Category Archives: Peter Shumlin

@bfp_fail: We interrupt this debate to bring you a picture of Peter Diamondstone nodding off

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Well, I tried to watch it.

The Burlington Free Press hosted a gubernatorial debate at noon today, and livestreamed it online.

Or tried to.

The first half hour was fine. After that, it kept freezing and crashing. I spent most of the ensuing half hour waiting for isolated bits of audio. Which, as Darcie Johnston pointed out on Twitter, always seemed to happen when Peter Diamondstone was talking. And the frozen image on the screen was usually Diamondstone with his eyes closed. Around 1:00, I gave up.

The Freeploid can’t blame its failure on too many viewers, either. There was a counter onscreen that tracked the number of viewers, and the highest it hit was 74. That’s not enough to crash a livestream.

Well, it shouldn’t be, anyway.

Of course, since the Freeploid only yesterday announced a corporate “reset” that includes forcing newsroom staff to reapply for their jobs, this disaster may have been an inside job. Whatever the cause, it’s a dismal performance.

Speaking of dismal performances, Scott Milne continued to hammer on the shortfalls, real and imagined, of the Shumlin Administration without offering any plans of his own.

Single-payer? Let’s wait six years.

How to cut the budget? Get rid of the governor’s SUV and out-of-state travel.

When asked for specific cuts, he tried to make a joke, talked about bringing in smart people from outside who’d be willing to take pay cuts to work in his administration, made a half-hearted call-out to the long-discredited Challenges for Change, and concluded by saying “I don’t know.”

School funding? He slammed Shumlin for failing to make tough choices, but offered nothing of his own.

And, according to the Freeploid’s Twitter feed (I’d stopped watching the unwatchable livestream by then), MIlne actually said he’d unveil a Lake Champlain cleanup plan by Election Day. 

Sheesh.

At one point, he briefly paused his attacks on Shumlin to day “It’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. I’m talking about the future.” And then he resumed the attacks.

Milne has managed to dribble out a few ideas, inadequate and half-assed though they are: a two-year statewide property tax freeze, Challenges for Change, maybe a regional health care exchange. But with less than four weeks until Election Day, he remains the Man Without a Plan, with apologies to Fred Tuttle.

His excuse is that he doesn’t “have a background” in government. Well, sure. But is that a positive asset for filling our top executive position? What if an applicant came to Milne Travel and said “I don’t have a background in the travel business, but you’re doing a terrible job and you should hire me”?

And even if you put a value on bringing in a fresh perspective, why can’t Milne consult with some of his “expert advisers” and come up with a few specifics? He doesn’t need years of government experience to do that.

I’ll say it again: I had some hopes for Scott Milne when his campaign began. And there’s plenty of room for an informed critique of the Shumlin Administration. But he’s just been a disaster.

Postscript. I’d slam the Freeploid for its inexplicable decision to invite Peter Diamondstone and not Dan Feliciano, except that it led to the most entertaining moment of the debate. Diamondstone wasn’t there at noon; he appeared at about 12:10, panting furiously. And continued to pant for a couple of minutes, directly into his microphone, while Milne was trying to answer a question.

Dear Shumlin Administration: Please heed the words of Uncle Barack

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President Obama got in a brief tick of turmoil a while back when his approach to foreign policy was summarized as “Don’t do stupid shit.” Which, as the political equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath, makes a world of sense to me.

And I wish our leaders in Montpelier would frame it and hang it over their desks, because it sure would come in handy when dealing with Vermont Health Connect. The latest, ICYMI:

Thousands of Vermont Health Connect customers who signed up to pay health care premiums online recently received email notices directing them to pay through a website that is offline.

Vermont took down its health exchange Web portal Sept. 14…  But the state and its contractors apparently forgot during the intervening three weeks to cancel an automated email blast that directed roughly 6,500 people who signed up to make payments online. Those people, about 20 percent of the website’s commercial customers, were directed to visit vermonthealthconnect.gov to view their premium invoice.

