Culture Vultures: Don't Be Fooled

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...Now I'd like to spend some time in the House...

...it's barely been shown out of state, but in Burlington it was so huge that, as the posters boasted, it out-grossed Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility...

...He said, `You can't get there from here, Dan.'" So how did Fred Tuttle get here from there...

...Not me: I know how many teats on a cow (thirteen on mine, since she's been on the BGH) and for me a man's record in 4-H will always count for more than his record at Harvard...

...He'll do it for Vermont...

...O'Brien's line now is that Tuttle wants to use his candidacy to raise voter turnout and to that end he and Leahy will be appearing together at Vermont schools...

...Jack McMullen blew 450,000 bucks—including a quarter-million of his own dough —to lose to an old coot who decided that, after a lifetime of dairying in Vermont, he could spare just $16 for his campaign...

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...That's why the last thing America should do is "Spread Fred...

...After all, in today's Ben-and-Jerrified Vermont, the only Republicans you ever see on bumper stickers are confined to sentiments like "Newt Happens...

...This is a sizable constituency, but it's not an obviously Republican one...

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...I don't doubt it She's pro-choice so she'll vote for Leahy but she's pro-Fred because, despite his anti-abortion line and despite the anti-diversity implications of his views on electoral eligibility in Vermont, he's no threat to anything she believes in...

...But, in what's left of the Vermont GOP, Fred was fortunate in his opponents...

...So he entered Fred in the Senate race as if he were an ox in the Tunbridge Fair...

...At the campaign "debate," Fred slid a list of Vermont towns across the table and invited his opponent to pronounce them: Instead of rhyming Calais with Dallas, McMullen rendered it as its French namesake...

...even if you've driven through Massachusetts or Connecticut, you'll maybe have spotted it on a handful of cars...

...John O'Brien, Tuttle's director and now his campaign manager, took the practice to its logical conclusion: He entered a celebrity dummy in the Vermont Republican primary and attracted enough non-Republicans to the polls to win his patsy the nomination...

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...Everyone seemed to think this was a brilliant political insight...

...He's not a dairy farmer but he plays one in motion pictures...

...He put a whole bunch of central Vermonters in it, from the guy who runs the general store to famed lefty preacher the Rev...

...To simplify the task...

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...I shopped from my own office and found the best deal available...

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...It's a difference of degree, that's all...

...Close but no cigar, as we used to say in the pre-Starr Report days...

...and, even if you haven't been through New England in thirty years, chances are you've heard about the bumper stickers, as Fred has spread to the news pages of the New York Times, "The Talk of the Town" in the New Yorker, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Australian radio...

...Computers—over 60 subject areas...

...Indeed, it's hard to see how he spent even that...

...The Fred we are being urged to spread is the Vermont Republican Party candidate in this November's election for the U.S...

...QUOTESMITH® ..14yr COR P ORA T ION www.quotesmith.com Ad Code: TAS 11/98 (Continued from page 59) in the knowledge that, thanks to John O'Brien, he's now the only Democrat who doesn't have to worry about whether he needs to denounce the president's behavior as "indefensible" and call solemnly for censure...

...Yaacaathuhfaa...

...And once his foreignness—the fact that he's "a suntanner from away"—became the issue, he walked into all the obvious traps...

...The poor sap...

...House of Representatives...

...Even the north country old-timers' traditional term of disparagement for southern immigrants —"flatlander" — doesn't seem to apply in this case...

...That's all too complicated for me," he mumbled, beaming, and hobbled off in the general direction of the pig racing...

...In November, the choice will be between Patrick Leahy, a four-term incumbent Democrat, and Fred Tuttle, a man who goes out of his way to say how much he likes Leahy, how Leahy's a friend of his, how he's "done a good job," how he'll probably vote for him himself, and how in any case even if he won he wouldn't want to go to Washington because his wife Dottie doesn't want to live there...

