The following article appeared in the October 12 edition of the Burlington (VT) Free Press, and has subsequently reappeared in various forums and email lists on the Internet.  With good reason!  The lady makes sense!

This is one Yankee I'd love to have migrate to Dixie and maybe run for governor a Southern state.  If Vermon't don't want her, maybe the Southern Party can do a little candidate recruitment in the green mountain state!

Three cheers for Ruth Dwyer!  And bravo to the Burlington Free Press for an article that mentions "slavery" only once and "racism" not at all.

Confederate Candidate

by Candace Page

THETFORD -- One wall of Ruth Dwyer's farmhouse living room is lined with books left to her by her grandfather: Bruce Catton's three-volume history of the Civil War, Douglas Southall Freeman's four-volume "Life of Robert E. Lee," G.D. Mosgrove's "Kentucky Cavaliers in Dixie," and dozens more.

The Republican candidate for governor has read them all. The lessons she draws aren't about slavery, but the destruction of a rural culture.

On that point, her sympathies lie with the South.

"What the Civil War really was about was economics and cultural conflict," she said one warm September evening. She sat at her kitchen counter, the phone ringing in the background with a stream of campaign calls.

"The South felt the North was oppressing them. They wanted to control their own rural, agrarian society. The North wanted to exploit it," she said.

"I see the same clash in Vermont, the rural, agrarian culture vying with a more sophisticated, industrial-suburban culture."

If rural people don't resist, she said, and "if urbanites don't understand them better" their values and traditions will be wiped out.

"Is this argument we're having today in Vermont about civil unions? No. ... It's about people thinking our way of life, what we believe in, what we hold dear, is at risk."

More than any state candidate in recent memory, Dwyer has cast herself as the candidate of farmers, loggers and small-town folk who lost their dominance of state government more than 30 years ago, when legislative reapportionment transferred power to urban and suburban areas.

Dwyer's conservative political beliefs have been shaped by a steady, self-guided reading program and 25 years of work on a 200-acre farm.

She opposes homosexual civil unions, abortion, gun control and big government. She believes in property rights, school choice, a less-regulated market and lower taxes.

As with her opponents -- Democratic Gov. Howard Dean and Progressive Anthony Pollina -- a look at the nature and sources of Dwyer's fundamental beliefs is part of understanding how she would govern.

Dwyer grew up in a conservative Republican home and didn't rebel against her parents' beliefs, as so many young people did in the 70s.

"I always tell people I was the only UVM freshman with a Reagan sticker on her truck," she says now. She left UVM after a year.

When she was 16, Dwyer encountered Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," a political manifesto cast as a 1,100-page novel. She has reread it many times.

In the novel, a powerful central government tries to destroy the hero, John Galt, because he is a brilliant inventor and entrepreneur. He persuades his fellow titans of industry to withdraw their talents from the world. Society collapses without them.

The novel glorifies individual success and private profit. Government is portrayed as the last refuge of the mediocre and incompetent, who use its power to steal from the successful.

"The message, to a 16-year-old, was an inspiring one," Dwyer says now.

She found "Atlas Shrugged" an antidote to the liberal messages of '70s pop culture, and still cites Rand's ideas.

"The person who says 'I'm wonderful because I'm spending the taxpayers' money on a new programs' is viewed as compassionate. The person minding his own business, working hard -- you know, the Bill Gateses of the world -- employing thousands of people and helping the economy, is viewed as the villain. Who does the Justice Department go after? Bill Gates."

"It's not bad to be successful and live a good life. That's what our society was founded on. ... Ayn Rand shows that society falls apart when you lose that outlook."

Those who know Dwyer describe her as an avid reader and researcher.

Many winters, she says, she'll choose a period of history to study and read everything she can find: the Vietnam War one winter, the European theater of World War II another, the Civil War frequently through the years.

"I feel I got all the skills I needed in public schools --reading, writing, basic math. That's why we have to have good high schools, so if you don't finish college you can educate yourself."

She quotes frequently from her reading to defend her political views.

Asked why she opposes the homosexual civil union law, she offers a quick analysis of 2,000 years of history and Gibbons' "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."

"If you look at civilization over history, you'll see any civilization that eroded the strength of the nuclear family didn't last very long.

"Look at Rome and how it destroyed itself. It wasn't just homosexuality but a general decline in a certain moral code. They let that go and they fell. That pattern has been repeated over time."

Ask Dwyer why she opposes abortion and you'll get a decidedly agrarian answer.

"When you raise animals, you'd never butcher a pregnant heifer," she said. "If your sheep's pregnant, it's important to protect that sheep so she will have a healthy baby. That's your livelihood."

If animal babies are that important, then, "how much more important, religion aside, it's got to be for a woman to have a healthy baby."

Dwyer's 25 years of farm life has been the other powerful force in her political beliefs.

"The way you look at life, the values you have, the way you do things -- it's all really shaped by the world that you live in," she says.

Her world, as she describes it, puts a high value on hard work, self-reliance, individual freedom, and independence from government assistance or interference.

Her views on such issues as property rights, health care and welfare appear to rise directly from her own experiences.

"People who own the land care the most about taking care of it," she says, pointing to her own laboriously cleared fields. "Bureaucrats don't care. ... Look at the countries where government owns the land -- Eastern Europe -- and look at their environments."

Dwyer isn't covered by health insurance. She said she's only needed medical care once since she was a teenager, so she decided this year to go without, rather than pay costly premiums.

She blames state government for the high price, saying if insurers were less regulated, their prices would be lower.

And her experience of the Thetford community, she says, makes her believe Vermont erred when it replaced local overseers of the poor with a state-run welfare system.

"You can send out welfare checks til you're blue in the face, but you can't guarantee the kids are going to get the benefits of that," she said.

"I know a lot of women on welfare, and believe me, they're out with their boyfriends and the kids are stuck at home in front of the TV with a bunch of Cheerios."

Dwyer says local groups do a better job tailoring charitable aid to people's needs.

"My vision (of government) is more like Jefferson's -- the government that governs best governs least," she said Saturday over a cup of instant Maxwell House coffee in her kitchen.

"There are certain things government absolutely has to do. Roads. Roads were a central piece of the Roman Empire, that allowed them to be a great society. Roads are a role of government because people can't do that privately."

She continued her list: Courts. Police protection. Preventing air and water pollution. She paused.  Almost as an afterthought, she mentioned education and social services like health care. "A good society makes sure that people who are vulnerable are protected," she said.

She immediately added a qualification: Those human services should be handled at the local level whenever possible.

"I think (local control) is a stronger way to run a society than trying to centralize and move everything up and redistribute wealth from a bureaucracy.... The tendency for abuse becomes huge," she said.

She recalled the way Roman emperors distributed bread and held public entertainments to keep the masses happy.

"The 'bread and circuses' thing keeps coming to my mind when I listen to Howard Dean. We're at the point in Vermont where our emperor is saying, 'I'll give you things' rather than saying, 'I'll make sure you have opportunity to do a good life for you and your family.'"

"I don't hate government. Government has an absolutely vital role, but you always have to guard against it becoming too overbearing."

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A HEARTY, SOUTHERN  "HEAH, HEAH!" FOR 
RUTH DWYER!