Word: vermonter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Vermont is blue heaven, home of Ben and Jerry and Phish, the first state with civil unions for gays, the last state with a Wal-Mart and the only state that President Bush has somehow neglected to visit. (Naylor likes to say that Bush is the unofficial membership director for his secession movement.) One Vermont Senator, Brooklyn-born Bernie Sanders, is an avowed socialist; the other, Pat Leahy, is a liberal Democrat perhaps best known for being told by the Vice President on the Senate floor to go "f--k yourself." When Manhattan-born Howard Dean served as governor...
...Nowadays, Vermont once again has a Republican governor, Massachusetts-born Jim Douglas, who's favored to win his fourth term in November. And it is a rural state, so its politicians tend to support guns and farms. It's even got some black-helicopter types in its rugged Northeast Kingdom. But thinking of Vermont as a northeastern version of Idaho or Nebraska because it's got rifles and cows is sort of like thinking of the Village People as tough guys because they had a cop and a construction worker. It's a land of teddy bears, organic cheese, planning...
...Which brings us to March 4. Vermont has the nation's second-whitest and second-oldest electorate, the kind of demographics that tend to favor Hillary Clinton in Democratic primaries. The popular former governor Madeleine Kunin is leading the Clinton campaign in Vermont, and Chelsea Clinton came to campaign on Friday. But Barack Obama is dominating the polls. "This is a state with a strong feminist tradition, but Obama's eating Hillary's lunch," says University of Vermont political science professor Garrison Nelson. Obama created quite a stir when he visited the campus last year. "I've been here...
...Republican side, John McCain seems to be running away with the race, with Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul in a battle for second place. The libertarian-minded Paul has a certain appeal to the leave-me-alone traditions of the Vermont outback - Naylor recalls meeting him at a 1995 secession conference in South Carolina - but it's not really a leave-me-alone state. Taxes are high. Government services are extensive. It's the only state without a balanced budget requirement, but its bonds are top-rated. Local affairs are still handled at the annual town meetings renowned throughout...
...case, the Democratic nominee will surely carry the state in November. G.O.P. primaries used to be the main events in Vermont, deciding whether progressive Republicans or conservative Republicans would represent the state in Washington and Montpelier, but now they're basically irrelevant. In 1998, an elderly dairy farmer named Fred Tuttle - a high school dropout who had starred in a low-budget political farce called Man With a Plan but had never showed any interest in public policy - won the G.O.P. primary to challenge Senator Leahy with a $16 campaign budget. (The key moment came during a radio debate, when...