There’s something facile, something simplistic, about antiwar protests like the one at U.S. Rep. Becca Balint’s fundraiser last week. Because given the current situation, calls for a cease-fire or a unilateral Israeli cessation of hostilities are unrealistic. It’s just not gonna happen.
It can’t happen, at least not right now. The single goal of Hamas is the destruction of Israel. Hamas impoverished its own people in order to build an infrastructure of war and terror. It launched an attack on Israel knowing it couldn’t win, knowing it would trigger a destructive counterattack on combatant and non-combatant Palestinians alike.
And Israel is supposed to do what now? Stand down? Give peace a chance?
Our two most prominent #vtpoli news outlets, VTDigger and Seven Days, are always eager to pounce on any sign of scandal regarding money in politics. They seem especially set on tagging a “For Sale” sign on the reputation of U.S. Rep. Becca Balint.
And now the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried has produced new documentation about his efforts to connect with the Balint campaign, so we have articlesrecounting the lurid details of his internal communiqués and Raising Questions about Balint’s integrity — and even the legitimacy of her resounding victory in the 2022 Democratic primary.
Well, color me unimpressed. There is no scandal. I’ve never thought so, and these latest stories don’t change my view at all.
Sure, Balint’s team dallied with SBF — who, lest we forget, was considered a financial savant at the time. No one knew he was — allegedly — a fraudster of the highest order. They met with him, they accepted donations from his associates, and they benefited from a huge contribution made to a national PAC that spent the money for ads touting Balint’s candidacy.
But there is no hint that Balint changed her positions to suit SBF and his friends. And there is abundant evidence that his largesse had no meaningful effect on the outcome of the primary campaign. If the new revelations show anything, they show that SBF is one cynical bastard.
I don’t know what U.S. Rep. Becca Balint did to so mightily offend the journalistic nabobs at VTDigger and Seven Days, but our two most prominent political media outlets seem bound and determined to lash her tightly to disgraced crypto king (and long-lost Fourth Stooge) Sam Bankman-Fried. Hell, they’ve probably started pre-writing her obituary with the headline “Balint, Beneficiary of Fraudulent Crypto Bro Wealth and Vermont’s First Woman in Congress, Dies at [insert age here].”
Digger’s been at this for a while now. Every time there’s a fresh development in the downfall of Bankman-Fried, Digger’s political team cranks out a story that reports said development and fills out the space by recapping all the old stuff about his million-dollar donation to a political action committee that then spent it in support of Balint, and hinting at a deeper relationship between the two.
It’s a nice way to fill the news hole, but c’mon.
Digger’s latest breathless retelling of the same old story refers to Bankman-Fried as “Balint’s $1 Million Benefactor,” which is about the most sinister possible way to characterize the situation. “Benefactor” implies two very untrue things: That the two had some sort of undisclosed relationship, and that he straight-up gave her a big bag of cash.
In truth, Bankman-Fried gave a bunch of money to the Victory Fund, a political action committee that supports LGBTQ+ candidates. The Victory Fund then spent it, almost certainly at SBF’s behest, on a last-minute ad blitz supporting Balint’s bid for Congress.
And no matter how long our political media keep chewing on that dry old bone, they can’t prove that Balint knew about any of this, that she’d made a deal of some kind with SBF, or that the money made any significant difference in Balint’s primary win over then-lieutenant governor Molly Gray. They continue to hint at it whenever they can, but that’s as far as they can get.
There is much to be said about Gov. Phil Scott suddenly pulling a voluntary paid family leave program. For instance, that he has never ever pushed this issue at all unless the Legislature is actively considering a universal program. This isn’t a principled position, it’s an artifice meant to draw votes away from the Dem/Prog caucuses.
But something else, something subtler but equally discomfiting, is on my mind at the moment.
There are signs that the House-Senate tensions of past years are flaring back up again. If so, key legislation could fail because of differences between the two chambers, real or imaginary. If that happens, they’ll be disappointing the voters who elected record numbers of Dems expecting them to get stuff done.
