Tag Archives: JIm Barnett

Repeat After Me: “It’s Only a Movie”

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Sen. Chris Bray seems to have contracted a mild case of the fantods regarding his prospects for re-election to a [checks notes] seventh term in office. He’s raised quite a bit of money, and he’s spent even more than he’s raised. Before the August primary, he and fellow Addison County Sen. Ruth Hardy spent big against a challenge from Rep. Caleb Elder that, frankly, was doomed from the start. As I said in my previous post, incumbent senators just don’t lose unless they’ve committed gross malfeasance, aged beyond the electorate’s tolerance, or done something equivalently heinous.

And now, Bray is spending beyond his means against a surprisingly well-funded challenge from Republican Steven Heffernan (and a not-nearly-so-well-funded challenge from Republican Landel Cochran). And I get it; in his position, he shouldn’t be taking anything for granted. But I’m here to tell you that Bray ain’t losing. Heffernan’s odds are roughly equivalent to a snowball in a very hot place.

Look. Besides the fact that incumbent senators never lose, there’s the district. It’s been a full generation since Addison sent a Republican to the senior chamber: Tom Bahre in 2000, the year of the great civil unions backlash. Since then, two Democrats every two years for a grand total of 22 elected Dems to zero Republicans. In 2022, Bray and seatmate Ruth Hardy each received more than 33% of the vote, while third-place Republican Lloyd Dike lagged with 16.4%. Republicans have routinely finished far out of the running in Addison, except for those years when the GOP didn’t even bother to field candidates.

Yes, Heffernan is a more credible figure than Dike, one of the radical right hopefuls who co-signed a 2022 newspaper ad denying that global warming exists and asserting that greenhouse gases are actually good for us and the planet. Heffernan isn’t one o’ them. But he’s not winning, either. Not in Addison, not in a Senate race against two established Democratic incumbents.

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John Rodgers Has Money Now?, and Other Notes on Mass Media Filings

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Well, well, well. Former Democratic state senator John Rodgers, now running for lieutenant governor as a Republican, seems to have searched for loose change in the sofa cushions and maybe the console of his (guessing here) pickup truck. Because after reporting no campaign activity whatsoever on July 1, he has now gone and spent a cool $10,400 on advertising with Radio Vermont, a.k.a. WDEV Radio.

We won’t know where the money came from until August 1, the next campaign finance deadline, but candidates are required to promptly report mass media expenditures of $500 or more when they occur close to an election. Rodgers filed his mass media report on July 11.

There are some other mass media filings of note, but let’s stick with Rodgers for the moment. I have to think — in a perverse way, I hope — he’s got some serious money behind him and that this big expenditure is part of a broader plan, because spending $10K on radio ads in central Vermont, by itself, is kind of a headscratcher. And I say that as a veteran radio guy whose brain still conjures up the radio version of the naked-in-public nightmare. (Which basically involves every possible interruption or technical problem sabotaging a live broadcast while I’m sitting at the microphone. Yep, radio in the blood.)

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Mad Dog in the Kennel of Nice

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Baby face… You’ve got the cutest little baby face…

It made for an amusing read. VTDigger’s piece about Jim Barnett’s role in the Scott Milne campaign featured several Republicans doing verbal acrobatics as they tried to explain why the self-described moderate required the services of a political operator described as “a nasty guy,” a “hitman,” and “Mad Dog.” (The latter was bestowed on Barnett by the late Peter Freyne, grand master of the unflattering nickname.) And a guy who claims political assassins Lee Atwater and Karl Rove as professional inspirations.

So, how does he fit into a campaign that claimed, from the getgo, to be all about the issues?

“He knows how to win a campaign and there’s not a lot of people in the Republican world in Vermont that know how to win,” state Sen. Richard Westman told VTDigger.

OK, so it’s transactional. Fine. Them’s politics. But — and I know I’ve written this before — you can’t go negative and simultaneously claim to be Above It All. And you have absolutely no grounds to complain if your opponent follows you into the gutter.

In that vein, I hereby offer a script for a campaign ad that’s not negative, as Barnett and his colleagues put it, but is based on carefully selected facts designed to make Scott Milne look like a bum, and Molly Gray look like a saint.

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The Strange Tale of Kid Swastika and the Scummy Consultant

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There’s a curious whiff of white nationalism around the Scott Milne campaign. The fresh-faced youngster above, Kolby Lamarche, is Milne’s director of field and digital operations. Lamarche became notorious back in 2017 when he used a Hindu swastika as his profile picture on his school email account. The Hindu version is slightly different from the Nazi swastika, but more than close enough to trigger the reaction he got — and seemed to welcome at the time.

Next we have Texas-based Harris Media, which has collected $16,000 from the Milne campaign for graphic design and online advertising. In recent years, Harris has created campaign advertising for some of Europe’s finest ultra-nationalists, including France’s Front Nationale and Germany’s Alternative fur Deutschland.

Is Milne is secretly assembling an All-Star team of neo-Nazis? Of course not. But the hiring decisions seem… shall we say… curious at best, and stupendously ignorant at worst. I mean, why go out of your way to hire a teenager and an out-of-state consultancy that might create bad publicity? Especially when you’re trying to wrap yourself in the Phil Scott cloak of plausible moderation?

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