(ahem.)

NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! 

Stop it! Just stop it!

Stop doing stupid shit!

“Apparently forgot,” eh? Maybe some of you should come to work tomorrow and find that your keys no longer work because your bosses “apparently forgot” to let you know about your change in employment status.

This bout of apparent forgetfulness happened under the new contractor, Optum, and under the revamped administrative team of Harry Chen and Lawrence Miller, so we can’t blame this on the dearly departed (CGI, Doug Racine) and the recently rendered invisible (Mark Larson).

I’m a strong supporter of the current iteration of health care reform, and I have high hopes for single-payer. As a result, I’ve too readily accepted Administration assurances that they’ve learned their lessons, they’re working hard, they’ve got a handle on it, and they’ll fix it.

This time, as Bullwinkle T. Moose used to say, for sure.

But I am getting tired of defending the Governor and getting the ground cut out from under me. Maybe that’s why a new poll shows him with a 45% favorable rating against 41% unfavorable. In spite of the fact that he’s running for re-election against the legendary comedy team of Mr. Blandy and Mr. Fringey.

So, Shumlin team, please tell me there won’t be any more screwups, revelations of past blunders, delays, or embarrassing emails to the very constituents who (a) were in line to benefit from Vermont Health Connect and would love to see it work, and (b) now have every reason to be royally pissed off at the authors of this reform.

A protest vote for Doug Racine is startin’ to look awfully tempting.

Health care reform: the election issue with no teeth?

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Interesting thing happened last week. Vermont CURE, an advocacy group for single-payer health care reform, cut ties with Tess Taylor, the former House Assistant Majority Leader who resigned from the Legislature to sign on with CURE only about six months ago. In the middle of the 2014 legislative session.

Taylor had been brought on board in the expectation that there’d be some heavy lifting to do in the 2014 campaign, and her political chops would come in handy. Seemed like a good bet at the time, and an even better one after a spring and summer full of trouble for Vermont Health Connect. Surely, went the conventional thinking, the failures of VHC would mean trouble for Governor Shumlin.

Well, maybe not. Bram Kleppner, chairman of the V-CURE board, speaking with VPR’s Peter Hirschfeld: 

“We were expecting a strong candidate to oppose Gov. Shumlin. We were expecting a wave of strong  candidates coming in to run against supporters of (single-payer). So we brought Tess on, obviously because of her deep expertise in the Vermont political process,” Kleppner says. “But it became clear to us after the primaries that that political and legislative opposition that we were expecting really just hadn’t materialized.”

So, rather than a campaigning challenge, V-CURE will focus on a PR effort to convince the general public that single-payer is the best way forward. Taylor’s experience is less germane to that.

This ties in with an email chat I recently had with fellow blogger (and former Burlington City Councilor) Ed Adrian. He wanted to know how my blogposts about health care reform were doing in terms of readership. He’d noticed that anytime he wrote about health care reform, his numbers were “dismal.”

So I checked my numbers and found that, for whatever it’s worth, the same is true for theVPO. Health care stories just don’t attract many pageviews.

Now, theVPO’s audience is a very select, and self-selected, slice of the general public: those with a strong interest in Vermont politics. You can’t safely generalize from them to the entire electorate.

But you’d think that, if anything, my readers would be more interested in health care than everybody else.

Ed pointed out that a sizable majority of Vermonters have never had to interact with Vermont Health Connect because they get their health insurance elsewhere. For them, VHC’s failings are basically an abstract concern.

I wouldn’t have placed much value in the pageviews of a couple of blogs. But combine it with V-CURE’s move, and i have to wonder: is health care reform a lot more sizzle than steak? Is it mainly of interest to insiders and the political media?

It’s hard to tell from the course of the campaign to date. Scott MIlne hasn’t made a dent in Governor Shumlin’s armor with his attacks on VHC incompetence; but is that because of the issue, or because of his terrible campaign?

