Seven Days’ legislative reporter Hannah Bassett is out with a short piece about Larry Hart’s resignation as state senator from the Orange district, not named in honor of Donald Trump’s skin tone. Surprise, surprise, Hart couldn’t take “the frustrations of Statehouse politics,” which generally sideline the concerns and ideas of the minority party.
Yeah, how about that, elections have consequences.
And then we get to paragraph five, which is just an absolute stunner.
Hart also said he grew frustrated by measures advanced by the Democratic majority. He said many of the policies he objected to appeared to be driven by Democratic members who were not born in Vermont. Hart said he anticipates that Republican legislators will introduce a bill in January that would bar anyone not born in the state from running for public office.
The basic concept isn’t a bad one. The paper is hiring a reporter to conduct a series called “Ways and Means” examining how effectively the Vermont Legislature is doing its job. That’s a subject worthy of exploration, although it’s also true that legislative bodies are, by their very nature, clunky and inefficient. You want maximum effectiveness? Get yourself a king or a dictator. And the Vermont Legislature is part-time and has virtually no paid staff, so it lacks the resources to be as effective as it could be.
But that’s not the bad part. The bad part is how the project is being funded. Routly describes the money as coming from “two Vermont philanthropists” who are former politicians “from opposite sides of the aisle.”
Their names? Bruce Lisman and Paul Ralston. Close observers of Vermont politics may already be rolling their eyes.
Lisman is a former Wall Street tycoon and dyed-in-the-wool Republican who once ran against Phil Scott in the Republican primary. He is one of the top Republican donors in the state, a prominent member of the unofficial club I call The Barons of Burlington. He and his buddies did their level best to eliminate the Democratic supermajorities last year.
Ralston, founder and owner of the Vermont Coffee Company, did serve two terms in the House as a Democrat but (1) even during his tenure he was known as a renegade centrist who thought he was the smartest guy in the room and (2) he hasn’t identified with the party since he left the Statehouse in 2015. More recently he has been politically independent and deeply critical of the Democratic Legislature. Details will follow. But let’s get this on the record right now: What we have here is two wealthy men who oppose Democratic politicians and policies, buying a series of reports designed to highlight the Democratic Legislature’s flaws and failures. There will be no corresponding examination of the Republican Scott administration.
Lisman and Ralston won’t have editorial input. But they’ve established the playing field and the terms of engagement. They are buying coverage that will almost certainly favor their political beliefs. Routly’s whitewash doesn’t hide the fact that this deal is a gross violation of journalistic standards and a real shocker coming from what used to be Vermont’s alternative newspaper.
The Vermont Political Observer. 