This year, Town Meeting Day - Tuesday, March 6 - is also the day of the Vermont Presidential Primary.
To the relief of Vermonters, the circus that is this year's Republican presidential campaign has bypassed us. There's no need for Republicans to campaign in a state that gave President Obama his widest margin of victory in 2008, a state that appears likely to do the same in 2012.
But there still will be an election on March 6, and DailyKos.com, is asking voters to participate in a monkey-wrenching of the Vermont Republican Primary.
In what it calls “Operation Hilarity,” the left-leaning political website is asking Democratic and independent voters in states with open primaries, such as Vermont, to vote for Rick Santorum in an attempt to extend the Republican nomination campaign and improve the chances for Democrats in November.
On the surface, the logic certainly seems sound. Turnout so far for the Republican primaries and caucuses around the country has generally been dismal, and there has been little enthusiasm for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the candidate that the party leadership thinks has the best chance of beating Obama this fall.
A succession of candidates - Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich - have serially had their moment in the sun as the “anti-Romney” candidate. All have had their candidacies crash and burn.
Now it's Santorum's turn to be the anti-Romney, and the more that people get to see and hear him in action, the more likely it appears that he will follow the well-worn path to oblivion blazed by Perry, Bachman, Cain, and Gingrich.
While Vermonters can cast ballots in any political party's primary contest without having to declare an official party affiliation, it seems a bit farfetched to expect Vermont Democrats and Progressives to cast a vote for Rick Santorum under any circumstances.
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However, there is a precedent for causing mischief in a primary in Vermont.
One of the great primaries in recent years was the 1998 GOP Senate primary between Jack McMullen, a millionaire from Massachusetts, and Fred Tuttle, a dairy farmer from Tunbridge.
McMullen was a recent transplant to Vermont and thought he could buy himself the GOP nomination. Tuttle's claim to fame was that he appeared in a 1996 film by John O'Brien called Man with a Plan, about a retired dairy farmer who decides to run for Congress so he can pay his bills.
O'Brien had the brilliant idea of having Tuttle run for Senate to promote the video release of Man with a Plan. He figured that it would be great publicity. He didn't figure that Tuttle would actually win.
McMullen wasn't that well liked, even by Republicans. Tuttle, on the other hand, was a beloved figure around Vermont, thanks to O'Brien's film.
The turning point in the campaign was a debate on Vermont Public Radio. Tuttle asked a series of questions to gauge how much McMullen really knew about Vermont. After McMullen was unable to correctly pronounce the names of several Vermont towns, Tuttle went for the kill with this question: “How many teats does a Holstein got?”
McMullen answered, “Six,” instead of the correct answer (four). In blowing that question, he confirmed his status as a carpetbagging flatlander.
On primary day, Democrats and Progressives voted in droves in the GOP primary to support Fred Tuttle, who spent about $200 on his campaign to beat the Massachusetts millionaire, winning 55 percent of the vote.
Tuttle's opponent in the general election was incumbent Democrat Patrick Leahy. Saying that he didn't want to win because it would mean that he would have to move to Washington, Tuttle endorsed Sen. Leahy and made several campaign appearances with him.
Despite endorsing Leahy, Tuttle still picked up 48,051 votes (22 percent of the vote) in the general election.
Tuttle died in 2003 at the age of 84, but the memory of that 1998 Senate campaign still warms the hearts of Vermonters. Yes, it was a prank, but it was done in good fun, and no harm was done.
Some fear a concerted effort to give Santorum a victory in Vermont might backfire. Others say that it is no different from “Operation Chaos,” Rush Limbaugh's attempt to monkey-wrench the Democratic primaries in 2008 by getting his listeners to support Hillary Clinton to upset Barack Obama's momentum.
In the contest between Santorum, easily the most reactionary candidate to ever run for the Republican presidential nomination, and Romney, a man who has already shown himself willing to say and do anything to get elected president, odds are that Republican voters here will find Romney a better fit.
And whatever the outcome here, the contest will continue, because the Republican party is badly split and neither Santorum nor Romney has enough support to clinch the nomination.
Vermont Democrats will likely resist the urge to make mischief in Tuesday's primary, because the Republicans seem to be doing a fine job destroying their own political party right now, and they don't need any outside help to complete the destruction.