Then there’s Dan Feliciano, who’s gotten a lot of insider buzz with his devout opposition to single-payer. But his fundraising has been terrible and his 48-hour fundraising blitz came and went without any news — which has to mean it was a complete failure. Is he getting anywhere with a frontal attack on single-payer? It’s impossible to tell, since he hasn’t been included in recent polls. But his fundraising numbers certainly don’t reveal any groundswell of support.

There’s reason to believe that the failures of VHC may not be that politically harmful to Shumlin. I suspect that property taxes would have been a better issue for the Republicans. They still wouldn’t have beaten the Governor; but only a small portion of Vermonters have interacted with VHC, while pretty much everybody pays property taxes, either directly or indirectly.

It’s worth pondering, anyway.

A rare bit o’ sunshine falls on Scott Milne’s shoulder

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I have to admit, I didn’t think he had it in him. But Scott Milne did it: he actually had a solid fundraising effort in September.

It’s too little, too late to get him elected. But it’s a nice solid turnaround.

Mahatma’s October 1 campaign finance report shows that he raised $78,529 during September, plus $2,600 in “in-kind” contributions, for a total of $81,129.

Very respectable. And roughly double his fundraising total before September 1.

But wait, there’s more good news. As many Republicans were quick to point out, the vast majority of Milne’s money came from in-state donors. He also did extremely well with small donations, racking up 348 separate gifts of less than $100 each. He had a lot of donations in the $100-500 range, and relatively few top-dollar gifts. His total number of unique donors in September was almost 450, or abut 15 per day. Not bad at all.

There were a couple worms in the apple, of course. He’s spending money faster than he’s raising it, having laid out more than $95,000 in all. Which leaves him with a net balance of about $41,000. In terms of cash on hand, Governor Shumlin has a 26-to-1 advantage. It’s still Bambi vs. Godzilla.

Also, more than $38,000 of Milne’s fundraising came from himself or his immediate family. And he had earlier loaned his campaign a cool $25,000. Overall, he’s much better off than he was a month ago, but he’s nowhere near competitive financially.

My conclusion: This was a good month for Milne, but it’s inconsequential to the Shumlin machine. The person for whom this is really bad news is Dan Feliciano, the Libertarian candidate who’s hoping to steal a sizeable chunk of the Republican vote. Feliciano continued to fundraise in dribs and drabs, pulling in only about $3,500 last month.

Milne beat him handily. What that says to me is that, among Republican voters, the GOP brand still carries a lot of cachet. They will vote for the Republican candidate no matter what. And quite a few of them will give money to the Republican candidate no matter what.

It makes me think that Feliciano’s upside may be more limited than us politi-geeks had thought. We heard the insider buzz for Feliciano, and party apparatchiks’ palpable disdain for Milne, and projected Feliciano to take a decent chunk of conservative votes — perhaps driving him into the teens, percentage-wise. Milne’s latest finance report makes me think the Feliciano buzz is mostly confined to the insider crowd, and that the Republican grassroots are likely to stick with their party’s man — even if (especially if?) they don’t know who he is.

Which makes me think that Feliciano won’t get out of the single digits. Sure, he got into the teens in the August primary as a write-in candidate, but that was a very small, self-selected sliver of the broader electorate. He’ll have a very hard time matching that performance in November.

(Note: If Feliciano’s seemingly ill-considered 48-hour, $100,000 fundraising blitz actually succeeds, I’ll have to eat a bunch of my words. And I’d be happy to do so. But I’m not getting out the ketchup bottle just yet.)

Dick-swinging time

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Apologies for the crass title, but it seems singularly appropriate for the early returns on this campaign finance deadline day. Particularly when it comes to Governor Peter Shumlin and, to a lesser extent, Lieutenant Governor Phil Scott.

Shumlin maintained his frenzied fundraising pace during September, and his campaign spending went straight through the roof. He raised a total of $100,875 during the month — three thousand dollars a day, including weekends and Labor Day — which is insane enough, but then you get to the Expenditures line:

$234,898.90.