This tension was minimized if not eliminated in the current biennium, thanks to the efforts of House Speaker Jill Krowinski and outgoing Pro Tem Becca Balint. It’d be a shame if Balint’s departure triggers a return of the bad old days.
The usual sniping between House and Senate is most often expressed in senators’ apparently innate sense of superiority. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen senators speak of state representatives as if they’re misbehaving kids on a school bus, and treat House legislation as if it’s toilet paper stuck to their shoes.
The most prominent example of the House-Senate tension has been the twin battles over paid family leave and raising the minimum wage. The House has preferred the former, the Senate the latter. The result: No paid leave program and woefully inadequate movement on minimum wage. On two occasions the Legislature has passed watered-down versions of a paid leave program and Scott has vetoed them. The inter-chamber differences have done much to frustrate progress toward enacting a strong paid leave program over Scott’s objections.
And now, here we are again with an apparent House-Senate rift on paid family leave.
The Democratic primary for U.S. Congress ended in a decisive victory for Becca Balint. She enjoyed a 23.6 percentage point margin of victory in what was expected to be a close contest. She cemented her status as a leading figure in the Vermont Democratic Party, and put herself in prime position to become the future leader.
There are a disgruntled few, however, who can’t seem to put the primary behind them. Meaning certain members of Team Molly Gray.
I hear this whenever I talk with anyone in Democratic circles or the state policy sphere. Malcontented Gray backers are, in the words of one advocate, “salting the earth.” They’re taking names and doling out threats as if they, um, actually run this joint. Which, having badly lost the primary, they decidedly don’t.
I’ve got a post sitting on the backburner called “We Have No Idea How Well State Government Performs.” The thesis is that Vermont’s government is woefully deficient in checks and balances. The Legislature is too slammed to do any green eyeshade stuff. The executive branch provides the bulk of the available information. The Joint Fiscal Office does some useful things and so does the auditor, but their reach is limited.
So we’ll probably never know who’s responsible for the monumental screwup with the Vermont Emergency Rental Assistance Program (VERAP). It’s out of money, folks. Rental assistance will diminish in a month and disappear entirely for thousands of households before the onset of winter. Oh, and utility assistance will end before the calendar turns to 2023.
According to the administration’s own numbers, 3,015 recipients will see their rental benefits end on September 30. Another 5,400 will get reduced benefits through the end of November, and then nothing.
The explanations on offer are threadbare, sheepish and inadequate. There are broad hints of administrative malfeasance.
This ought to be a scandal. Will it be? Based on past performance, probably not.
Some people just loooooove the taste of sour grapes. Myself, I prefer to let them ripen before consuming, but Molly Gray and some of her devotees simply can’t help themselves. They’re shoveling fistfuls of the bitter things into their mouths like they’re consuming caviar.
And what’s left of Vermont’s political media is feeding this strange hunger by obsessing over the tide of big, out-of-state money spent on behalf of Becca Balint’s Congressional campaign. Seriously, they’ve missed a boatload of good stories about the primary, but they’re chasing this one like a starving dog sniffin’ roadkill.
So let’s start here. No, the last-minute flood of independent money didn’t make the difference. There is no way on God’s green earth that the outside expenditures created a 24 PERCENTAGE POINT MARGIN OF VICTORY. I’m sure they contributed a few points to the margin, but Balint would have won handily without a single outside dime.
She beat Gray fair and square. The longer Gray and her minions keep beating this drum, the longer it will take to rehabilitate her political reputation in Democratic circles. She’s already at serious risk of never eating lunch in this town again.
Becca Balint’s one-sided primary victory leaves only token obstacles in her path to Congress. This is obvious.
What’s less obvious is that it puts Balint on track to become the most powerful person in Vermont Democratic politics. This is the extra dimension of the primary’s import. It was a hinge moment in the party’s progress.
Follow me, if you will, down a wary-too-soon but perfectly logical rabbit hole.
Patrick Leahy and Peter Welch are extremely powerful presences in the Vermont Democratic Party, more so than is visible publicly. (Bernie Sanders is treated with veneration but as a resolute independent, he doesn’t have the same level of influence.)
