EAST MONTPELIER – The events of this past weekend in the Mad River Valley of Vermont highlighted a well-known, but rarely discussed, feature of Washington, D.C., politics: the tin ear. I like to call it the imperial ear. It listens, but doesn’t hear. Instead, it assumes. And last weekend, it assumed wrong.
Imagine you’re a Washington politician, prominent on a national stage, but only about 40 years old and essentially still a country boy from the hills of southern Ohio (one of the least cosmopolitan states of the Union). You’ve become vice-president of the nation on the coattails of a most controversial figure and have begun to assume some of the characteristics of your boss. You’ve heard nothing but praise, which is hardly surprising, as your boss has surrounded both of you with sycophants.
You’ve been on the job for a bit less than two months, and spring break is coming up for your two schoolchildren. So you decide to take a week off and go on a little late-winter vacation with the family. Thanks to your new status, you no longer have to even think about the cost, which (again, thanks to your new status) will run into the millions for security. Skiing it will be. All you have to ponder is where.
You decide to ski the East. After growing up watching the golden oldies Holiday Inn and White Christmas as a kid with your parents, you have an image in your mind of the Vermont mountains as a winter paradise conducted by Nelson Riddle, of ancient cutters drawn by sleigh-belled Morgan horses, of heavy pungs loaded with maple sap hauled through deep snow by placid oxen, of a hundred country themes painted by Norman Rockwell and Grandma Moses. It’d be an idyllic long weekend.
Intelligent travelers, on the other hand, do at least a little reading about the place they’re proposing to visit. If the vice-president had done that, he’d have known that Vermont was founded by people like Ethan Allen, who led a night raid that forced the British out of Fort Ticonderoga a year before the Declaration of Independence. By patriots who, refused entrance to the Union, created their own sovereign state, wrote their own constitution, coined their own specie, abolished slavery, and established universal suffrage (for men, anyway) and public education. He’d have heard the story of Smugglers Notch, through which Vermonters continued to trade with Canada in defiance of Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807. He’d have learned that the state was historically moderate Republican until about 20 years before his birth, when Jim Crow became identified with the Republican Party, and Vermont, electing its first Democratic governor, began to shade toward the indigo it is today.
But it’s doubtful he did any of that. He probably saw how tiny Vermont looks on national maps and noted that it has about as many residents as Washington, D.C. He may not have noticed that Vermonters chose Nikky Haley over Donald Trump in the Republican primary. With visions of snowy slopes in his head, he chose Vermont.
Vermont’s Republican governor asked his constituents to be polite and kind. But it was obvious early on that there’d be protests. So the vice-president’s family’s reservation at a traditional white-clapboarded inn in Warren was changed to “an undisclosed location.” Vermonters, seething over the confrontation with President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office the day before, and clearly inflamed by the entourage of black-painted, smoked-windowed security vehicles, responded to their governor’s request for politeness with the same spirit their ancestors had shown for the Embargo Act. Their shaken fists, their rude comments, and their protest signs, as well as large Pride flags borne down the ski slope by a pair of protestors, must have made Vermont feel like a hostile foreign country to the vice-president. My favorite sign, a mix of pure Vermont humor and opprobrium, claimed the vice-president washed his cast-iron frying pan in the dishwasher. In the end, Vance canceled a lunch date and a second day of skiing and flew earlier than planned back to Washington. The Secret Service, the president’s ear still fresh in their minds, were likely beside themselves.
Calvin Coolidge (a staunch Republican) said in 1928 what the tin ears of Washington should read before venturing north again: “I love Vermont because of . . . her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish from other parts of the union and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.”
