Listening to Phil Scott talk is like bathing in a vat of Malt-o-Meal: Sleep-inducing, no stimulative properties, somehow comforting and discomfiting at the same time. If you don’t believe me, just look: Scott’s buddy Lt. Gov. John Rodgers is fixin’ to nod off.

Seriously, this is the second time in a month I took notes on a gubernatorial address only to barely scratch the surface of my legal pad. (Yes, I’m old.)

Which stands to reason. He was never an orator by any means and he’s been in office for nearly a decade. If he had anything new to contribute, he would have done so long ago.

He did try to pretend there was new wine in those old, moth-eaten wineskins but it wasn’t nearly enough to persuade. Every governorship has an expiration date, and this speech was one more sign that Scott’s has come and gone. Not that he won’t win another term if he tries, since all the top-tier Democrats seem to be scared out of their minds to confront him and far too many Dems are happy to keep on voting for him because, I don’t know, he handled Covid pretty well (six years ago) and he’s not Donald Trump?

I mean, he talked about permit reform as the fix for the housing crisis. He complained about the cost of public education. He emphasized enforcement in his approach to crime, juvenile offenders, and substance use. He called for rollbacks or repeal of Democratic initiatives on climate change. Blah blah blah.

Oh, and he had the brass balls to blame Peter Shumlin for our crisis in health care costs. Shumlin, who hasn’t been in office for a decade and who abandoned his single-payer plan in The Year of Our Lord 2014. Scott cited Shumlin’s failed effort and the regulatory regime he did implement as the wellspring of our health care woes.

To which I say, well, who the hell has been governor since January 2017 and why hasn’t he done anything to counteract the alleged poison of Shumlin’s doomed reform plan?

One of Scott’s core efforts to lipstick his pig of a record was his call for reinvention of how state government does its work. As precedent, he cited reforms initiated under Dick Snelling and continued under Howard Dean, and said it was time to refresh that effort for a new era.

You know what it reminded me of? When Scott was first running for governor in 2016, he touted lean management at every opportunity. Lean management, he said, was the key to unlocking huge savings in state government:

I believe we can reduce the operational cost of every agency and department by one cent for every dollar currently spent, in my first year in office. Saving one penny on the dollar generates about $55 million in savings.

The link above is to a piece I wrote in 2020, by which time the phrase “lean management” had long been assigned to the dustbin of bankrupt political schemes. When asked about it in early 2020, Finance Commissioner Adam Greshin said “It’s not necessarily about savings, it’s about maybe spending the same amount of money and providing better value.”

Okay, fine. But that’s not what candidate Scott promised. And if he had made good on his promise, that’d be more than half a billion dollars we could have returned to taxpayers or invested in addressing some of our many challenges.

That was the unfulfilled promise of Scott, the businessman who knew how to make government work better and cheaper. And just like all the other businessmen-turned-politicians before him, he found out that the real-life work of managing government was a hell of a lot harder than he thought.

And now he’s coming back with a vaguely-described plan to reinvent state government. I’ll believe it when I see it. No, wait, I won’t believe it when I see it — I’ll believe it when it produces real, tangible savings. Not holding my breath.

I think Phil Scott has had his chance. He’s had many chances, thanks to his easy-going Real Vermonter charm and the failure of top Democrats to mount the least resistance, to put in the effort needed to rough up his Teflon coat. But it sure looks like we’re stuck with him for a while yet.

I tell you what, the next governor is going to have a massive job on their hands to clean up all the messes Scott leaves behind and all the crises he’s allowed to get worse and worse.