...But O'Brien is shameless in his self-justification: to increase voter turnout, you run a joke candidate with no interest in the issues and no intention of taking the job...

...According to the Boston Herald, Fred is "a symbolic barrier to a changing Vermont" No, he's the poster boy for a wholly changed Vermont—confirmation that the kind of folks who drive around with "Celebrate Diversity" stickers and order arugula on the Internet have reduced wild old-time Vermonters to the status of domestic pets, a protected species in their Yankee theme-park...

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...In 1992, several New Hampshire Democrats I know (and in New Hampshire there are only several to know) trooped off to vote for Pat in a cunning tactical vote to damage George Bush...

...ermont has an open primary system, as New Hampshire does: As Pat Buchanan likes to tell Democrats when he's campaigning in the Granite State, "Come on over and join the Party of Greed for one night...

...By then, McMullen couldn't make the St...

...During the campaign, he'd expressed views on only two issues: He was anti-abortion, but also pro-gun control—positions which would in normal circumstances seem expressly designed to offend the core voters of both parties...

...It would have been cruel, and doubtless electoral suicide, but at least it would have made plain to voters just what they were doing nominating not an "idiot savant," but an idiot...

...Move it away from quaintly folksy hillside Holsteins: Suppose that at the '96 presidential debates Bill Clinton had cornered Bob Dole and Fred Tuttle is a downright dirty Democratic trick...

...Six, said Jack...

...Senate: Fred Tuttle, a 79-year-old dairy farmer from the tiny town of Tunbridge, with a weather-beaten face, faded overalls, a slow, lopsided gait from some bovine mishap, and a north-country accent so broad that come election night Rather, Brokaw, and Jennings will need interpreters...

...Best, Duff Phelps Mood s, Standard & Poor's and Weiss Research, on every quote...

...Tuttle is an affable stooge who has the grace to appear at least slightly embarrassed at being pushed reluctantly into a limelight for which he is singularly unqualified...

...cynical out-of-touch Beltway insider...

...Tuttle is an authentic Yankee old-timer, but, in my experience, all the other authentic Yankee old-timers think he's as boring as the guys they've sat next to at the lunch counter for the last sixty years...

...Now I like gnarled old Yankee characters as much as the next person...

...The leading man was Fred Tuttle, more or less playing himself and campaigning under the slogan, "I've spent all my life in the barn...

...Linda Picazio, FL "Get auotes on the spot...

...I was impressed...

...Unfortunately, the film and "Fred Fever" were beginning to subside until O'Brien cooked up his ingenious publicity stunt: Life would imitate art...

...The other week, driving back from the Tunbridge Fair, I followed a car that carried a "Spread Fred" sticker plus a "Celebrate Diversity" sticker plus an "I'm Pro-Choice And I Vote" sticker...

...While it's just about conceivable that Tuttle, insofar as he's anything at all, is a Republican, O'Brien is a Democrat and his intervention in this election has produced the kind of Republican candidate Democrats prefer: a joke...

...O'Brien has announced piously that the Tuttle campaign will spend a total of $251— or a buck per Vermont town—and there's no reason for Leahy to dip into the three-quarter million he's raised...

...In O'Brien's film he got a kind of grassroots bandwagon rolling by exercising this constitutional right to run — actually, to limp—for office...

...the host asked a pundit...

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...From backwoods obscurity to "a modern-day folk hero" (Boston Herald...

...Not only does Fred Tuttle have no experience in politics, he has no discernible interest in it...

...Yet, granted all that, Fred's question was still a low blow...

...Senator Leahy certainly appreciates it...

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...Instead, Fred'sbecome a hero to all the flatlanders—the tee-huggers, draft dodgers, and ponytailed "caring capitalists" like Ben and Jerry...

...Then Fred delivered the killer blow: How many teats does a cow have...

...William Sloane Coffin...

...Vermont Congressman Bernie Sanders is backed by Hollywood diva Barbra Streisand...

