The Scott administration staged a nice little feel-good event yesterday. Gov. Phil Scott’s latest flood recovery press conference was held at, of all places, the 802 Subaru dealership in Berlin. Why? Because its billionaire owner, Ernie Boch, Jr., was presenting the governor with a donation to flood relief programs in the form of a great big cardboard novelty check for $250,000.

Boch and the administration got what they wanted. He got to open the presser with a boast about Subaru. The governor got a warm and fuzzy moment amidst the ongoing drudgery of flood recovery. But cynical ol’ me, it brought to mind a probably apocryphal anecdote that’s been variously assigned to Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, Groucho Marx, and W.C. Fields, among others, but seems to have been first told in 1937 by newspaper columnist O.O. McIntyre:

“They are telling this of Lord Beaverbrook and a visiting Yankee actress. In a game of hypothetical questions, Beaverbrook asked the lady: ‘Would you live with a stranger if he paid you one million pounds?’ She said she would. ‘And if be paid you five pounds?’ The irate lady fumed: ‘Five pounds. What do you think I am?’ Beaverbrook replied: ‘We’ve already established that. Now we are trying to determine the degree.”

Well, our governor’s degree is a quarter million dollars. And for another 100 G’s, he’s willing to be interrupted in the middle of his prepared remarks and stand there like a goof while the sponsor hogs the microphone.

The money went to good causes, so I guess we can just ignore the unseemly optics. That’s how the media coverage played it, anyway.

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