The Overhaul

For the moment, let’s shift our focus away from the shootings, the needless death, the war, the oligarchs, climate change and the profound social-emotional disconnection wrought by the Internet. 

Let’s instead talk about the positive change that’s coming. 

Let’s talk about a Swiss-born immigrant to the U.S. named Madeleine May Kunin and what she has done to change the future of Vermont politics and its culture.

Kunin is one of those politicians who - like Jimmy Carter and many others - is more popular out of office than in. From 1985 to 1991, she served as the first female governor of Vermont. Then, under Bill Clinton, Kunin became the deputy secretary of Education, only to be again promoted to ambassador to Switzerland. Just given these broad strokes, from immigrant to Ambassador, it's been a wonderfully successful career. But even that doesn’t fully describe Kunin.

After leaving government in 1999, Kunin embarked on an astonishing career of writing and change-making. First she founded the Institute for Sustainable Communities, a nonprofit designed to help developing countries build democratic systems of government. Kunin based her model, in part, on Vermont’s model of small government working closely with the people. The ISC thrives today with offices around the world. From civil wars in Bosnia to water pollution from Asian factories, it  has, for 30 years, spread democratic values around the world. 

Kunin then began writing books. First about her political career, then poetry and finally a memoir of life in her 80s. It was her book “Living a Political Life” that left a searing impact, allowing me to see Kunin as so much more than a former governor. It drives home the pain of an ambitious mother trying to carve out a political career in a country that paid little attention to the needs of women. I was struck by one passage where, in the morning, when it was time to leave for the Vermont Statehouse, her children, sometimes crying, begged her to stay home. But she would go, spending her days arguing for better funded child care, among other priorities. 

Finally, Kunin founded Emerge VT, a training ground for women seeking political office. The impact of this group is way beyond its small budget. Since 2002, this organization has trained 149 women on how to run for office - from fundraising to media training. Currently 45 Emerge VT alumni hold political office in Vermont, including the President of our Senate and the Speaker of the House. And as of this writing, an Emerge VT grad will likely be our next member of the U.S. House of Representatives. 

Last week, I attended a graduation event for the latest class of future candidates at the old socialist Labor Hall in Barre, VT. The room was packed with future office holders. I couldn’t get over the feeling in the room. Unlike the hundreds of fundraisers I have attended where men controlled the political agenda, this room had new energy and a sense that anything is possible. 

Graduates took to the microphone and extolled what Emerge VT has given them; not just the training but the courage to run for office, to step up when it looked too hard. It made me think of a passage from Kunin’s first political memoir, where she describes a painful scene in which she, despite being chair of the House Appropriations Committee, was shut out of a a secret meeting where men were cutting the budget deal. She was livid and humiliated. I can’t help but think the idea for Emerge VT must have been rolling around in her mind since the days when she doubted whether she could succeed in a world dominated by men. And she turned the pain into all the work she has done for Democracy in the years since she left office.

For years, the Vermont Senate has been controlled by older men. But Vermont politics is seeing a wave of retirements at all levels. Committee chairs in the House and Senate are leaving in droves, opening up space for new legislators and new thinking. Waiting to take their place are women from all over the state, many of them trained by Emerge VT. They are prepared and when they arrive on the scene, they are ready to govern.

An overhaul of the Vermont General Assembly is coming. It will be revolutionary. It will spread to the rest of the state government. And it will continue Vermont on its journey to become the best place to live in the country: a state with a Constitutional Amendment to protect women’s reproductive rights, a state that gave gay people the right to marry and a state that can be a haven for those seeking some part of the American dream - just like Madeleine Kunin did when her mother packed her onto an America bound ship to escape the Nazis in 1940.

When Madeleine Kunin was first elected governor of Vermont, she ushered in a new generation of political activism and young activists who took over the government and changed the state from a Republican stronghold to a liberal trailblazer - not to mention Bernie Sanders. But now these young activists are old and their generation is retiring as well. 

But Kunin never stopped. And her founding of Emerge VT sets up another generational change in this state. There will be bumps in the road for sure. Kunin has experienced her fair share.

But she persevered in the 1980s to overhaul a state.

And now - in her 80s - she is doing it again.