Posted on 12/23/2006 8:15:35 AM PST by Galactic Overlord-In-Chief
MONTPELIER, Vt. - Former Sen. Robert Stafford, a staunch environmentalist and champion of education whose name is familiar to countless college students through a loan program named for him, died Saturday. He was 93.
Stafford was surrounded by family at a Rutland nursing home when he died at 9:30 a.m., said Neil Houston, his former chief of staff.
Stafford served two years as governor, 11 years in the House and 17 in the Senate before retiring in early 1989.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
RIP.
Well back then he probably was a standard Republican, before the Goldwater/Reagan Revolution hit the GOP.
Wikipedia describes him in this way:
Though a Republican, Stafford was generally considered a moderate or liberal. He is best remembered for his staunch environmentalism, his work on higher education, and his support, as an elder statesman, for the 2000 Vermont law legalizing civil unions for gay couples.
And in August 2004 he did join with some Republican politicians from past years to urge the party "to return to the mainstream."
But Republican politics have changed a lot over the last thirty years. Stafford wouldn't have been outside the mainstream of the GOP in the 1960s and 1970s, when the party still had a liberal wing.
Allow me a moment to pontificate on the passing of Sen. Stafford and a bit on Vermont politics of the past half-century. Vermont, alas, seemed to develop a taste for more liberal Republicanism, contrasting with neighboring New Hampshire. Unfortunately, because of that lean, it was laying the groundwork for the eventual decline of the party. By the 1950s, its lead Senator, the former Governor George Aiken, tended to exemplify that liberalism. Stafford himself was likely still a moderate or even Conservative then when he began his career in state government around that time.
One name I saw mentioned in the article was that of Consuelo Bailey, who encouraged Stafford's career. She is, lamentably, a now forgotten figure in VT politics, but one who deserves to be in the pantheon of giants, not just in VT, but nationwide. Bailey was a trailblazer for women in politics and she was elected the first woman House Speaker AND Lieutenant-Governor in U.S. history.
One reason she is ignored today is because she was a strident anti-New Dealer and was an unapologetic Conservative. Despite her own hard work and widespread appeal to the people of VT, the liberals in the party sought to undermine her and halt her natural ascension to the Governorship (virtually every Lt Governor to that point would go on to serve as Governor), even exploiting her husband's illness (I believe it was Sen. Aiken's wife that told her to go home and take care of him (he was battling Parkinson's disease), since the people of VT would never elect a woman or, gasp !, "Conservative" like her !). Bailey played the good soldier and allowed Stafford to take her place in the '56 election for what should've been her 2nd term as Lt Governor.
Stafford, of course, would go on to be elected Governor in 1958, an election which saw the Democrats capture the At-Large seat in Congress (the first time that had happened since Thomas Bartlett, Jr's single term 108 years earlier) with William Meyer (I am somewhat familiar with Meyer because his n'er do well ultra-hippie offspring moved down here to Nashville, TN, where (in his 60s) he remains a local radical activist, more typical of the kooks you'd find in Socialist Burlington -- the father considered him later on to be a shameful disappointment to him).
Stafford was unusual that he opted to serve only a single term as Governor when he was enticed to take out Meyer in the '60 election, for which he was successful (though Meyer continued to offer himself up for office throughout the '60s before his death in 1983). During his time in DC, he moved leftward, even sometimes more so that his colleague Aiken (once scoring as low as a 9 from the ACU, even slightly higher than Lincoln Chafee's recent ranking).
It was no surprise when the ultimate choice between a dominant liberal GOP and liberal Dem, that the state started opting for the real deal, starting with Leaky Leahy's 1974 upset victory over the incumbent House member, Dick Mallary, for Aiken's open seat. Mallary thought moving hard left after starting out a moderate would be the key to victory, and found out how well that worked (years later, Mallary briefly made a comeback to the state legislature where he aligned himself with the pro-gay marriage faction and he was defeated in the primary for reelection and left the GOP in a fit of pique).
Despite Stafford's erratic voting record throughout the '80s, he retained a veneer of respectibility if only because of the horrid Leahy. One wonders how different the state GOP would've turned out had Consuelo Bailey, rather than Stafford, had made her rise to the Governorship, and ultimately, the U.S. Senate, becoming the dominant figure promoting a Conservative agenda before her death in 1976, rather than a wishy-washy liberal one that helped turn the state into the hippy Socialist bastion it is today.
May they all rest in peace.
What an absolutely insightful post. There were similar conservative women in CT (Ann Uccello) and MA (Louise Day Hicks) who could have made a difference there as well. Instead, we get the two women from ME and the pending permanent loss of NH, I wonder.
Uccello's mistake was not running for either Governor or Senator in 1970, though she very nearly won the 'Rat leaning Hartford-based 1st that year (when she deferred to the men that won the other two offices).
I'm a bit more dubious of Hicks, and wouldn't call her a "Conservative" (her average ACU rating for her 2 years was a paltry 26, more Conservative than the rest of the delegation except for moderate Cape Cod Republican Hastings Keith), but more a moderate liberal. She was essentially a regular Democrat who opposed busing, pretty much representing the views of her Southie constituency in Boston. Her true desire was to become Mayor of Boston. She didn't really want to serve in Congress, which wasn't a good platform for her. She served a single term after Joe Moakley beat her in 1972 running as a 3rd party Independent-Democrat.
Out of curiousity, how do you know all of this? Do you just thoroughly research the people as they are mentioned, or are you already familiar with most of them? You seem to have an unmatched knowledge of American political history--is it a part of your career?
Heh, no, I'm a rank amateur compared to Michael Barone. I just do this as a hobby, as I'm not sure how I could ever make $$ off of it. I'm well-versed enough on the basics of many of these folks, but usually when I write up something, I double check dates or figures to make sure there aren't errors. I used Stafford's passing as an opportunity to talk about the unsung giant, Mrs. Bailey.
She deserves a lot more respect and attention for her contributions. I left out in my prior post that she had links from Charles Evans Hughes clear up to Ronald Reagan, an astonishing legacy (Hughes, as Chief Justice, approved her to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1931, one source saying she was the first woman to do so; and she was personally feted by Reagan in the '70s for her contributions to the GOP and Conservatism). Had she been born a generation later, Mrs. Bailey would've been material for the Supreme Court or the Presidency (she was certainly worthy even in her own time !).
Thanks for all the information. Vermont's problem may have something to do with having been a one-party state for so long. Politics degenerated into a boys club run by establishment hacks who never had to face the consequences of their policies.
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