Liberals look to Vermont

It is unfortunate that Bill Clinton came to the support of Obama during the debt-ceiling crisis this month, because he should have been on the other side. In fact, the president, who said correctly that “The age of big government is over,” should have been leading the other side. This idea and all of the original thinking of states’ rights, sovereignty, opposition to global empire, freedom and individuation that we hear today from Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, Judge Andrew Napolitano and the Tea Party pretty much started with the liberal and hard left here in Vermont and New Hampshire in opposition to the imperial Bush/Cheney/Rove adventures. A quick check of the Vermont Commons: Voices of Independence website and a look at their lively and thoughtful newspaper can confirm.

Today, with no place left to turn, liberal New York looks to Vermont for direction. As New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg hoped to buff his shine by presiding over the wedding of the first gay couple in NY, it is old hat here. Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin does so this week. Shumlin advances other innovative and practical regional solutions.

Our America today is no longer Marx v. Keynes in imperial global projection. It is Keynes v. Hayek in regional competition. The regional economic competition which Texas Gov. Rick Perry today advances was suggested first in New England during the George W. Bush administration. These ideas are not yet fully formulated in either party and could use someone with the status and cachet of Clinton to advance them on the left. Clinton is on a vegan diet; he advocates David Lynch’s Transcendental Meditation. His best bud, London School of Economics-trained Mick Jagger, is a Hayek buff. Clinton might have been out front on this.

Conservatives have been the first in the new century to bring to political action the new libertarian and regional thinking. But that could easily flip.