As I surf the web, the banner ads for Phil Scott and Bruce Lisman continue to follow me like the shambling monster in “It Follows.” Last week, I noted the graphic-design shortcomings of both campaigns’ efforts — with Lisman’s being the worse of the two.
Well, maybe they read my post, because they’ve put up a new and much better banner ad.
You’ve got to hand it to Matt Dunne. If my email inbox is anything to judge by, he’s got the most active, persistent fundraising operation of any gubernatorial candidate.
And he’s borrowed an old trick from the public radio playbook: ginning up a false sense of urgency.
Public radio fundraising isn’t aimed at the vast majority of listeners. More than 80 percent of the audience will never give a dime. Roughly ten percent are loyal donors who don’t need convincing.
A pledge drive is aimed at the five to ten percent who listen frequently, who know that public radio depends on listener support, and who are predisposed to make a contribution — but never quite get around to it.
This is where the sense of urgency comes into play. Call Now! Because Right Now is a crucial time! We’ve got a matching gift or a challenge pledge or a prize drawing or we’re about to hit a milestone.
When candidates wants to hammer home a rhetorical point, one of their favorite devices is to declare it “my top priority.” Or, weasel wordly, “a top priority.”
Either way, I’ma here to tall you not one of them has their top priority right. Whoever wins, their top priority has already been assigned.
Like it or not, the biggest single item on the next governor’s to-do list will be Lake Champlain. Thanks to our decades of consistent neglect, we are now under orders from the EPA to create an effective plan to limit nutrient flows into the lake, and take extensive action to clean up the lake.
Both will be costly. The former will impose tougher conditions for growth, tougher effluent standards for farms, developers, road contractors, and municipalities. The latter will require spending on a large scale. Which will require large-scale indebtedness, tax increases, or budget cuts elsewhere. Or all three. And it’s got to be done in a way that satisfies the EPA, no matter its effect on entrenched political interests.
Meanwhile, neither the candidates nor the media are giving this the attention it deserves. It promises to be the dominant issue of the next several years. But to hear the candidates tell it, Lake Champlain is nobody’s top priority.
Commerce Secretary Patricia Moulton was far too busy to comment on the sudden, unexplained departure of Gene Fullam as head of Vermont’s EB-5 office, but she did manage to make time for a live interview on Thursday’s “Vermont Edition.” Subject: EB-5.
Inexplicably, host Jane Lindholm didn’t ask about Fullam’s departure. A deal, perhaps?
UPDATE 7/23: Got this Tweet from Lindholm:
@theVPO1 There was no deal. Our own reporter was busy breaking the news & getting Moulton’s comments. https://t.co/luXLYjSziS
— Jane Lindholm (@JaneLindholm) July 23, 2016
Immediately preceding Moulton was State Auditor Doug Hoffer, who’s been critical of the grant programs administered by her agency. Among other things, he pointed out that it’s impossible to prove whether the state grants actually create economic activity that wouldn’t exist in their absence.
And then Moulton came on and admitted that those programs operate on the honor system. Regarding the Vermont Economic Growth Initiative, she said:
… we believe the CEOs, when they sign an application, that the material is true and correct.
Aww. Isn’t that sweet. “We believe the CEOs.”
Because a CEO would never lie to us.
Okay, so after less than one year on the job, the director of Vermont’s embattled EB-5 program has resigned. And nobody is saying boo about it. No explanation, no praise for the departed, just No Comment across the board.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move it along.
Well, sorry, but if there’s one area of state government where That Dog Won’t Hunt, it’s the scandal-plagued EB-5 program.
Plus, we’re not talking about some schmo plucked from bureaucratic obscurity to caretake EB-5 through the fag end of the Shumlin administration. When he was hired in August 2015, Gene Fullam appeared to be the idea candidate.