Congratulations, Governor, for holding the line under $235,000.

The lion’s share of that money went to TV advertising: $215,147.

I recall Scott Milne castigating the Governor for spending $20,000 a week on TV ads. Well, Mahatma was wrong: Shumlin spent twice as much. More than $40,000 a week. Yikes. 

Later Note: That was a mental leap too far. Shumlin’s campaign spent $215,147 on TV in September, but some of that money — perhaps most of it — may have been prepaid for ad time in the coming weeks. So I can’t say how much Shumlin is spending per week. 

At this time two years ago, Shumlin hadn’t even begun to advertise. And he faced a stronger opponent — well, a less sickly opponent, anyway. As of October 15, 2012 (there wasn’t an October 1 report that year), he had spent a total of $160,387. For his entire campaign.

He spent more than that on TV ads alone. In the past month alone.

And he’s got enough cash on hand to keep up the pace through Election Day even if he doesn’t raise another dime, which, ha ha. His campaign fund has a positive balance of just over $400,000. Add in the money left over from his Hulk-Smash victory over Randy Brock in 2012, he’s got more than a million bucks in the bank.

Scott Milne, who hadn’t filed as of 2:30 pm, has told VPR’s Peter Hirschfeld that he’d raised over $80,000 in the past month. Which is impressive by his standards, but still nothing compared to Shumlin’s stash.

Libertarian Dan Feliciano, as I reported earlier today, raised about $3500 in the past month and $17,000 for the entire campaign. And his bottom line is actually underwater. Or it would be if he hadn’t donated $10,000 to his own campaign.

Money-wise, the Governor has nothing to worry about. So, given the fact that his challengers are woefully underfunded and undertalented, why is he spending like a drunken sailor in a state liquor store?

My theory is that he really, really wants to get a pure majority of the vote. And hopefully approach the 57% he received two years ago. If he wins with a mere plurality against puny competition, he’ll enter the big push for single-payer health care a diminished political figure. He doesn’t want that. So expect to keep on seeing plenty of Shumlin for Governor ads on your TV screen.

Phil Scott’s package is nothing like Shumlin’s, but he’s doing just fine by the standards of the Lieutanant Governorship. He did crack the $200,000 mark in total donations, which was his stated goal — to raise as much money the traditional way as Prog/Dem Dean Corren would receive in public financing. And Scott still has more time to raise more money.

And more space, too. He’s getting plenty of money from business groups and PACs, but he’s getting a goodly share of smaller donations as well. Uniquely among Vermont Republicans, Phil Scott actually has something of a base.

He’ll need to keep fundraising if he wants to maintain his spending pace. He’s managed to spend over $150,000 so far. He did enter this cycle with over $42,000 left over from 2012, so he’s up around $100K in cash on hand. But if he’s spent $150K so far, he’s likely to spend a lot more by November 4. The Governor won’t break any campaign spending records, which were set in 2010’s Shumlin/Dubie contest. But Phil Scott must be shattering the previous campaign spending marks for his office. His ceremonial office.

If only he had time left over for his alleged VTGOP-rebuilding project.

Shumlin’s second TV ad: nice, but…

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The Governor’s first ad featured a number of Vermonters talking about Shumlin initiatives that had helped their lives. The second spot connects two themes: post-Irene recovery and helping Vermont businesses survive and thrive.

Nice glasses, Gov.

Nice glasses, Gov.

The spot is narrated by John Wall of WallGoldfinger, a furniture maker located in Randolph. Wall tells how his factory was hit hard by Tropical Storm Irene, and how the Administration responded “within a week,” facilitating loans to keep the company afloat.

“It was the difference between life and death,” says Wall. Now, he says, the company is poised for further growth.

It’s a good story, and having it told first-person gives the spot instant impact and credibility.

My only qualm?

I hope we’re not leaning too much on Irene.

