Recognizing the Eightieth Birthday of Governor Phil Hoff

RECOGNIZING THE EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY OF GOVERNOR PHIL HOFF -- (Extensions of Remarks - June 25, 2004)

SPEECH OF
HON. BERNARD SANDERS
OF VERMONT
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
FRIDAY, JUNE 25, 2004

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Speaker, it is a very great personal pleasure to extend best wishes on his eightieth birthday to Governor Philip H. Hoff of Vermont.

During my own years of service to Vermont, I have found no finer example, no better counselor, no more steadfast friend, than Phil Hoff, the Governor of Vermont from 1962 to 1969.

Educated at Williams College and Cornell University, Phil Hoff ran for Governor of Vermont in 1962. His was an uphill battle: Although Democrat William Meyer had been elected to one term in the U.S. House in 1958, no Democrat had won the governorship in the state of Vermont since before the Civil War. Vermont was steadfastly, resolutely, a one-party state, even resisting national plebiscites for Democratic candidates, standing alone with Utah in voting for William Taft in the Woodrow Wilson victory in 1912, alone with Maine in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt landslide in 1936.

With energy, vision and a great personal warmth that touched voters deeply, Phil Hoff boldly took a simple message to Vermont's citizens: It was time for a change. And people listened, and agreed. Phil Hoff was elected Governor of Vermont in 1962 by defeating the incumbent chief executive, F. Ray Keyser Jr. His vigor was put in service of his dual linked commitments, to social justice and to making those changes that would bring it about. During the next six years, everything in Vermont was changed, opened up, made more responsive to the people, reshaped in the visionary spirit of those exciting times of growth and renewed democracy. With Phil Hoff as governor, it seemed anything was possible: Stale tradition, entrenched power, historical limitations, all gave way to the bold vision and active involvement of this remarkable human being.

While we have many differences, many different points of view, in our state, for many years Vermont has been to people all over America a beacon for what politics can be. Here, ideological conservatism does not rule, nor narrow self-interest, nor recriminations of one group against another. Our political figures far more often than not speak out on the side of justice and fairness. That is the legacy of Phil Hoff, who not only governed our state but left a legacy that ever afterwards politics would be about inclusion and not exclusion, about moving confidently into the future rather than cowering in the shadow of the past.

Phil Hoff kept up an active life in the public sector, serving in more recent years as a Vermont State Senator, as a Trustee and President of Vermont Law School, as Chairperson of Vermont Advisory Committee of U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. His greatest honors have come not from institutions, corporations, bureaucracies, but from the place held for him in the hearts of his fellow citizens. Deeply honored and revered by all in Vermont, Phil Hoff remains accessible and warm, a good neighbor, a good friend, a model citizen, to thousands and thousands of Vermonters.

On my own behalf and on behalf of the entire state of Vermont, Let me conclude by wishing Phil Hoff, our finest public citizen, our model of what a human being can and should be, a very, very happy eightieth birthday. Phil, the nation, as well as Vermont, is proud of you.

END