BRATTLEBORO — “All politics is local,” the late House Speaker Tip O'Neill once said.
But with the Town Meeting ballot question that called for the town to indict President George W. Bush and Vice-President Richard Cheney, the town's local politics went national.
And more than 8,000 people from the nation responded to the issue, a little less than half outraged by the notion and the remaining majority reacting encouragingly.
Since the citizens successfully petitioned to include a ballot article on the March 4 ballot, their decision attracted national attention before it was approved by Town Meeting voters. (See story, page 1.)
Interim Town Manager Barbara Sondag points at a two-foot stack of documents on the floor of her assistant's office.
The printouts of e-mails in that stack represent about a quarter of the volume of public correspondence directed to her office, most in the form of brief comments submitted through a contact form on the town's Web site, www.brattleboro.org.
Sondag's assistant, Letitia Trent, has been poring through the comments for security reasons, forwarding an unspecified number to Brattleboro police for follow-up.
But “we did not follow up with them as active or true threats,” said Acting Police Chief Eugene Wrinn.
“If we had an active investigation, we wouldn't be talking,” said Wrinn, who characterized even the most disturbing correspondence as “venting, on both sides.”
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Tish Grier agrees, almost word for word, with the acting police chief. “I wouldn't see it as a debate,” she says, scrolling through the e-mails.
The outpouring of national public comment, unusual for Brattleboro, is a long-established phenomenon of the Internet, said Grier, an Easthampton, Mass.-based blogger and consultant to Web sites that build communities online. Grier has some professional insight about how sites interact with their users, and how users interact with one another using Internet technologies.
When a story about the Selectboard's approval of the citizen initiative to put the question onto the ballot linked to the conservative Drudge Report Web site, that link triggered a phenomenon where “something goes viral,” Grier says, where a link to a high-profile site like Drudge's ignites a firestorm of public response on blogs, message boards, or, in this case, filling in a form on the town's Web site.
Whether a story goes viral is hard to predict, Grier says, noting that a number of factors affect whether stories ignite public response.
Grier asks about the headline that was linked to the Drudge Report, wondering if the wording might have contributed to the initial response.
“Aha! Oh, that's excellent,” Grier says of the headline, “Vermont Anti-Bush Petition Sparks Anger,” which contained keywords likely to be picked up by Google e-mail alerts and other search technologies.
The nature of the comments also tells a lot about the way citizens use the Web, Grier says.
Grier, noting that a lot of the traffic for similar comment posts to Web sites happens between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., the work of “a lot of disgruntled cubicle people” who get “caught up in an emotional moment.”
For such users, “people or publications become lightning rods for people's personal issues,” Grier says.
Scrolling through the e-mails, Grier notes some of the most visceral comments were left anonymously or with names and e-mail addresses that are almost certainly fake.
And many cross the line from “invective to parody,” Grier says, calling one comment, "Each one of you whinny [sic] little Vermont bastards deserves a wedgie,” a “great example.”
But Grier stops at one from Vivian Schiffer, the wife of a soldier stationed at Fort Polk, La., who charged that the proposal to indict Bush and Cheney give “aid and comfort to the enemy.”
“Now this one - that's real,” Grier says. “Her anger is coming from a certain place.”
Unlike in the past, someone deeply offended by an opinion or ideology now can fire off a post or a note. “There's no filter of physical time and space anymore,” Grier says.
“It used to be people yelling at the TV,” she says. “Now, rather than swearing and yelling, they throw out an e-mail.”
Grier points out that with a few exceptions, most popular bloggers and pundits don't incite people to swarm. “People take it upon themselves to do that,” she says.
“The Internet spreads [information] further, but it doesn't compel them to act,” she says.
Grier reads through the second wave of positive comments that came into the town offices in response to media reports about the furor of the original swarmers.
She calls the volume of positive comments “shocking,” given that angry people tend to post their opinions but those who have a positive reaction to an issue normally don't express affirmation.
Grier says the 8,000 responses can say a lot about people wanting a voice in the world.
“A lot of people feel the particular need to express themselves on a particular issue that touches their core personal belief,” she says, “and they've got to say something about it.”
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Several consistent themes run through the e-mails, including one in a number of the original responses: economic retaliation.
In most cases where writers announced intentions to cancel vacations and exact other economic retaliation, they threatened to do so not only for Brattleboro, but also the entire state of Vermont.
Some writers alluded to several high-profile Vermont court cases involving sex offenses, brought to national attention by conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly. Several letters also referenced nudism in Brattleboro.
The Commons wrote to several such correspondents, looking to understand what would prompt economic retaliation not against Brattleboro but the entire state.
“The fact that a very vocal group of Brattleboro citizens was able to make national news proposing criminal indictment of our president and vice president without the other citizens of Brattleboro speaking up and denouncing the actions of the vocal few implies agreement on their part,” explains Jackson Williams of Tijeras, N.M., who informed Sondag in a Jan. 26 e-mail that he and his wife were checking labels of products to ensure they bought nothing manufactured in Vermont.
“I think you'd have to agree, overall, silence implies agreement,” Williams says.
“I believe the majority of the citizens of Vermont fall in with the typical Northeast way of thinking, liberal or moderate,” writes John Thibeault of Bangor, Maine. “How else do you explain the election or re-election of the likes of Howard Dean, Patrick Leahy, Jim [Jeffords], and the [Selectboard] of Brattleboro?”
Kent Lundquist of American Fork, Utah, who wrote on Jan. 30 that the indictment question “eliminates Vermont as a destination for anyone sane and serious,” was a little more conciliatory when contacted later.
“My feelings about the Brattleboro [ballot question] were heartfelt,” he wrote, calling people's responses to the town an attempt “to have a voice in something that frustrates them.”
“I hear wonderful things about Vermont, but have never visited there,” Lundquist says. “We will likely do so in the next couple of years.” Joseph Smith Jr., founder of Lundquist's Latter Day Saint faith, was born in Sharon, Vt., and Lundquist says he would like to visit his birthplace. “The more I think about it, I actually can learn to like Vermont,” he writes.
“I'm not sure about Brattleboro," Lundquist admits. "Can I get maple sugar there? Or one of those Teddy Bears?”