Fallows says Greenville SC and Burlington VT share a lot in common- governmentally

[cali]

I'm not sure I buy it, and Fallows who just spent quite a bit of time profiling Burlington for other issues of The Atlantic, should know better than to claim that VT has universal single-payer; it doesn't. It passed the law mandating it but it hasn't been enacted yet. The article does give a very interesting look at Bernie and why he's such an effective politician, as well as a glimpse at Miro Weinberger, the current Mayor of Burlington, son of two back to the land hippies. The article is getting quite a bit of attention. Fallows got some heated reaction to his praise of Greenville. I've added a link that includes that.

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In principle, you would compare Greenville and the Upstate with Burlington and northern Vermont only to highlight the unbridgeable chasms in American politics: one of the most right-leaning regions versus one of the most left-leaning. Vermont was the first state to pass legislation authorizing same-sex marriages, and is the only state with universal single-payer health coverage for its residents. South Carolina is likely to be among the last on both. While Barack Obama was getting 35 percent of the vote in Greenville County in 2012, he got more than 70 percent in Burlington’s Chittenden County. Burlington thinks of itself as a university town; Greenville, despite the presence of Bob Jones, does not. In South Carolina, the main threat to Republican candidates is a Tea Party challenge. In Vermont, the main threat to Democrats is from an independent. Vermont has a very active statewide organization called Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility; seed capital came from the City of Burlington and Ben & Jerry’s. I saw no organization of a similar nature in South Carolina.

But if you looked at Burlington and Greenville as cities, for their amenities and feel and civic sense, and for the history of public-private interactions behind today’s cityscapes, you would find more similarities than you might expect. Today the waterfront is very important to the character of each town—the Reedy River and its waterfalls in Greenville’s case, Lake Champlain in Burlington’s. Thirty years ago, the cities were similar in that their waterfronts were off-putting rather than attractive: Greenville’s, because of the highway that made it hard for people to get to the river; Burlington’s, because of a railroad right-of-way that ran along the lake. The shopping, cultural, and recreational life of each city (and surrounding region) centers on its lively downtown. Greenville’s is called Main Street, Burlington’s is Church Street, but, with allowances for the difference in climate, you would have a hard time telling them apart. As with the waterfronts, these were deliberate public-private creations. Led by strong mayors, each city changed the physical look of the street, redid parking arrangements, commissioned public art, ran concerts and fairs, and took the lead in bringing new life to a battered downtown. Each city has a very popular Minor League baseball team (Greenville’s, for which the city built its new stadium modeled on Fenway Park, is a Red Sox affiliate called the Drive, after the local auto complex; Burlington’s is now an A’s affiliate called the Vermont Lake Monsters and was a Cincinnati Reds affiliate called the Vermont Reds during Bernie Sanders's time as mayor*). Greenville has a software and design start-up community with a critical mass of entrepreneurs who have chosen a smaller-town life. Burlington has a critical mass of entrepreneurs who have chosen the outdoor life and political tone of Vermont.

Today’s mayor of Burlington, Miro Weinberger, illustrates his city’s story much as Knox White, from a prominent old family, does Greenville’s. Weinberger’s parents, from Long Island, moved north during the Vietnam War “to opt out and find a different value system,” Weinberger told us. He is one of many 40-something children of that migration who have stayed in Vermont. “You’ll hear a lot about public-private partnerships,” he told us last fall, long before we went to Greenville. (For all the political differences between South Carolina and Vermont, the two mayors struck on this same phrase.) “This is a place where it’s really true.” In Vermont, these efforts—to teach nutrition and sustainability courses in the schools, to find work for some of the Burmese and Bhutanese refugees being resettled in the area, to foster tech start-ups—are often called “social responsibility” efforts, a term we didn’t hear in South Carolina.

The dominant political figure in Burlington’s modern history is Bernie Sanders—independent senator from Vermont since 2007, the state’s only House member before that, and, through the Reagan years, from 1981 to 1989, the embattled and effective mayor of Burlington. Running for mayor as an independent, Sanders beat a longtime Democratic incumbent by 10 votes. Through the next year, the Democratic-dominated city council tried to thwart every appointment, proposal, and piece of legislation Sanders put forward. “They thought my election was a fluke—they called it a fluke!,” Sanders told me last fall in Washington. “Their strategy was to prevent me from doing anything, so the people would realize their mistake and get rid of me next time. At the first city-council meeting, they fired my only appointee.” He drew the obvious comparison to the GOP’s strategy of hamstringing and waiting out Barack Obama.

The difference, as Sanders has not been shy in pointing out, is that he directly fought back, and overcame rather than compromised with his main opponents. His city attorney and the state attorney general sued the Central Vermont Railway for control of waterfront property then used for petroleum storage and a rail siding. They won, and now the land is the site of an aquarium and science center, bike paths, and other public facilities. “We put together a grass-roots coalition and made the city as open as we could,” Sanders told me. “Unions, workers, low-income people, women, environmentalists—that’s the kind of politics I believe in.”

Sanders pushed to create a “land trust,” a kind of permanent endowment for low-cost housing in the city. His economic-development agency concentrated not on recruiting big outside employers—maybe the clearest contrast with Greenville—but on “helping the small businesses we had grow.” Many have: Seventh Generation is a major supplier of natural and “green” cleaning and personal-care products; NRG sells wind-turbine instruments around the world; Burton is a leading snowboard and recreation company. Sanders started after-school programs that are now popular at all the city’s schools.

“He just turned that city around,” Chris Graff, a longtime Associated Press correspondent in Vermont and the author of a book on the state’s politics, Dateline Vermont, told me. “People will tell you, ‘What Burlington is, is because of Bernie,’ and they are right.” Melinda Moulton, who moved to Vermont in the early 1970s and has led waterfront reconstruction through the Main Street Landing company, which she co-founded with Lisa Steele, said, “He really is a socialist, and thinks that what is good about the city should be available to everyone.”

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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/the-case-for-strong-mayors/358642
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/03/greenville-burlington-and-american-futures/284527/