I would not be so bold as to say that our news media are in the tank for Gov. Phil Scott. But their sadly reduced capacity has redounded to the governor’s benefit, over and over again. No one has the bandwidth and/or interest in covering state politics anymore. As a result, recent events that might be harmful to Scott’s popularity have gone completely unreported or, at best, substantially underreported.

Example #1: The legislative hearing that revealed the disastrous state of the administration’s biggest IT project, which includes the budget, human resources, and finance and accounting — a project that touches on everybody in state government and every dollar it spends. This project is so badly off the rails that no one can say how long it will take to fix, how much more it will cost, or even if it will ever come to fruition. That’s not coming from critics, but from top administration officials themselves. I cannot explain why this isn’t a big fat deal.

Example #2: Scott’s attempt to bigfoot the Democratic primary for Chittenden County State’s Attorney. He openly urged Republicans to take Democratic ballots and vote for challenger Bram Kranichfeld over incumbent Sarah Fair George. At best it’s an ethically questionable thing for a self-proclaimed non-politician to do.

Example #3: What the Scott administration has done to Act 143, the Legislature’s attempt to reform the emergency housing program. I’m preparing to write a full post about this. For now, I’ll just say that Scott signed it and immediately began subverting it. His administration has devised its own plan that certainly violates the spirit of Act 143 and probably the letter of the law as well. Carly Berlin, a reporter shared by VTDigger and Vermont Public, did post a story about this on September 1, but it didn’t explore the full extent of the administration’s skulduggery. Otherwise this sorry affair has gone pretty much uncovered. It ought to be a scandal.

Example #4: In late July, the University of New Hampshire Survey Center published a poll showing that one-half of Vermonters “have a positive overall view of socialism, while only about four in ten have a positive view of capitalism,” and “a plurality have a positive view of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).” (It also showed Donald Trump’s popularity at an all-time low of 22% in Vermont, bwahahaha.)

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