A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a story about the career of state Sen. Alison Clarkson. In so far as a 22-year legislative career can be summed up in under 2,000 words, the story more or less captured the high points. It did not rehearse all of the lows, such as when Clarkson was voted out of her position as Senate majority leader after the 2024 election, in which the Woodstock Democrat’s party lost its supermajority in both the House and the Senate.
When I write about a political figure, I’m more interested in whether they achieved what they set out to achieve. In Clarkson’s first run for the House, in 2004, she ran on making the state more affordable and on reforming how we pay for education. So, a failure on both counts. This is true for every politician in the state, including the governor, but they can all conveniently blame it on partisan gridlock between the legislative and executive branches.
But there was another supposed Clarkson low point that I left out, and for that a former journalist saw fit to take the Valley News to task in a letter published May 16. To my mind, the letter’s chief complaint gets at a problem in Vermont’s political discourse, one that makes us more like the nation at large than the outpost of citizen democracy that the state has always prided itself as being.
What this former TV reporter thought I’d left out of the story was a moment in September 2024 that seemed to have passed unremarked upon until March this year. That’s when VtDigger published a commentary by Loralee Tester, now the head of the Northeast Kingdom Chamber of Commerce, in which she asserted that Clarkson referred to rural Vermonters as “cave dwellers.”
The passage is worth quoting at length, to give you the flavor of it:
“A year and a half ago, I attended the Vermont Solutions Summit, hosted by the Vermont Chamber of Commerce in Burlington, which brought together business, education and policy leaders to discuss solutions to the state’s workforce and economic challenges. It was an important event, and I was glad to be there.
“However, one moment from the final panel has stayed with me: when Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, referred to the ‘urban dwellers and the cave dwellers’ of Vermont, the latter term clearly directed at rural Vermonters in my view. I was one of only a small handful of people in the room from the Northeast Kingdom. I remember looking around and realizing that hardly anyone even reacted. The comment seemed to pass as clever, harmless, maybe even funny. To me, it was neither.
“It was a small but telling reminder of something many of us in rural Vermont know well: too often, the people making policy in this state speak about rural communities with a mix of condescension, amusement and disbelief. We are treated as though we are difficult, unreasonable or simply in the way.”
The internet being what it is, “cave dweller” has taken on a life of its own in Vermont political circles in the weeks since Tester’s piece was published. It inspired a Vermont Cave Dwellers group on Facebook. The phrase has been weaponized, turned into a virus.
In the course of my reporting, I asked Clarkson about it. She denied having said it. And I couldn’t find any further proof, so I considered it hearsay and left it out of the story. To scrutinize one dumb thing a lawmaker was alleged to have said in a 22-year career struck me as a waste of time.
But the letter in last Saturday’s Valley News from the former journalist made me reconsider, not because I agree with the letter writer’s point, but because of the letter’s niggling pointlessness.
I’ll summarize the letter: The story the Valley News published left out my favorite detail about Clarkson, the one that makes her into a despicable caricature, and that’s wrong.
OK, fine. I called Peter Hirschfeld, the Vermont Public reporter who moderated the September 2024 panel discussion. He was kind enough to indulge this exercise, and said he didn’t recall the phrase Tester attributed to Clarkson.
I called Tester. She stood by her story and added that she talked to Clarkson after the panel discussion ended.
Clarkson is an easy target for this kind of attack, a patrician Harvard graduate who lives in Woodstock. How could her views possibly align with those of rural people? Or so goes the view of Tester, and the letter-writer.
In our phone conversation, Tester said she saw a divide between rural and urban residents of the state, which is what led her to bring up what she recalled Clarkson saying. Her aim, she said, was to foster conversation.
“My intent was not to cause harm,” she said. “It was meant to be illustrative.” The impact of policies enacted in Montpelier has a different effect depending on where in the state a person lives, she added. Tester’s column also slipstreams along with an uprising against elements of Act 181, the 2024 overhaul of Vermont’s landmark development law, Act 250.
This leaves me more or less back where I started, with a single statement from a politician — which she denies saying — that was dredged up 18 months later for political reasons.
All of this seems like small potatoes, except that it sadly replicates our national political model on a Vermont scale. Is that really what we want?
If Clarkson did indeed say what Tester quoted her as saying, that’s a clumsy cultural contrast, one that certainly deserves an apology. But it’s hard to see how a productive conversation was going to emerge from Tester’s commentary. She, like so many other political operatives, elevated a cultural complaint, which by its nature has no meaningful solution, in place of an economic one.
Rural places have always been at the mercy of wider economic forces. As a person who grew up in the country and lives in Vermont because it’s a rural place, I’m not glossing over the state’s issues. But Vermont isn’t going to solve problems caused by a century of economic transformation by sorting out who’s a “cave-dweller” and who isn’t.
What Clarkson was alleged to have said, and what Tester wrote about it, and what the letter-writer complained about, was empty political chatter, words lobbed like dummy grenades from ideological bunkers. It wastes everybody’s time.
Vermont has pressing issues around the costs of education, how an influx of wealth has affected the state, the cost of housing and health care, the challenges that Clarkson, Tester and many others have been trying to address. Let’s talk about that, and set the caves aside for when we really need them.
