Governor Peter Shumlin from Vermont is in Iowa to campaign for Hillary. You may wonder why the Governor of Vermont is campaigning for Hillary and not Bernie. I would hazard a guess that he is looking for a new job in Hillary’s cabinet. He narrowly won re-election in 2014 by 1.1% over a virtually unknown republican candidate that ran a bare bones campaign. He announced that he was not seeking re-election, likely to avoid the embarrassment of loosing to the next challenger. In such a blue state as Vermont, even coming close to loosing to a Republican shows how disliked he is. Bernie Sanders by contrast won re-election to his Vermont senate seat with 71% of the vote.
There are many specific reasons people in Vermont dislike Governor Shumlin. I’ll give you some examples:
In 2015 facing a budget deficit, He gave the Vermont State Troopers a 2.5% wage increase. Then he asked the Vermont State Employees Association (state workers union) to re-open their contract and cut wages or face up to 325 layoffs. The union didn’t back down and the administration cut 14 jobs as well as leaving over 200 open positions vacant.
He took money from small unexpected revenue on a projected budget deficit year to fund a $4.5M giveaway to corporations. The next 2 examples are where some of the money ended up.
He is giving $1,000,000 of Vermont taxpayer money to a company owned by the the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Down from the $2.5M he wanted to give them before the state ran in to years of budget austerity and even after they laid off workers in the Vermont plant.
He is giving $200,000 of Vermont taxpayer money to a Canadian company.
Vermont Gas Company applied for a $86M fracked gas pipeline through farm fields traversing half the state. Then even when the cost ballooned to $154M they were approved over many landowners objections. He personally signed the bill banning fracking in Vermont.
When protesters interrupted his speech at the Paris climate talks and pointed out the hypocrisy of banning fracking then running a fracked gas pipeline down the state, he was condescending saying “I know your Mom and Dad and I know they taught you better manners than this,” adding “you’re missing classes back at Smith (College) that you’re going to get in trouble for.”
He persuaded the powerful (in VT) Progressive party not to run a candidate against him for governor for years by convincing them that he was going to implement a first in the nation single payer health care system, then after the 2014 election, he killed the idea.
He took advantage of a neighbor with disabilities by buying his property for a quarter of it’s value.
He has peppered our scenic landscape with industrial scale solar projects, from out of state developers, overriding town and neighbor objections
Most of the reasons Vermonters don’t like Governor Shumlin boils down to him almost always taking the side of big money interests and corporations over homeowners and the environment. For those reasons he would be a very compatible addition to Hillary’s cabinet. Lets hope he doesn’t get the chance.
Edit 1/14/16 1:16pm EST added example starting “In 2015” about unions. Added link under “neighbor objections”
Update: 1/14/16 1:16 EST
There are a few comments about why other members of the Democratic party in office in VT are supporting Hillary not Bernie. The short answer is that they believe in the current system of getting money from corporations and rich people to fund their re-election and that they would never be influenced by those donations(sarcasm). Here are two examples:
Just out today, Howard Dean gets job with health care lobby firm and opposes single payer health care(that he has supported in the past) coincidentally when it’s politically convenient for Hillary.
Maybe it’s been long enough that some of you have forgotten about the PIPA and SOPA acts that would have been a boon to the recording industry and movie industry. Funny that Time Warner gave more money to Sen. Leahy than any other politician in 2010. Leahy introduced PIPA in 2011 and has cameos in two Batman movies. Demand Progress called their campaign “Holy Conflict of Interest, Batman!”.