immediately proceed with round four with the voters remaining in the auditorium or those close enough to race back there before the close of voting. Then at least we’d have an answer, assuming there wasn’t a second tie.

However this all winds up, I’m certain of one thing: It was important that I was there. It was important that every single individual was there. Every vote mattered. Good on you, BTV.

Seven Days’ Andy Bromage has a good write up of the event with all the voting totals here. Haik Bedrosian offers his two cents here. Fox44 has some more quotes here. WCAX has a headline claiming the caucus ended in “disarray.” Sigh. There was a tie. That’s hardly disarray. Seriously, WCAX. The Fox channel is kicking your ass, editorially. Time to do some soul-searching?

So great, except all day there’s been this thing nagging at me, taunting me, double dog daring me to ignore it. And now I’ve just given in. Ignoring it isn’t working so I’m diving into shark-infested waters. It’s time for me to tell some very smart people just how utterly misguided and foolish they’re being.

Some context:

I’m a liberal. Like most liberals in this country, I supported Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. I mean I really supported him. I even gave him some of my money. For the first time in my life, I had the experience of voting for someone that I actually wanted to be president rather than for the guy who wasn’t as awful as the other guy. It wasn’t just vague platitudes about “hope” or “change” that I liked, it was the specific stuff he said he was going to do as president that won me over, along with his enormous intellect and seriousness of purpose.

Since President Obama’s 2009 inauguration, the Obama administration has made some decisions I don’t agree with 100%. It’s a long enough list of things ranging from actual policy positions I disagreed with to overly conciliatory negotiating tactics to not being forceful enough rhetorically on certain issues I care about. The most recent example is the administration’s decision to scuttle planned EPA rules that would have toughened lax Bush-era smog standards (it’s bad policy, and at a minimum, a missed opportunity for a bargaining chip).

Seeing the guy I supported doing things I disagree with is frustrating. I want him to be perfect. I want him to be Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, JFK and Jed Bartlett all rolled up into one guy. President Linceddyveltlett would have made sure we got the public option. The Linkeddyveltlett administration would have gotten Gitmo closed and would have played hardball in the debt ceiling fight.

I think it’s important to hold the President to a higher standard and expect him to meet it. And when he doesn’t, when he fails to live up to our President Linkeddyveltlett ideals, it’s important we let him know and complain about it and write blog posts and tweet and stomp our collective liberal feet.

But I also think that while we express our frustration, we need to keep our wits about us.

Recently, some friends of mine, who I tend to think of as very smart most of the time, have taken their liberal indignation to some rather absurd places.

For example, Gerry Canavan recently wrote this on his excellent blog:

Historically, primarying a sitting president is tantamount to just giving the presidency to whomever the other side nominates. But if it’s Romney, given the extent of the Obama disaster, that’s a tradeoff that could potentially be reasonable; Romney would likely just be a more effective version of Obama, putting forth generally the same sorts of policies without the scorched-earth opposition from the other side. Let Romney 45 govern like Bush 41 and regroup for 2016/2020.

And then the other day, Casey (The Contrarian) Rae-Hunter wrote this on his blog:

My wife made the observation that we might actually fare better under Mitt Romney. Yes, I know that sounds weird, but it makes sense if you think about it. First of all, Romney’s record indicates that he’s a fairly moderate Republican. Earlier in his career, he very plainly supported a woman’s right to choose. If elected, I doubt he’d push to overturn Roe v. Wade (he’d probably just leave it to the states, which is kind of what Obama is doing by default). Romney’s health care solution in Massachusetts looks a lot like what the President promoted (and ultimately got). On the campaign, Mitt has to tack rightward to appease the teabaggers. But those positions wouldn’t necessarily carry over to the Oval Office.

My wife’s most interesting point was that, instead of negotiating against himself, like Obama, Romney could end up giving the left more of what they want. It’s not hard to picture him telling his party that he “had to make concessions” in the course of negotiations. And those concessions might very well be more than we get out of Obama, due to the fact that he gives away half the store BEFORE entering talks.

Seriously? Mitt Romney would be “more effective” as president than Obama? We might “actually fare better under Mitt Romney?” Guys (and Mrs. Contrarian), I think you’re letting your emotional reactions to some individual disappointments get the better of your brains.

First of all, literally the same day Casey posted the piece quoted above, Mitt Romney delivered a big speech about the economic plan he’d pursue if elected. What’s in it? Massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the elimination of all new safeguards to reign in Wall Street, widespread deregulation, and a crackdown on labor unions. He also wants to enact a spending cap that would gut most of the federal budget and require brutal cuts to programs like Medicare.

In what universe can you look at that sort of economic plan and think a Romney presidency would anything but a disaster?