It did, after all, happen three years ago, during the first year of Shumlin’s governorship. He deserves full credit for pushing the recovery forward… but I hope he doesn’t lean too heavily on Irene.

In the first ad, one of the four brief testimonies was about Irene; it’s the dominant subject of the second. More are on the way, I’m sure; and if other spots focus on other issues, I’ll be fine with the overall balance. Irene deserves to be part of the story, but let’s have some more recent stuff as well.

The universal Milne

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The Scott Milne campaign has a number of albatrosses around its neck.There’s the newbie candidate’s inept performances on the stump and in debates. There’s his apparent allergy to fundraising. There was, of course, his late start. There’s the devastated, improverished infrastructure of the Vermont Republican Party. (Tickets Still Available for the Congressman Peter King fundraiser tonight!) (Please buy a ticket!) (Pretty please?) There’s the fact that he still hasn’t managed to articulate actual positions on the issues.

And on top of all that, there’s his remarkably incoherent political positioning. Because, you see, Scott Milne is trying to be all things to all people. He’s simultaneously opening his big-tent flap to conservatives, moderates, and even liberals.

Scott MilneLiberals?

Yup.

He’s trying to present himself as a thoughful, moderate leader who will consider all points of view, including the most progressive. He’s depicting Governor Shumlin as a bad manager; his pitch to liberals is, “If you replace Shumlin, state government will work better and you’ll see more of your policy dreams come true.”

It’s an impossible balancing act to maintain. And Scott Milne is definitely not the man for the job.

Look at his runaround on the GMO labeling bill during this week’s debate.

First, he said the GMO bill was “a good example of the radical, progressive management of a bill by this Administration.” Then he said he wouldn’t repeal it. Then he couldn’t say whether he would have vetoed it if he’d been Governor. And finally, he returned to the theme of “managing the bill,” saying that if Shumlin hadn’t been so ham-fisted about it, the bill could have been passed “in a much more business-friendly way.”

To sum up: the bill itself isn’t necessarily bad. In fact, it could even be a positive. But Shumlin’s “management of the bill,” whatever the hell that means, was the problem.

If only Scott Milne had been Governor, we would have gotten the same outcome with completely different results. The liberals would have gotten their way, but we would have remained somehow “business-friendly.” Or something like that.

My theory also explains his odd stance on health care reform. Vermont Health Connect was a radical, progressive program — but single-payer health care is NOT necessarily radical. It could turn out to be the best option. Milne ain’t saying.

What he is trying to say to us liberals is, Shumlin’s made a mess of Vermont Health Connect. Elect me, and I’ll make it work so smoothly that it’ll pave the way to single-payer. Maybe.

On issue after issue, Scott Milne is trying to appeal to everybody at the same time. On school funding, he wants to cut costs but he also wants to retain local control. He wants a freeze on the statewide property tax, but he apparently doesn’t want schools to suffer any cuts. And he’s unwilling to even hint at a new school-funding plan. Because he doesn’t want to lose a single vote.

Many issues are simply too “complicated,” and all he promises is to work with the Democratic Legislature on the details. To conservatives, the message is: I’ll hold the line. To liberals, it’s I’ll let you have your way a lot of the time. Somehow he’s not convincing any of us.

Most telling of all is his stance on legalizing marijuana, which sounds like it came from a chronic doper:

“It is a bad idea but if I get a bill, I’ll sign it.”

In the words of the candidate himself, Holy Shamoley.

I realize the man thinks he is “Gandhi-like,” but even the original Mahatma couldn’t have pulled this off.

 

The Good Ship Milne runs aground

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Oh dear. Oh wow. That debate last night. (The gubernatorial debate on VPR featuring Governor Shumlin, Republican Scott Milne, Libertarian Dan Feliciano, and the Liberty Union’s Peter Diamondstone.)

Lots to talk about, but the main takeaway is this: Scott Milne is losing it. His performance was so bad that, I hear, it sparked some back-channel sentiment among Republicans to get him out of the race and leave it to Dan Feliciano.

