The Road Taken by Patrick Leahy

Author:Patrick Leahy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

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1974, 1980, 1986, and 1992 had been varying degrees of difficulty in my Senate races; the first two, of course, were nail-biters, and the third had been a race against a former governor recruited by the Reagan White House, even if I won comfortably at the end. 1992 had been easier still, even if I had to navigate populist waters against an opponent who was well funded and positioned as an outsider to capture the spirit of the prevailing political winds. But this year, 1998, was shaping up to be something entirely different.

An extremely wealthy man had moved from Massachusetts to Vermont, and by virtue of a second home, a ski chalet, he was able to claim Vermont residency in order to come up and run against me.

I was thinking about all the things I could do to highlight an obvious difference between us, including not being the least bit shy to mention the term “native Vermonter” or mention exactly when the Leahys had come to Vermont in the 1800s. Our roots were deep; his seed had barely been planted. But I did worry that this man from Massachusetts had one advantage: he promised to spend whatever it took to win a Senate seat. I started planning accordingly.

Then a funny thing happened. An hour before the time expired to announce for office and file the necessary petitions to qualify for the ballot, a farmer came into the secretary of state’s office with his thousand signatures. He wasn’t just any farmer; he was a neighbor of a filmmaker named John O’Brien, who had captured his folksy wisdom in two films already, earning him a cult following of sorts in Vermont. His name was Fred Tuttle.

Fred announced that he would spend only $251, a dollar per town, or, as he pronounced it, tieon. Fred’s primary opponent, Jack McMullen, was outraged that someone dared to interrupt his carpetbagging foray into Republican politics in Vermont. The first big mistake McMullen made was to challenge Fred’s signatures and claim there were eight signatures that were probably incorrect for the towns they were supposed to be from. McMullen filed a complaint to kick Fred off the ballot. He and his lawyers did not realize that if you do make a mistake in your petition, you’re allowed fifteen days to correct it. The farmer understood that there were eight signatures gone, so before the time was up, he walked back in with eight hundred more signatures and a phalanx of television cameras covering it.

Fred and Jack faced off in a primary debate. Jack probably knew every single piece of legislation from the last ten years and could robotically answer any policy question, but Fred had a secret weapon: he was actually from Vermont. Fred started questioning Jack by handing him a list of ten towns. He asked Jack to read it aloud. The towns all had idiosyncratic names; we don’t say Calais we say Callis and so on. Jack got eight of the ten wrong,

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