Well maybe Romney is a secret moderate, as Casey suggests. After all, one of previous versions of Romney’s many personas was actually quite moderate. But to accept this premise, one would effectively have to believe, “Maybe every word Romney has said over the last four years about his agenda and worldview has been a total lie, and he’s secretly a sensible centrist.” In other words, let’s trade a pragmatic progressive president for a Republican who *claims* to be a conservative, but who might possibly turn out to be shamelessly lying to the entire country. Romney *says* he’ll be super right-wing on everything from the economy to the judiciary to foreign policy, the argument goes, but maybe it’s all just an elaborate, half-decade-long ruse.

That seems like an awfully big risk to me.

What’s more troubling about Casey and Gerry’s posts is that they seem to assume that the Obama record of accomplishments is thin and underwhelming. That’s wrong.

If you had told me three years ago that Barack Obama, after 32 months in office, would:

• pass an $800 billion stimulus that ended the recession
• pass a breakthrough health care reform law 100 years in the making
• enact Wall Street reform
• rescue the auto industry
• repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
• pass a terrific-but-overlooked student-loan bill
• ratify the New START treaty
• pass the first overhaul of food-safety regulations in 70 years
• pass new consumer protections against the credit card industry
• expand stem-cell research
• and add two solid new Supreme Court justices,

I (and a lot of lefties) would have been doing cartwheels. If you then told me at the time that Obama would also get Osama bin Laden, withdraw troops from Iraq, and oust Moammar Gaddafi from power, all within the president’s first 32 months in office, I would have suggested saving room on Mt. Rushmore.

But if you had told me at that time that all of this would happen and liberal voters would not only be apoplectic about Obama’s perceived failings but would also start eyeing Mitt Romney as a credible alternative, I would have said that you’d clearly lost your mind.

And there’s a finer point here too that’s largely overlooked. Voters don’t just elect a president — they elect an executive branch and an expansive regulatory bureaucracy. Under a Democratic president, that bureaucracy works towards progressive ends — on everything from consumer safety to worker rights to the Justice Department’s prioritization of civil rights cases — while the exact opposite happens under a Republican president. Almost no one even realizes the importance of well-below-the-radar governance, but in countless ways that affect millions of Americans literally every day, it matters.

I get frustrated by the Obama administration sometimes too. But suggesting that handing a radicalized Republican party even more power might not such a bad idea because Romney was sort of moderate once upon a time is not a reasonable position for sane people to hold. You’re smarter than that.

• Best rundown I’ve seen yet of where Apple went wrong with the release of the much-reviled Final Cut Pro X. (This issue caused NYTimes tech writer David Pogue to call me “snarkyface” on Twitter.)
• Apparently I’m the only person in Burlington, Vermont (who isn’t a city counselor, that is) who thinks giving city counselors free parking downtown isn’t the worst idea in the history of humanity.
• Steve Benen and Matt Yglesias point out that policy making is a lot easier when the institutions lawmakers work in are not broken.
• The SCOTUS yields yet another 5-4 conservative ruling, this time taking the definition of “free speech” and twisting it into a corporate pretzel. Justice Kagen’s dissent is worth a read.
• Delicious timelapse, motion-controlled astrophotography (which will be featured at the Vermont International Film Festival this year).
• All four parts of Dan Harmon’s exhaustive walk through Community season two are worth your time (link to part one). He pulls no punches about the sausage-making nature of network TV.
• What? Vermont has a toy museum? How awesome is that?

I cut a 30-second spot for a Lt. Governor candidate a few years back, but that had been produced and shot by other people and I was just brought in as the editor. This piece I was involved with from the start. My VCAM cohort Matt Goudey and I shot all the video over the course of the last year — at Philip’s house, at campaign events and house parties and bar-b-ques. I cut the piece a few days ago. It’s an interesting kind of filmmaking — it’s a promotional piece, like a long commercial, but it’s also a documentary. I had to make decisions about how wonky and issue-specific I wanted the film to be, as opposed to hitting on a more general emotional level. I went for the emotions. I still have tons of footage of Philip being smart and wonky — perhaps for use at some later date.

“The blanket moratorium seems to assume that because one rig failed and although no one yet fully knows why, all companies and rigs drilling new wells over 500 feet also universally present an imminent danger.” … “If some drilling equipment parts are flawed, is it rational to say all are?” … “The court is unable to divine or fathom a relationship between the findings and the immense scope of the moratorium.”

Putting aside the fact that nobody is saying all drilling equipment parts are flawed and putting aside his honor’s well publicized ties to the oil industry, let’s consider another situation.

Remember January 1986? The space shuttle Challenger exploded a few minutes after takeoff killing its seven occupants and destroying the expensive vehicle. NASA didn’t launch another space shuttle for nearly three years following that incident. Why? Because the government didn’t know why the accident had occurred and they wanted to find out and fix the problem so that another shuttle didn’t explode for similar reasons. Three years. And the Challenger explosion didn’t cause the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.

