As Gov. Peter Shumlin launched his campaign last week for a second term, he focused on two themes: the state’s relative economic prosperity and that he is a governor who gets “the tough things done.”
Those ‘tough things’ have boiled down to balancing the state’s budget without raising broad-based taxes, even while coping with four major storms in 2011, and initiating health care reform by passing the nation’s first universal access health care system based on a single-payer model.