The last, most-important Republican

Were it not for a maverick liberal streak that led Middlebury College to admit women students in 1883 — generations before many other schools — we might never have had Republican James Douglas as governor of Vermont.

That’s one of the little gems in Douglas’s memoir, “The Vermont Way,” published late last year. The book is his account of his four decades in public life in Vermont, a transformative half-century for the state — from solidly Republican to solidly Democratic — and Douglas’s starring final role in leading a failed last stand against that transformation.

To understand the change in Vermont, you have to read Joe Sherman’s “Fast Lane on a Dirt Road.” It charts the past century in the state’s politics, from its post-Civil War roots as a poor American backwater and Republican bastion of the mostly moderate Yankee variety to its position as a crusading liberal state — “Vermont,” almost a brand in itself — run largely by Democrats.

Think what you will of all that change, but Sherman also documents Vermont’s slow economic progress in the second half of the last century. At mid-20th century, it was one of the poorest — rating lowest on all the socioeconomic indicators.

Poverty and low-paying work remain huge problems, but Vermont has largely left behind its place among the poorest in the nation.

This state began to change in the 1960s and ’70s, just as Jim Douglas was becoming a man and a Vermonter. Born and raised in western Massachusetts, he’d been admitted to Middlebury and Dartmouth, and might well have ended up at that college in New Hampshire. But Middlebury, he noted cheerily at the time, had women, and that was the deciding factor.

Against the tide

Slightly pudgy, bespectacled Douglas arrived at Middlebury in the fall of 1968 amid a raging social revolution and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Civil rights, women’s rights, drugs, long hair, armed troops on college campus — it was an era of upheaval, challenging virtually every status quo.

The conventional, admittedly square Douglas swam against much of that prevailing current, and that would become a familiar role. This was the era of flower power and anti-Nixon student sit-ins and Woodstock, and there was Middlebury freshman Jim Douglas, a Republican, who supported the war and President Richard Nixon and took the reins of Middlebury’s Republican Club. He organized welcome rallies for the president and worked to jam the White House with telegrams showing Vermont’s support of Nixon speeches and the war effort.

Douglas didn’t recognize it clearly at the time, but he was getting a great education in politics, learning skills he would need later in life.

In one case, faced with an impossible demand from GOP leaders in D.C. to show that Vermont supported Nixon’s decision to send U.S. troops to Cambodia, Douglas crafted a carefully worded petition that equated the president’s decision with the path to peace in the region. He then stationed a shaggy, hippy-looking kid behind a sign reading, “Sign here for peace!” outside the dining hall. He got hundreds of signatures.

Douglas also learned something about the responsibility of leadership. President Nixon had inherited the war from Democrat Lyndon Johnson. Douglas doesn’t come off as hugely supportive of the war, but he felt a responsibility “as a Republican” to support the president.

He reckoned that whether he agreed with the policy or who was responsible for it was of little consequence; his party and his president were now holding that hot potato.

“As I would later learn in an executive role, after a while you can’t blame things on your predecessor,” Douglas writes. “You own everything, and the president clearly owned the war.”

Shrewd and tough

In person, the former governor is an easy companion and a charming storyteller. That’s the voice that carries the best parts of the book — short, often funny and personally self-deprecating stories about people, places, events, successes and failures in his life. That charm was a key to his success as a politician.

But you don’t get elected to statewide office 14 times — including four times as governor —on charm alone. Ultimately, his was a political life and this is a political book.

Emerging from the book’s aw-shucks folksiness — and its somewhat tedious but requisite thank-yous and explanations of the functioning of government and the Legislature — is Douglas the shrewd, tough politician, who hated to lose and relished the victories.

Douglas was powerfully disappointed when his lieutenant governor, Republican Brian Dubie, lost to Democrat Peter Shumlin in 2008 for the state’s top job. Shumlin’s victory completed the Democratic takeover of Montpelier.

Douglas’s only major election loss was when he ran against U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy in 1992. In that campaign, he showed up at a debate with his pockets overflowing with dollar bills, which he strategically and slowly counted out when the right moment presented itself, in a stunt to criticize Leahy for accepting two large pay increases while in office.

Douglas was, by many accounts, well prepared and a solid candidate, but he says Leahy shrewdly dodged debates and relied on incumbency to get the win.

Taking names

On politics, Douglas spends a chapter rationalizing his veto — later overridden — of Vermont’s pioneering gay-marriage legislation. He also seethes that his Promise Scholarships, which would have been financed with most of the money from a settlement with large tobacco companies, was largely gutted. And he accuses the Democrats in Montpelier and Washington of fiscal irresponsibility, of spending beyond governments’ means and piling unsustainable debt on future generations.

Douglas had an amicable relationship with the press, so there isn’t much press bashing. But he does reserve some of his toughest criticism for his hometown paper, the Addison Independent, which never endorsed him and was often among his harshest critics.

On political opponents, he calls the anti-development, pro-environment Conservation Law Foundation the “single greatest obstacle to prosperity in Vermont.”

Douglas characterizes Shumlin as a flip-flopper, and in an odd bit of reporting Douglas writes that Shumlin himself admits to some political squishiness and blames it on his dyslexia. “I have no clue what really motivates him,” Douglas says.

Douglas liked working with Peter Welch, the Democrat who was Vermont’s speaker of the House and is now its only congressman. “At the end of the day, he wanted to accomplish something,” Douglas says.

Current House Speaker Shap Smith “seems like a nice guy,” Douglas says, but he thinks Smith runs the House with an overly heavy hand and early on drove through irresponsible budgets that resulted in huge avoidable shortfalls.

What’s his legacy?

Most analysts characterize Douglas as a good steward of the state; he left Vermont in sound fiscal shape, with agencies running efficiently. But, his critics argue, he didn’t “do” much: no groundbreaking legislation.

Instead, particularly later in his tenure, he was largely a counterbalance to the Democratic-dominated Legislature. To a great extent, the veto-proof Democratic Legislature defined Douglas’s time in office.

And his tempered political nature didn’t help set up the GOP to maintain major power in Montpelier. In his wake, the Republican platform fractured, and no single leader emerged.

To this day, the Vermont GOP is searching for a strong voice and a few charismatic frontrunners. Which makes the Douglas chapter all the more interesting. Five years after leaving office, he remains quite clearly the last, most-important Republican in Vermont.

That’s perhaps the most compelling reason to spend a few hours with “The Vermont Way.”