I don’t think that sentiment will turn into action, because in the long run it’d be more embarrassing to have no Republican candidate than to have a really bad one. But still, it shows you how bad it was.

How bad was it? The Freeploid’s Nancy Remsen, in referring to a question Milne asked of Governor Shumlin, characterized it as a “strange question.”

And she was right.

It’d be fun to provide a tally of how many times Milne said that an issue was “complicated” or that he was “running a campaign of ideas” without providing any ideas. But a couple of excerpts will, I think, give a more complete sense of the debacle.

After a couple of opening-round questions, the candidates were given the opportunity to ask a question of one of their fellows. Milne made a complete botch of it:

Milne: I’ve heard from four different people that therte was an emergency sort of last-minute called meeting Saturday night after that debate with Democratic leaders in Windsor County that you attended. I’m just curious, at that meeting, how many folks that were there to sort of help you regroup after that debate worked for the state directly or worked for nonprofits or advocacy groups that are funded by state dollars prinarily?

This is the question Remsen called “strange,” and she was dead-on. Shumlin’s response?

Shumlin: Scott, I’m totally unaware of what you’re talking about. I can tell you what I did after the Tunbridge Fair, I went up and spoke with state employees, the VSEA, in Killington, I made one other campaign stop, and I went to the Windsor County Democratic dinner in Hartland. It was a very good event, and I went home. So the meeting you’re referring to did not happen.

Milne: Okay, my bad. Thank you.

Moderator Bob Kinzel: No follow-up question for that?

Milne: Nope.

Do I have to explain how awful that was? In a four-way debate, Milne would get few opportunities for a direct interaction with the Governor. He took is best chance and blew it on a hot rumor he’d heard about an alleged event that didn’t happen, and even if it did, what the hell difference would it make? The best he could have hoped for was that Shumlin would decompensate and admit he’d had a secret powwow to strategize a counterattack against the Milne Menace with a roomful of state employees. And then what would Milne have? A “gotcha” moment that would do nothing to illustrate policy differences between the two.

As it was, he looked like a fool.

Next, Shumlin asked MIlne a question. He noted that Milne repeatedly calls Shumlin “radical and progressive.” He then ticked off several of his initiatives — universal pre-K, college tuition, downtown revitalization, fighting opiate addiction, and the GMO bill, among others — and asked Milne which ones he disagreed with.

And here, in all its incoherent glory, is Milne’s response.

Milne: Since you used all my time asking questions, I’ll try to be brief. I also want to give a shout out to Peter Diamondstone, just so the listeners know, Peter and I are doing this without notes. Dan’s reading questions from a paper, as is Governor Shumlin, so I’m happy to answer questions with my brain, not with what I wrote down ahead of time to bring into the test.

I think the GMO labeling bill is a good example of the radical, progressive management of a bill by your administration.

Shumlin: Would you repeal it?

Milne: I didn’t say I’d repeal it. I’m not entirely positive I would have vetoed it if I was in your shoes.

Shumlin: So you’re against it but you’re for it?

(I have to pause here and just say I really hope, purely for the entertainment value, that there’s a one-on-one debate between Milne and Shumlin sometime during the campaign. It’d truly be a Bambi vs. Godzilla moment.)

Milne: No, no. Um, I could do the flip-flop thing on you. I’m running a debate on ideas, I’m running a campaign of ideas, I’m not doing the sound bite flip-flop stuff. You flip-flopped on, you know, you’re totally doubling down on single-payer on Tuesday when you’re with your Democratic announcement, then you’re on a statewide radio program three days later, and you’re not going to go forward with it unless it’s goig to be good for the economy, so if you want to do the sound bite kind of campaign, we can do that.

What I said very clearly is, you managed that bill in a radical, progressive way. We could have gotten the same results in a much more business-friendly way that would have done great things to contributing to a business-friendly environment in Vermont which would be good for business, which would be good for government, because government is funded by business.

Yyyyyyyeah.