,The Scott/Lisman primary contest has taken on a predictable pattern. Bruce Lisman attacks Phil Scott; Scott replies with shocked outrage over Lisman’s negativity. Lather, rinse, repeat. It caused me to pose an existential Tweet:
At what point does repeatedly hammering a candidate for negative campaigning become negative campaigning itself? #vtpoli
— The #vtpoli Observer (@theVPO1) July 21, 2016
The latest roundelay began when Lisman accused Scott of calling for “a mileage tax on all who drive.”
Which is a lie. In a Rutland debate Wednesday night, Scott discussed the certainty that, as cars become more efficient and we transition to ever more hybrids and electrics, the gas tax will become insufficient to pay for needed highway repairs. Here’s a portion of Scott’s remarks:
‘We are going to have to think about other ways, nationally, to tax and receive revenue from those who use our highways and byways. … So, we’re going to, in the future, have to look at some kind of a mileage tax.’”
That’s not “calling for” or “proposing” a mileage tax. It’s a self-evident observation on our changing transportation system. Scott is right to complain of an inaccurate attack from Lisman.
However…
Need I point out that this line of attack is standard operating procedure for Republicans, including Scott himself?
I have occasionally chronicled the Vermont Republican Party’s perennially dire financial condition, but never have I seen the situation as bad as it is right now. Because heading into the heart of a campaign season, the state GOP is virtually out of funds.
Explanatory note: the VTGOP and Vermont Democratic Party file both state and federal reports. Because of the way federal law is written, the bulk of their activity is considered “federal” even though they are state parties.
In this case, it hardly matters; we’re talking peanuts wherever we turn. Its latest state filing listed less than $1,000 in cash on hand; its latest federal filing reported $1.104 in the bank.
(By contrast, the Vermont Dems filed a state report indicating it raised more than $100,000 in June and spent a little more than half that. Its federal filing indicates $120,000 cash on hand. The VDP’s fundraising and spending are in a completely different league than its Republican counterpart.)
Even on the VTGOP’s bare-bones budget, that’s less than two days’ worth of operating expenses. They’re tapped out, just when they need to kick things into high gear.
In a time when America is averaging more than one mass shooting per day*, the good people of Burlington just suffered through several weeks of a homeless man riding his bike around town with a rifle strapped to his back.
*FBI definition: four or more people shot in a single incident, not including the shooter. We’ve had 29 in July so far.
Per Seven Days’ Mark Davis, police “found [Malcolm Tanner] to be ‘incoherent,’ and he insisted that laws do not apply to him.” But they did nothing about him because “he did not seem to be breaking any laws.”
Tra la la.
You know how online advertising works. You shop for something on the Internet — socks, refrigerators, hotels — and you get a torrent of related banner ads wherever you browse.
So me, politics. I’m getting a load of banner ads from candidates. Ironically, mostly Republicans. (The tracking software doesn’t detect sarcasm.) And, given the relative rate of spending, mostly about Bruce Lisman.
My conclusion: whatever he’s spending all that money on, he’s getting screwed on graphics. Just look at this.
Ugh. Looks like a quick cut-and-paste job by a hyperactive five-year-old with a rudimentary grasp of Photoshop. Cluttered, random, doesn’t stand out, doesn’t guide the eye, too many messages. And then there’s that terrible photo crammed into the middle: why would you want to show your candidate squinting?
More bad banners… after the jump.
Patricia Moulton just became the latest high-ranking rat to leave the Good Ship Shumlin. The Commerce Secretary, under whose watch the EB-5 scandal went on undetected for years, has herself a soft landing spot as interim president of Vermont Technical College.
Moulton is one of those seemingly unmovable fixtures of Montpelier life — a species that moves effortlessly between government, private sector, and government-related nonprofits. She’s served in the last two administrations, Douglas and Shumlin; and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she turned up in a hypothetical Phil Scott cabinet.
What are her credentials to lead an educational institution? Pish tosh. Who needs relevant experience when you’re one of the cross-partisan In Crowd?
“… I can bring to that institution great knowledge about education and workforce for the state of Vermont,” Moulton said in an interview Thursday.
Well, that’s one way to spin it.
The Vermont Political Observer. 