Sen. McCormack: “Am I so out of touch? No, it’s my constituents who are wrong.”

Democrat does his best to paraphrase Principal Skinner

The first meeting of the Senate Natural Resources & Energy Committee in 2024 consisted of a round robin series of members sharing their priorities and wish lists for the new session. While these wonderful folks who brought you the Clean Heat Carbon Tax in 2023 have even bigger plans for your wallet this year (more details to come later), the “priority” that jumped out was one of Senator Dick McCormack’s (D-Windsor) that they just need to do a better job of explaining to the public that what they are doing isn’t terrible, awful, no-good policy.

“I am not happy,” says McCormack with stern disappointment rippling through his countenance, “with where the public seems to be on what we’re doing. I get constituent calls telling me that we’re wrong to try to raise people’s energy costs.”  

Hmm. Maybe one conclusion to draw from these calls from the people who elected you is that you are, in fact, wrong to be passing laws that raise people’s energy costs – that they can’t afford to indulge your ego-driven, save-the-planet god-complex fantasies, and you should listen to, respect and represent that perspective in the State House per your job description as an elected official in a representative democracy.

Alas, no. This is not the lesson learned here. As Principal Skinner of The Simpsons might conclude, “Am I so out of touch? No, it’s my constituents who are wrong.”

The problem McCormack sees as needing to be address here is that the local yokels are just too ignorant and in the dark about what great things he and his fellow Democrats are doing for them. “I don’t think the public knows that. I don’t think they believe that.” (Well, they don’t, and they shouldn’t, so score one for us!) McCormack’s solution: Work on doing a better job of “how we present the case.” To which I say, go for it! Please.

The irony here is that McCormack himself admitted that he didn’t understand how the Clean Heat Standard law worked, called it a “Rube Goldberg” contraption, but voted for it anyway. (Here’s the video). So, pro tip, if you want to be able to explain to your constituents how a law you passed is supposed to help them, you might want to understand how that law works, what it costs, and how it gets paid for. You didn’t do that. Your colleagues actively and aggressively refused to do that work, which looks, well, kinda shady. Like maybe you’re trying to hide something from us. But now you want to be trusted and, sorry for chuckling, praised? Yeah, no.

McCormack is upset that the public views his and his party’s energy policies from the perspective, “Should the elitists in electric cars be allowed to force real people to spend all that money on their yak yak yak.” Yak yak yak I assume is shorthand for the hundreds of millions, running into billions of dollars, in subsidies for other people’s EVs, weatherization projects, renewable energy boondoggles, etc. and so on down the very long list of pork projects these folks are, in fact, forcing us to spend our money on.

Sigh…. To some extent here I regret having to pick on Senator McCormack because he committed the sin of speaking up. I will give him credit for at least thinking he wants to do a better job of explaining legislation to constituents, as that is a noble aspiration – so long as you’re being honest about what you’re selling.

This is better than the Committee Chairman, Chris Bray (D-Addison) who – not for nothing in his job outside the statehouse is a PR professional who founded the company Common Ground Communications – has done everything in his power to stop any meaningful discussion from occurring about cost or other impacts on real people as a result of these policies. Silence is a communications strategy too.

In response to McCormack’s desire for more and better public communication, Bray said, “It’s hard to have conversations on the topic in part because it’s such a large and amorphous [unintelligible] that people end up thinking near term, close to home. What is it costing me this week? Voting with your wallet as opposed to saying we have a big thing to tackle as a state, as a nation.” Which reveals two things:

1) Bray doesn’t want to make the case to the public because he thinks we’re too stupid to understand or buy into what he thinks is the genuinely important priority (Chris Bray Saves the World with your money! as opposed to you being able to pay your heating bill that was due last week). And, 2) He knows Vermonters are correct in our understanding that these policies are extremely costly, and the more this reality is discussed publicly, the more people are, in fact, going to vote with their wallets – and not for him.

Bray also asked McCormack if he could cite any examples of communicators who have done a good job of explaining why these “green” boondoggles that line the pockets of Party donors at the expense of taxpayers, fuel buyers and electric ratepayers -- but let’s be honest have no actual impact on climate -- are somehow good for the folks footing the bill. McCormack answered, yes! “I’ve heard it done well many times, but I’m not sure the public bought it.” No, the public didn’t buy it because, unlike you, they actually do understand it.

This recalls a wise insight from advertising guru Bill Bernbach, "A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad." Which is why I predict Senator McCormack’s New Year’s resolution to do a better job of explaining to his constituents what he and his colleagues are really up to in Montpelier will evaporate pretty quickly. These are bad products, and the faster people learn about them the faster they will fail.

My resolution is to make sure that happens by keeping the light shining bright! Happy New Year!

• Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 20 years of experience in Vermont politics including three years service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free market think tank.

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Event Notice: Rob Roper will be speaking Milton Library on Saturday, Jan 13, from 10 am to noon about the issues we will be facing in the 2024 legislative session. Free and open to the public!