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July 2008
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Candid Assessment -- Where the Candidates Stand on Our Issues
by Mary Elizabeth Fratini
with additional reporting by Carrie Chandler
Lt. Governor - John Tracy
 Trying to get Representative John Tracy (D-Burlington) to stop talking about health care is a bit like waving a red flag in Pamplona and wondering why the bull keeps charging. The six-term legislator had served as both majority and minority leader, but opted to chair the House Committee on Health Care this biennium. He is running for Lieutenant Governor.
“We set up a health care commission because there wasn’t leadership coming from the executive branch of government. The only reason we had health care reform is because we took a leadership role in the Legislature,” Tracy said early in our interview at the Vermont Woman offices in South Burlington.
Tracy is possibly the most well known house-husband, if not the only one, to be elected to the state legislature, and it’s a title he does not shy away from. (But then again, as a 6-foot-plus Vietnam Veteran, we don’t think many people stop to question his masculinity.)
“My wife said, ‘I’ll have [children] and you stay home’ and that was fine,” he said. The youngest of their five children is now in high school. “God love single parents; I have no idea how they do it. I was so fortunate, first of all, to have a wife that was willing to be the primary breadwinner, who picked up when I went off to work [at night]. I’m lucky I had a partner who was strong, but not all people are that fortunate.”
Why Leave the Legislature
Whether Tracy’s fortune will carry him through a Democratic primary with Senator Matt Dunne (D-Windsor) to face incumbent Republican Brian Dubie, remains to be seen. Of challenging Dubie, Tracy said, “If you check the boxes, we’re both Vermonters, we’re both family guys, we’re both nice guys, we’re both veterans, we’re both from Chittenden County which is a big voting bloc. If you check those boxes, we’re fine and we like each other. Now let’s talk about the differences.” Tracy described the lieutenant governor’s office as “rather quiet in a couple of areas” that he has worked on in the Legislature, including health care, civil rights, and affordable housing.
“Those things make a difference to Vermonters. They’ll say [of me] here’s a guy who’s been leading the charge,” he added. “There are a number of challenges and opportunities and we need to deal with them and we need leadership in the executive branch. I want to be the chief advocate for Vermonters.”
For Tracy, being the “chief advocate” means monitoring the implementation of the Catamount Health Program and overall health care reform to ensure progress and prevent backsliding. “There are other discussions we have to have,” he said, including how to insure the rest of Vermonters, help the underinsured (those who pay more than 10 percent of their income for health care), and rethinking the role of hospitals as a business model. “In 2002, the World Health Organization ranked the U.S. 37th in health care. People here say we’ve got the best health care system in the world – we do, if you have insurance and money,” Tracy continued. “It does too much for too few, and not enough for too many.”
Environment and Energy
On environmental protections and energy, Tracy calls Vermont “ahead of the curve” for being less reliant on coal as a source of electricity than the national average. “When you have advisories posted on nearly every lake and stream in Vermont telling you what kind of fish you can eat and how often, that ought to be a real wake-up call,” he said. Tracy also believes that we can’t avoid having a discussion about locally generated wind power in Vermont, and he is critical of the current administration’s role in not leading that conversation, but described wind as “an energy option” to “supplement” the overall portfolio, in addition to new technologies.
“We are doing the right thing by engaging with other states because we are all part of the [electric] grid,” he said, but described a cost shift in energy prices similar to the one described in health care. “The eastern states are getting nailed. We as federal taxpayers subsidize low-cost energy for the Tennessee Valley Authority and areas like that. So we’re using our tax dollars to subsidize the low-cost energy that we are competing against.”
Citing the end of existing contracts with Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon and HydroQuebec in 2012 and 2015, Tracy believes broader discussions about Vermont’s energy future can’t wait. “We can’t afford to let the time go by; otherwise we’ll be at a point where we can’t be competitive economically.”
Choice and Gender
Tracy calls abortion a choice between a woman and her health care provider and does not support parental notification laws. “That’s a private decision that we have no business being in [and] you cannot legislate good parenting,” he said. He also supports over-the-counter access to emergency contraception, while noting that some pharmacists refuse to fill the prescription at all. “There was an article about a professional woman in her mid 40s. Her pharmacist would not prescribe emergency contraception and she couldn’t get a doctor to prescribe it, so she had to end up getting an abortion,” he recalled. “How crazy is that? If a person is making a decision that they are comfortable with, a personal decision, then we should allow them to do it.”