In this light, maybe the president’s six month moratorium on new off shore oil platforms deeper than 500 feet doesn’t seem so egregious.

I live in a neighborhood that has never been connected to BT because of the expense of laying the fiber lines underground. Despite having never had access to the service promised by BT, I recognize the unique and amazing asset that the network represents for the city. I strongly urge you to consider the extraordinary level of expertise being offered by the Group of 9, and to support their bid to step in and save the flailing state-of-the-art fiber network.

Best,
Bill Simmon

Thanksgiving Day is tomorrow and families will be coming together for dinner all over the USA to share the big meal. Football will be watched. Pie will be consumed. And inevitably, in some homes, politics will be discussed. Family members love each other, but they don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye on political issues. Political divisions among family members are often extreme and for some of these people, holiday meals are the only times in the year that they come face-to-face with folks who are so diametrically opposed to their political views.

So this year, Candleblog would like to offer a little help — some ammunition for the Thanksgiving table-talk.

One big topic of discussion will be the continuing debate on Capital Hill over health care reform. That’s what’s still taking up the bulk of the news cycles. But that debate has been raging for many months and all you good progressive blog readers should already be on your game for that discussion (if you’re not, there is some great material to get you started here).

But I think the political dark horse at this year’s Thanksgiving table will be global warming. Right wing blogs are all in a lather this week about some recently hacked emails from the University of East Anglia in Britain. These bloggers have cherry picked some quotes from individual scientists over the last decade of the email log and presented them as evidence that global warming is a sham being perpetuated by a conspiracy of alarmists. The link above literally calls the news “the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic [human-caused] Global Warming.’”

Right wing blogs and email lists (and Fox News) are apoplectic about this, so if you have family members at your turkey-day table this year who follow these information sources, it’s likely you’ll get an earful, particularly given the imminent summit on climate change in Copenhagen.

The truth, of course, is that while the hacked emails have proven embarrassing for some of these scientists who were informally (and sometimes ingraciously) communicating with each other in what they assumed was private correspondence (let this be a lesson for everyone about the security of email), the science behind human-caused climate change is totally unaffected by this development.

Below you’ll find a series of links to some good reactions to the “climategate” story in both the MSM and climate science blogs. There’s a lot of info here and it’s fascinating stuff. If your time is limited (gotta mash those potatoes!), I recommend starting with the NYTimes’ story on the hacked emails and them immediately reading the reaction to that story by Dr. Joe Romm (MIT physicist, former Clinton Dept. of Energy official and a leading climate change blogger):

• NYTimes story
• Dr. Joe Romm’s reaction

Then if you still have some time, read the reaction from the scientists at RealClimate.org (very thoughtful piece) and from the indispensable Nate Silver, who writes:

I don’t know how you get from some scientist having sexed up a graph in East Anglia ten years ago to The Final Nail In The Coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Anyone who comes to that connection has more screws loose than the Space Shuttle Challenger. And yet that’s literally what some of these bloggers are saying!

Incidentally, 2009 is shaping up to be the 5th warmest year on record, according to the conspiracists at NASA.

And if you’re still hiding in the office and surfing the net when you should be making the gravy, there’s more good info at HuffPo and The Wonk Room at Think Progress.

But my favorite reaction is this one from the Carbon Fixated blog (quoted in the HuffPo piece above), which declares that “Newtongate” has driven “the final nail in the coffin of Renaissance and Enlightenment ‘thinking.’”

If you own any shares in companies that produce reflecting telescopes, use differential and integral calculus, or rely on the laws of motion, I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the calculus myth has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after volumes of Newton’s private correspondence were compiled and published.

Good luck! If you actually do engage your relatives on this, make sure you leave comments here about it! We like to know we’ve helped (or hurt) your argument.

H/T to Steve Benen for providing me with some of the above links.

UPDATE: In the comments, Gerry Canavan reminds us that a good first stop in dealing with climate change deniers is this post about How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic. And indeed, it’s a great clearing house for refutations of the most common canards coming from the global warming deniers. I do take issue with the use of the phrase “climate skeptic,” however. A “skeptic” is someone who doesn’t trust a given claim in the absence of strong evidence. There’s ample evidence of anthropogenic global warming to convince any actual “skeptic.” Once they’ve been presented with the evidence and scientific consensus, if they still claim it’s an open question, they’re just deniers at that point. Perhaps a new post needs to be written about How to Talk to Climate Change Ostriches (heads in the sand and all). Or maybe there’s no point in talking to them — if the actual evidence doesn’t convince them, it’s unlikely that a few more links will.