...Free Catalog 1-800-677-3483 5671 ak HAMILTON Falls Village, CT 06031-5005j The American Spectator • November 1998 85...

...Tuttle wound up with almost universal "name recognition" throughout the state and was turning down interview requests from Europe...

...His campaign brochure bore the message: "He's done it in corporate America...

...What issues do you think he'll be raising in November...

...A couple of years back, at the annual World's Fair in Tunbridge, in an idle moment between the ox pulling and the exhibition chainsawing, I asked him about Vermont's education funding system, the most bitter political controversy raging in the state, pitting town against town...

...Come to think of it, I haven't even seen that ad in a couple of weeks now...

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...This is a low-budget independent picture made a few years back by Fred's neighbor John O'Brien, about an old codger running a grass-roots campaign to get elected to the U.S...

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...At which point, I'm obliged to mention Man With a Plan...

...Suppose for a moment that a Republican film-maker (an oxymoron I know, but let that pass) had found a minor celebrity—say, that hippy-dippy gal from Dharma and Greg—to run in the New York Democratic primary and that, after a surprise victory, Dharma had announced she really likes Al D'Amato and would probably be voting for him herself Would the Times and the New Yorker think that so cute, or would they regard it as a grotesque usurpation of the democratic process...

...So on September 8 Fred Tuttle won the Republican Senate primary by 5,000 votes...

...the more he spent the more obscure he got...

...I hope the American electorate would recognize that, while undoubtedly demonstrating a working knowledge of the landscape, it should not be the deciding factor...

...Admittedly, next to Farmer Tuttle, Forrest Gump would look like a MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic ofthe Spectator of London...

...Fred Tuttle isn't an antidote to the suffocating phoniness of American politics, only the latest exemplar of it...

...58 November r 9 9 8 The American Spectator demanded to know how many nipples on an intern...

...now, running for real, he's just another celebrity with a movie to plug...

...The next person likes them mostly in small doses: While motoring through Vermont on a leaf-peeping tour, he wants to be able to skid to a halt outside a general store and, as he's going in to pick up a copy of the Sunday New York Times, pass a couple of gnarled old Yankee characters chewing the cud on a weathered porch and hear an amusing smidgen of authentic Yankee folk gibberish...

...Politics, Biography, History, Travel...

...the plot of his movie would be made real...

...America's biggestbargain book selection...

...Tuttle is backed by maverick indie director O'Brien...

...In fact, I like them rather more than the next person...

...But, as VPR eventually concluded, the Tuttle candidacy is not really about issues or positions...

...McMullen could easily have slid back across the table a list of C-7 countries and challenged Fred to name their capitals...

...But, even by the debased standards of national politics, favored Republican candidate Jack McMullen was an easy target: A multi-millionaire with an MBA from Harvard who was a resident of Massachusetts until a few months ago...

...I've no idea what it is he's done in corporate America, but it'd be hard to think of a slogan less likely to fly in the Green Mountains: even for the handful of hardline right-wing bastards over there, the point of Vermont is as a refuge from corporate America...

...So when will you be coming to Washington, Senator Tuttle...

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...On primary night, Vermont Public Radio was unsure how to handle Tuttle's victory...

...If that sounds hard on a septuagenarian dairy farmer, well, tough: If you can't stand the heat, go back to the barn...

...Instead, it's time to scuttle Tuttle...

...He is, for a start, retired...

...His campaign ads show him blissfully dozing underneath a sun hat as his skiff drifts lazily across Lake Champlain —as well it might: The senator can nap secure (Continued on page 85) Find the lowest term life rates in America at quotesmith.com or we'll overnight you $500 "Quotesmith's interface is marvelously simple...

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...Whereas most flatlanders are desperate to be accepted by the natives, McMullen, in his appearances in the state, always gave the impression he had a couple of hours to kill between connecting flights...

...He's had a summer home in the state for years, but the Fred-heads had no trouble painting him as "acarpetbagger who's rented an apartment round the corner from the airport...