The Little State That Could, and Has

Just last week, this was an obscure little state with cows, cold weather and a paltry three electoral votes. Now Vermont is the apex of this country’s political universe.

“Imagine that,” mused David Frattalone, a jeweler in this cozy capital. “Our little Vermont.”

Frattalone, like many across the state, is closely following speculation that one of Vermont’s U.S. senators, James M. Jeffords, would defect today from the Republican Party, ending GOP control of the Senate and shifting the balance of power in Congress.

While Washington insiders anguished over the implications for committee chairmanships and President Bush’s conservative agenda, many people here celebrated a home-grown lawmaker who could admit that he and his party no longer walked in step.

Jeffords’ expected decision to abandon a party that fails to reflect his views on the environment, abortion rights, gay rights and the best way to cut taxes was entirely in keeping, they said, with the rugged tradition of autonomy that has characterized Vermont since it became the first state to join the original 13 Colonies in 1791.

“We have taken independent roads before,” said Linda Leehman, manager of Bear Pond Books. “Jeffords knows he is safe being his own person.”

The importance of the senator’s actions escaped no one.

“It’s the biggest political story since the Supreme Court decided in December to settle the contested election, and this little state is the star,” said Eric Davis, a political science professor at Middlebury College.

The state that voted most recently for Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore also handed 7% of its vote to independent Ralph Nader; only Hawaii gave him more. Crusty Vermont rode proudly against the tide in 1936 when it joined Maine as the only two states to vote for Republican Alf Landon in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legendary Democratic sweep of the presidency.

A small state, Vermont has about 10,000 square miles and 600,000 residents, about the same population as California’s Kern County. Even in the Northeast, Vermont has a cold and lonely reputation--the only New England state without a seacoast. But it boasts an odd intimacy: a state where just about everyone, even the governor, is listed in the phone book.

Consistently, Vermont has championed itself as a bastion of firsts. First state to outlaw slavery. First state to grant the right to vote to all men, not just landowners. First state to offer troops in the Civil War. First state to commit to higher education for women. First state to launch Head Start, a program designed to prepare disadvantaged children for elementary school. First state--just last year--to extend the rights and responsibilities of marriage to same-sex couples.

It was a Vermonter, Republican Gov. John Stewart, who in 1860 placed Abraham Lincoln’s name in nomination for the presidency at the GOP convention in Chicago. With its strong sense of tolerance, Vermont embraced Lincoln’s Republican Party--barely a decade old at that point--as the party of emancipation, the party of abolition. No Democrat won any statewide race in Vermont until Philip Hoff became governor in 1962. With his election in 1974, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy--the senior member of this state’s three-person congressional team--became the first Democrat Vermont sent to Washington. But while staunchly, insistently Republican, Vermont was never a conservative state, and as early as the 1930s, the GOP’s progressive wing thrived here, Davis said.

Jeffords, the son of a state Supreme Court justice, embodies that strain of Republican: liberal on social issues, cautious with fiscal matters.

His political role model, Davis said, was the late Sen. George Aiken, also a Vermont Republican. Aiken, the consummate Yankee statesman, had his own run-ins with his party when he advocated ending the Vietnam War by declaring victory and bringing the troops home.

“What I expect you’re going to hear Jeffords say is not so much that he is leaving the Republican Party as the Republican Party has left him behind,” Davis said. “With the changes in the Republican Party over the last 20 years, there is no longer a place for someone like him. In true Vermont fashion, I think you will hear him say, ‘I look at the issues, and I am less concerned with the party than I am with the issues.’ ”

The 67-year-old senator’s expected defection comes at a time when Republicans in his own state are mirroring the conservative tilt of Washington. A half-dozen Republicans ousted Democrats from their state Senate seats in November, due almost entirely to outrage over the passage of legislation legalizing civil unions for gay and lesbian couples. Debate on a state Senate bill to reverse that measure continues this week.

But the predominantly Democratic state House of Representatives has vowed to overturn any effort to change that law, and Gov. Howard Dean, a Democrat, has promised to veto any bill that challenges it.

“So we’re not even a Republican state anymore. We’re a two-party state. The country’s got us all wrong, pegging us as conservative,” said University of Vermont political science professor Frank Bryan.

“Don’t forget,” Bryan chastened, “we were the northern frontier. We were the place people went in New England when they wanted to get away from the suffocating influence of the churches everywhere else. Ethan Allen, our state hero, published the first anti-Christian book on the North American continent.”

A hundred or more years ago, Bryan said, “we led the country on per capita nudists. Now you figure that one out. We’ve got 10 months of winter and two months of black flies.”

The state that Jeffords will continue to represent for the next five years, regardless of his party, maintains the strongest town-meeting tradition in America, Bryan said. Vermont abhors secrecy, and to ward off risk of political cabals, it is one of only two states--with New Hampshire--that elects its governor every two years, he said.

“We are a democratic state with a small ‘d,’ ” Bryan said. “We’re small, we’re quirky and we don’t give a damn what people think.”

Part of Vermont’s against-the-grain nature traces to its hard-working populace, said Rep. Bernard Sanders, the former mayor of Burlington and once the only independent in Congress.

“Vermont has never been a wealthy state,” Sanders pointed out. “It’s closer to reality in that way than perhaps other places.”

With members of the Progressive Party in the state Legislature, including Sanders’ own daughter, Vermont has learned that there is political life outside the two main parties, he said. If Jeffords becomes an independent, that lesson stands to serve him well, Sanders said.

A Jeffords switch also could teach the rest of the country a thing or two, Sanders suggested.

“It means that a small state can have a major impact on the politics of this nation,” he said. “It shows that a small state can stand up for itself and stand up proudly.”

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Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.

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Vermont Fact Sheet

Name: Comes from the French words vert meaning green, and mont meaning mountain.

Population: 608,827.

Median household income: $35,210.

Size: At 9,250 square miles, the least-populous state east of the Mississippi River.

State’s best-known products: granite, marble, ski resorts, maple syrup and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.