Leahy is about to exit the stage and take on an emeritus-equivalent position in the party. He’ll have a say as long as he draws breath, but he won’t have the power of the office anymore. His people took a huge hit in the primary. Most or all backed Molly Gray, or even worked on her campaign. They might never recover, especially given how negative Gray went in the closing weeks of the primary campaign. That won’t endear any of them to Balint.
The primary campaign was a rough one for the Vermont Republican Party. While the Democrats had enough good candidates to populate several robust primary contests, the Republicans offered the usual collection of unknowns, kooks and zealots in such low numbers that H. Brooke Paige reprised his ever-popular “run for a bunch of offices” ploy just to prevent Democrats from winning Republican nominations via handfuls of write-in votes.
Well, primary day has come and gone, and somehow things have gotten even worse for the VTGOP. First, we have the usual aftermath of the Paige maneuver: As he has done before, he withdrew from all but one race to allow the party to choose replacement candidates. Second, we have a Republican Congressional nominee who’s treating the nomination like it’s dogshit on the bottom of his shoe.
Back to the Paige situation. The VTGOP now has to scramble to find people willing to fill out the ticket even if they have no chance of winning and will barely even try. These are people who didn’t want to run in the first place. They’ll get a terribly late start on what will surely be underfunded, low-wattage efforts that might bear the slightest of resemblances to real, functional campaigns.
This has become SOP for the VTGOP, but it should be seen as the disgrace that it is. In a system with only two parties competing statewide, this Republican failure is not only bad for the party, it’s bad for democracy.
In addition to that, we have the embarrassment of a top-ticket nominee who wants nothing to do with the VTGOP.
Well, primary night turned out to be quite a bit less exciting than we thought. With a few exceptions, the races that seemed unpredictable weren’t, in the end, very close at all. What follows is a selection of post-midnight thoughts, none of which are about the gubernatorial race because the primaries were uncompetitive.
1. Those unbelievable polls were right about the Democratic primary for Congress. Becca Balint beat the metaphorical pants off Molly Gray. In the end, the margin was 23 percentage points. Remember back in January, when Gray had gotten off to a hot start and Balint was entering the race at the same time she had to manage the Senate Democratic Caucus? Seemed like Gray had the edge. Hell, it seemed like Balint might get squeezed between centrist Gray and progressive Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale.
I think Gray did have the edge at the time. So what happened? Balint caught fire with the Democratic electorate while Gray’s bio-heavy, policy-lite approach wore out its welcome. When it became clear that Balint was pulling ahead, Gray started flailing around, presenting herself as a pragmatist (be still, my heart) while depicting Balint as a Bernie Sanders clone. Yes, Bernie, Vermont’s most popular politician. Gray’s attack lines were implausible from the get-go. Did anyone really believe that Balint was an uncompromising ideologue or a captive of shady out-of-state money? No. For an attack to be effective, it has to be plausibly based in a candidate’s real or perceived weaknesses.
2. Everyone involved in Gray’s campaign has some soul-searching to do. Not only because they lost badly despite the very public blessing of St. Patrick Leahy, but also because they burned a lot of bridges in Democratic circles by going negative.
2a. Is this the end of Team Leahy’s dominance in Democratic politics? They bet big on Gray, and she rolled snake eyes. Leahy will remain a beloved figure but a sidelined one. His team, meanwhile, soiled themselves and dragged Leahy down with them. If there was any belief that they had the corner on political savvy in Vermont, well, that balloon has burst.
3. Oh Lord, the Republicans. They emerge from the primary with a statewide “ticket” of Gerald Malloy, Liam Madden, Phil Scott, Joe Benning, H. Brooke Paige, H. Brooke Paige, H. Brooke Paige, and H. Brooke Paige. The VTGOP now has a few days to cobble together a slate of candidates to supplant Paige, and none of them will have a prayer of a chance. Besides Scott, Benning is the only winner who’s not a walking, talking joke, and his campaign is operating on a shoestring. He’ll be a decent candidate, but he’s not going to win.
