Rich Tarrant Touts
His Independence
By M. D. Drysdale

Rich Tarrant, once a basketball star at St. Michael's College, created one of Vermont's most successful companies, a software firm. He's hoping his skills carry over into the political arena. (Herald photo / Bob Eddy)

Certainly the most visible of this year's new crop of candidates is Rich Tarrant, the Republican who would like to step into the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Sen. James M. Jeffords.

To do that, Tarrant must defeat one of Vermont's most successful politicians, Bernie Sanders, who wants to move up from his current job as Congressman.

Tarrant is a visible candidate because he can afford to be. He has spent more than $6 million of his own money on the campaign for Senate, an amount which is making history, not only in Vermont but in the U.S. Tarrant is far from being the country's biggest spender among self-funded candidates, but his estimated expenditure of $25 per eventual voter may set a national record.

Not that Tarrant has a lopsided margin over Sanders when it comes to expenditures. Sanders' war chest is about the same size, raised primarily from out-of-state sources, but also from thousands of smaller contributions from Vermonters. The two candidates will spend roughly the same amount courting the voters—give or take a million bucks.

Tarrant doesn't apologize for spending his own money. He claims that since he hasn't had to ask anyone for big money, he can remain independent in Congress. He also claims that his business success is the result of skills that would make him a good Senator.

Record-Holder

A native of Newark, N.J., Tarrant came to Vermont to go to school at St. Michaels, where he became one the greatest basketball players in the college's history, setting 13 college scoring records, being selected as an All-American, and taking his school to the Division II Final Four in 1965.

He was drafted by the Boston Celtics but failed to make the cut, and so with some friends he went into the software business in Chittenden County, creating business software needed by various health care providers. His firm, eventually called IDX Systems Corp., became one of the most successful in the state's high-tech history, employing hundreds.

Tarrant spent from 1995 to 2005 as chairman of the board and principal owner of IDX, and when he sold it to General Electric in 2005 for $1.2 billion, he became a very rich man, as he and his wife each profited to the tune of more than $100 million. He decided he would try putting some of that money to work in running for the U.S. Senate.

Alarming Health Costs

Why? Health care—his business specialty—was the main interest that got him started in the race, he told The Herald. Specifically he, like most politicians of any stripe, is frightened by the speed with which American health care costs have erupted.

Tarrant likes to compare these to the cost of the Iraq War. "The equivalent of 25 Iraq wars was spent this year on health care," he said, "and every year it's two MORE Iraq wars being added.

"We can't keep going like this. The market is shaking people (without health insurance) out of the tree. I hear stories all over the state."

Tarrant's suggestion—perhaps a surprising one for a private businessman—is that the federal Medicare program ought to be expanded to be an insurer of last resort for everyone—not just for older people. Medicare has proven to be the country's most efficient health insurer, he said.

People who want to buy more extensive insurance should be able to buy their own insurance, and do it across state lines instead of just in their own state, he said.

Still, Tarrant said, insurance is not the issue—the underlying growth in the cost of health care is the issue, and any insurance scheme will have to face that fact.

His second issue, he said, is "borrow and spend Republicans" in Washington who have produced an "outrageous" deficit that "my grandkids should not have to pay off." His suggestion is to require "sunsetting" for most programs, and if the programs don't work, to "lop'em off." A recent promise of $232-million for Lebanon is among the disbursements he would like to see lopped.

Position on Iraq

Like other Republican candidates in Vermont, Tarrant is trying hard to show that he's not a George W. Bush Republican. He frankly thinks the United States should leave Iraq.

"It's time for us to start getting out," he told The Herald. "I'd rather that they fight each other than us."

His proposal is to pull some forces out altogether and to pull some back to a neighboring area where they will be available for a quick strike should an emergency need arise.

Tarrant is also of two minds about the Bush tax cuts, which are much criticized by his opponent, Rep. Sanders. On the one hand, he thinks it was a mistake to cut the top tax rate for high earners.

However, he believes that cutting the tax on capital gains and dividends was a good idea. He explained that cutting the taxes on those categories resulted in an avalanche of transactions which were then taxed (though at the lower level) and produced a windfall of new taxes. What is not widely understood, he said is that while tax rates have declined, tax collections have actually "skyrocketed" because of the economic buying-and-selling that the new tax rates produced.

Tarrant has not held electoral office, and at times his campaign has demonstrated that political inexperience. He was asked why he did not run for a lower-level office rather than starting off by running for the U.S. Senate.

"I felt that if I wanted to have input on health care, it had to be from a strong platform," he replied. At 64, he feels that if he is going to have political influence as well as business success, there's no time to waste.