In talking about the defeated federal marriage amendment, Tracy returned to the decision to pass civil unions legislation while he was the Democratic Majority Leader. “We had people from D.C. saying ‘stick it in the drawer, deal with it after the election,’” he recalled. “We said, ‘that’s maybe the way you do it in D.C., but that’s not how we do it here.’ We’re not afraid to take on the federal government.” He voted to allow marriage, calling it “the right thing to do,” and emphasized that Vermont’s legislation does not place any mandates on religious institutions. “I think the Republicans like to run on God, guns and gays. That’s how they spend their time in Washington, D.C. That’s not how we spend our time here.”
Affordable Housing
On the debate about how to provide more affordable housing in Vermont, Tracy tied it back to the need for a “decent day’s wage for a decent day’s work” and reducing the impact of other costs, including health care, gas, and home energy. “I think we have to get back to a discussion about basing people’s ability to pay tied to how we fund education [and] part of that is acknowledging what is driving the cost of living,” he said. “If we don’t pay people decent wages, if they don’t have health care – [medical emergencies are] the second leading cause of bankruptcy in this country […]. People are working two and three jobs, and that’s not right.”
Tracy noted that Vermont was one of the first states to increase the minimum wage, but said more action is needed. “If you go back to the federal government, they’re still struggling to bump the thing up a little bit. It’s obscene,” he said. “We’ve done things like give tax credits to private investors so that they can invest in the affordable housing market, increased the minimum wage, [and] increased the earned income tax credit, to try to help working families.”
Energy costs, he added, are eating into employers’ bottom lines and affecting businesses’ abilities to provide a livable wage or health insurance to their staff. “None of these things stand alone – not a one of them. They are all mingled together and we’ve got to address them all,” he said. “We’re getting no leadership from the federal government. We’ve got so much money going over to Afghanistan and Iraq that ought to be spent here for housing, for paying people, for health care, for higher education. Our priorities are just screwy out of D.C. and you need a Lieutenant Governor, and a Governor, who will say this is not okay.”
Agriculture
On agriculture, Tracy said, “bigger is not better and Vermont is not made for bigger. How can we make it so the family farmers can survive at the size that they want to?” and still compete against agribusinesses in the Midwest. “The nation continues to talk about agricultural subsidies and never deals with them. Don’t talk to me in hundredweight because as a consumer, that means nothing to me. Tell me what a farmer gets for a gallon of milk. Then when I go in and pay $3.29, I ask: So if the farmer’s getting $1.09 or $1.19, where’s the other money going?”
Tracy’s vision includes diversifying farms, in part through biofuels, being realistic about the size of farms the landscape can support, and investigating public/private partnerships to rebuild the local foods infrastructure, particularly processing facilities. “We’ve got a long history of being self-sufficient, of being creative, and a lot of it we can do by rejuvenating what we have and that’s the family farm,” he said.
Is Vermont ‘Open for Business’?
For the non-agricultural economy, Tracy thinks we need to focus growth by redeveloping around downtowns and providing wide access to broadband. “We have to take an inventory of where we are, make sure we have the infrastructure in place, and talk about what a great place Vermont is to do business,” he said. “The current administration will say, ‘Vermont’s open for business, but geez, it’s hard to do business here’ – that’s like saying the restaurant is open, but the food is pretty bad.”
Tracy also points to creeping suburban sprawl in Chittenden County as a lesson and a warning. “I tell my kids as we drive down the Interstate [by Williston], ‘look, this has happened in your lifetime,’” he said. “Part of it is having the discussion with people who ask, ‘why should I do it downtown if it’s going to cost me a little bit more when it’s cheaper to plow and build a new one?’ You have to look at the long-term cost and what we’ve had in this current administration is short-term vision.”
War in Iraq
Tracy pulls no punches in drawing on his experiences in Vietnam to criticize the invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq. “I served in Vietnam when we were trying to turn the war over to the Vietnamese. Everyone knew we were leaving and we made life miserable for each other. To be quiet [now] when we are losing lives every day just drives me batty. […] My father served. I served. I would like just one generation to have it off,” he said. “I think as a Lieutenant Governor, a Vermonter, a veteran and a father, I have that responsibility. If that were to cost me the election, that’s fine. I’m not going to be quiet. I want them home.”
Conclusion
Tracy describes himself as a regular, blue-collar guy and said that as the second of eight kids, “I understand that you can’t get your way all the time. You have to play well with others.” That spirit of working as part of a team is one of his greatest strengths, he said. “I believe politics is about making life better for people and I don’t let my ego get in the way. It’s more important to me that we make good public policy and we keep going.”
While the distinctions between Tracy and Dubie are clear, those between Tracy and his primary opponent, Dunne, are fuzzier. Dunne seems to have the imprimatur of party leaders, including former Governor Madeleine Kunin, but Tracy remains confident. “I think I’m the candidate that can win. I wouldn’t run if I didn’t,” he said. Either way, Tracy and politics seem as inseparable as, well, unwise people waving red flags in front of angry bulls.
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