All I can say is, if you can listen to that mess and conclude that Scott Milne is your man for Governor, then I’ve got no words.

Copy editors? We don’t need no stinkin’ copy editors!

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On Friday, Governor Shumlin released his 2013 income tax form. The Freeploid’s Nancy Remsen  wrote up the story… which included this little gem:

He lists five vehicles, a boat and farm equipment with total value of $128,300. One car, a 1964 Porsche, is valued at $55,000. The other vehicles are older and much less valuable. Since becoming governor, Shumlin gets little chance to drive as he is always chauffeured by his State Police guards.

Huh. Five vehicles. One is a 1964 Porsche. The others “are older.”

Let me guess…

— 1962 Chevy Nova

— 1958 Trabant P50

— 1952 Nash Metropolitan

— 1951 Fuldamobil

— 1948 GAZ-M20

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Funny; I would have guessed that our millionaire Governor would  own at least one car newer than 1964. But hey, the Freeploid reported it, I believe it, and that settles it.

Mahatma’s meltdown

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Scott Milne, the man who famously called himself “Gandhi-like,” is finding that it’s awfully hard being a pacifist when the bullets are flying. He made an unplanned call to WDEV’s Mark Johnson Show on Friday morning and… well… spent about 20 minutes ranting about the media’s unfair treatment of the Milne campaign. And specifically impugning the good name of Our State Pundit Laureate, Eric Davis. That will never do, Mr. Milne.

Davis had been a guest during the first hour of the program. He and Johnson discussed the gubernatorial race. The consensus was that Governor Shumlin had left himself vulnerable because of various scandals and issues. And that it’s too bad the Republicans didn’t have a better candidate, because Scott Milne had made a mess of things.

Apparently it was enough to make even a Gandhi-like person’s blood boil. A little while later in the show, Milne called in to rebut Davis’ analysis. Or to slap it around, anyway. At great length and in pretty extreme terms: at one point, he accused Davis of “laughing at me.” Sorry, Mahatma, I don’t think I’ve ever heard Eric Davis laugh at anyone. If he’s anything, he’s a straight arrow, cautious to a fault.

Here’s a sample of Mahatma’s Meltdown:

When you’re bringing people on the air that influence people with, ah, you know, tenured professorships from elite institutions, you need to ask the tough questions and bring out the contradictions in what they said. If you look back on Mr. Davis’ track record of picking things in Vermont over the last few elections, it’s not stellar. And I think it’s a form of, uh, you know, uh, you know, journalistic malpractice. You just let him get away with saying some of those things.

I’m sure the folks at Middlebury College are happy to be considered an “elite institution,” but otherwise, good God. Eric Davis’ track record hasn’t been perfect, but it’s been awfully good. That’s why he’s the go-to political analyst for Vermont media. He knows his stuff, he’s conscientious, he doesn’t take chances, and he certainly doesn’t engage in gratuitous attacks. He has earned the respect he is given by the media and by news consumers.

Milne railed against the notion that his campaign lacks ideas. Which isn’t accurate; what we say is that he lacks policy positions and proposals. Milne’s definition of “idea” includes such things as “Peter Shumlin spends too much time out of state” and “the economy isn’t growing quickly enough.” What Milne is criticized for is his real, true, honest-to-God lack of proposals. He tries to make this a virtue by saying, on issue after issue, that he’s going to get all parties together and work out the best solution.

That’s awfully thin gruel. And besides, his current definition of ideas is at odds with what he was saying earlier on: that he would spend August attacking Shumlin, and start rolling out his own proposals in September. He hasn’t delivered on Part 2. “Give me 30 days,” he said on July 25. It’s been 50 days since then.

Milne also repeated one of the more extraordinary statements he’s made during the campaign:

I am uncomfortable about calling people and asking them for money to support a public policy campaign, and feeling 100% like I don’t owe them something afterwards.

I guess you could say that has a certain freakish nobility. But it’s a fantasy: Politicians have to raise money. Yes, there’s too much money in politics. But Milne has raised a laughably small amount — and virtually all of it from his family, friends, and his own back pocket.

Now we know why. He doesn’t want to ask for money, and he doesn’t want to be obligated.

Somebody should. tell Phil Scott about this. He’s been raising money right and left from contractors and gas companies and rich Vermonters and his vast network of cronies, and insisting that it doesn’t make any difference in his politics. Scott Milne would beg to differ.

Somebody should also tell the Scott Milne of midsummer about this. At the time, he said he planned to raise and spend about $200,000, which would be enough to wage an “unconventional campaign.” As of early September, he’d raised about 20% of that total. And since then, his full-time professional campaign manager has resigned. And we haven’t seen any TV ads or mailings or yard signs or any other tangible measures of an adequately resourced organization.

Milne was upset Eric Davis’ characterization of his campaign as “running on fumes.” He said, “If [Davis] hasn’t talked to my bank, he has no way of saying that.” And he pointed to his paid staff of five people as evidence he had money.

And then he contradicted himself.

We’ve got a strategy. Granted, it’s not perfect. I’m going to make mistakes. But I think our strategy is, you know, we’re running an insurgent campaign. We’re going to use our lack of money as best we can as an asset.

“Our lack of money.” Yep, he said it.

And about this “insurgent campaign” stuff. Yes, Milne is running an unconventional campaign. And yes, Eric Davis and Mark Johnson and me and all the rest of the punditocracy are basing our judgments on political convention: you have to take time to build name recognition, you have to generate news coverage, you have to have a robust infrastructure from the central office to the grassroots, you have to have a decent amount of money to run advertisements and do mailings and staff phone banks and print signs and all that other stuff of retail politics. You have to have ideas and positions that give people positive reasons to vote for you. You need a certain capacity for public speaking and pressing the flesh and handling the media.

And, preferably, you need a track record of accomplishment in the public sector.

Scott Milne has none of that. And he’s made a bunch of obvious blunders.

And so, when measured against every available standard for judging a campaign, Milne comes up short.

Now, if his “insurgent campaign” taps into a vast unseen reservoir of support, then all us conventional thinkers will get our asses kicked on November 4.

And I, for one, will be more than willing to admit I was wrong.

But I am extremely confident that I’m not wrong.

Of course, if Milne loses it’ll be Eric Davis’ fault.

What I need are people who want change and balance in Montpelier, to be naive enough to believe that they can make a difference by voting. And having people like Eric Davis that don’t think that, there’s a  lot of that, but somebody like you giving him a microphone week after week, when he’s got a track record he has of saying things that are factually inaccurate, I believe he purports an awful lot of opinions like they’re facts and you let him get away with it, and I don’t think that’s fair.

He went off the rails in mid-sentence there, but his point was that Eric Davis’ negativity was going to keep him from building momentum, and cause him to lose the election.

Sigh.

Like I’ve said before, pundits and reporters and even little old partisan bloggers like me simply don’t have that kind of influence. The vast majority of voters have already made up their minds. And the rest of ’em won’t spend the next seven weeks poring over media coverage of the campaign. The crowd of political junkies who pay a lot of attention to this stuff is a very small crowd indeed.

No, Mahatma, Eric Davis won’t kill your insurgency by the power of his punditry. Peter Shumlin will kill it with his superior organization, warchest, and advantages of incumbency. The Vermont Republican Party will kill it with its nonexistent grassroots organization, lack of resources, and internal divisions. The voters will kill it because a solid majority of them are liberal or progressive, and the Democrats have a built-in advantage.

And Scott Milne will kill it with his lack of political experience and smarts, and his poor performance on the public stage.

By all conventional measures, Scott Milne has run a terrible campaign. And I’m a guy who, when Milne first came on the scene, had some hope that he’d turn out to be a solid representative of moderate Republicanism. If he were doing a good job, I’d be reporting as such. But he’s not.