Apologies to Jack, who just posted a diary on the Georgian conflict. I don’t mean to trump, but I’ve been putting this together for a while, and I think it’s important to put some information out there that can help folks contextualize just what is going on, as it is a very big deal. There are a few things that even the most casual observer should bear in mind. First, that, like so many conflicts in the modern era, fossil fuels very much complicate the dynamics of what can and should be done, and what is underway. Second, that distinguishing who the good guys are isn’t exactly as clean as the media might like to believe. Third, that something like this has been building for a while, and the Russians have been itching for an excuse. The following is from a piece by Richard Holbrooke in the WaPo going back to 2006: While the United States is otherwise preoccupied, this small former Soviet republic has become the stage for a blatant effort at regime change, Russian-style. Vladimir Putin is going all out to undermine and get rid of Georgia’s young, pro-American, pro-democracy president, Mikheil Saakashvili… …Putin’s methods are brutal. He has expelled at least 1,700 Georgians since October, cracked down on Georgian-owned businesses, made repeated statements about preserving the Russian market for real Russians and demonized Georgians as a criminal class. He has doubled natural gas prices two years running and cut off all direct rail, air, road, sea and postal links between the two countries. Russia has also waged an aggressive international disinformation campaign to raise doubts about Saakashvili And finally, that this should put to rest any pretense that Putin isn’t still very much the man in control in Russia, and that is not good news for Russia or the rest of the world. My own understanding of the situation is very very limited, so I turned for help to people far smarter than I. With their help – more often than not, through some good ol’ fashioned cutting-and-pasting (is it plagiarism if they say it’s okay?) – I’ve attempted to present a pretty comprehensive picture of what’s happening, it’s historical/cultural context, and what some of the implications are. Obviously, there’s a lot of interpretation involved, so many will disagree with some of the conclusions, but it will still hopefully help to fill in some of the gaps in understanding an issue that is very much below the radar screen to most US observers. Again, I wish I could take credit for this, but I really can’t…

First of all, to look at the situation from a strictly Ossetian-Georgian perspective, you do have to go back, despite the claims by many casual commenters in the blogosphere that this is a recently developed conflict. Compared to tensions in places like the Balkans, sure, but the root of this conflict can be traced back nearly a century to the early Soviet “Nationalities Policies” which are hard to pin down, and a point of great scholarly disagreement. Suffice to say that Leninist communism rhetorically aspired to elevate the many, many ethnic groups under the vast Russian Empire into rough equality with ethnic Russians. The policies changed over time, especially into the Stalin era (where there were, of course, large scale atrocities that may have been intentionally, or just incidentally genocidal, depending on which scholars you prefer), but in the end the Soviets made the place pretty ungovernable (without Moscow of course) by design. They instilled a fervent, territorial-based nationalism that made it quite clear that all ethnic groups had their ancestral land, where any other groups present (regardless of how many generations) were “outsiders”. That, combined with an intentionally problematic drawing of internal borders, which made certain that plenty of minority groups were always included, created the foundation for problems across the former Soviet Union.  

Having said that, there were issues between the Ossetes and Georgians around the time for the Russian Revolution, but for the most part, during the Soviet days and even well back into Tsarist days, they had amiable enough relations, with plenty of intermarriage and a fair amount of Orthodox brotherhood, given that they were (and are) the only majority Orthodox ethnic groups of the 100 or so groups native to the Caucasus region. Historically, the Ossetes have had more issues with their Muslim neighbors, who always viewed them (correctly, basically) as the Russian colonialists’ facilitators in the Caucasus. This favoritism continued in Soviet days, when Ossetes were granted land and houses of their Muslim Ingush neighbors after Stalin had the entire Ingush population deported to Central Asia. After Stalin died, and the Ingush and others who were still alive were allowed to return, they were not allowed to go to their occupied homes, and laws were passed actually forbidding Ingush from settling in North Ossetia.  

This all resulted in a brief Ossete-Ingush War in the early 90s, as the seriously marginalized Ingush tried to get their old homes and land back. Russia stepped in, on the Oesstian side by all accounts, and finally ended that war. But things are still quite dicey between those groups, especially as the Ingush (same linguistic group as their Chechen neighbors and therefore seen as little Chechens basically) made up most of the perpetrators during the Beslan school massacre a few years ago, while the victims were almost all Ossetian. (the whole world seem to think that was a strictly Russian-Chechen thing. It actually more of an Ossetian-Ingush thing) Meanwhile, Ingushetia today is a police state, with arrests and extrajudicial executions by the KGB a regular occurrence for the Ingush.  

Back to South Ossetia, things got nasty in the late Soviet days when arch Georgian nationalist Zviad Gamsakhurdia came to power, and tried to aggressively “Georgianize” every aspect of the country as Georgia pushed for independence. The more Russified Ossetes didn’t like this at all, which resulted in Gamsakhurdia eliminating the South Ossetian Autonomous District upon Georgian independence. By this time, Georgia was a complete mess with Abkhazia and South Ossetia declaring independence and Georgians fighting amongst themselves. Georgian forces eventually attacked South Ossetia and Abkhazia, with the war in the former not lasting too long and resulting in several thousand Georgian refugees, and the latter lasting years and resulting in 100,000s of refugees. Russia supplied both the Abkhaz and Ossetes militarily.

When the less nationalistic Shevardnadze came to power (certainly a known quantity in Moscow), things calmed down in South Ossetia (in part because militarily the Georgians could barely supply their soldiers even clothes), but the Ossetes maintained their “independence” and had complete control (or at least Russia did). According to a peace deal, Russian “peace keepers” were stationed in most of South Ossetia (including Tskhinvali) with Georgian troops stationed in the ethnic Georgian villages dotted around of the region. That situation remains today. (Abkhazia has basically the same scenario, though only after a few more years of much more bloody fighting. Shevardnadze was preferable to Moscow, but he wasn’t a puppet) That’s basically how things stayed for years. In late 2001 there was an election (who knows how fair) that saw my contacts there removed from power. (They are mostly in North Ossetia now)  

And of course Kosovo recently getting independence (more or less) pretty much set the stage for what is happening now. Russia always insisted that whatever happened with Kosovo should happen with South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Trans-Dniestria (in Moldova) as well, so they have encouraged those folks to become increasingly aggressive.  

Now, how things played out in the few days leading up to all out mayhem is not entirely clear, with the Georgians saying the Ossetes started attacking Georgian villages first, and the Ossetes saying the opposite. The fact is, it may never really become clear. In any case, the Georgian attacks on Tskhinvali clearly raised the bar substantially on the violence (though the Russian/Ossetian claims of 1500-2000 civilian deaths should be viwed skeptically… that’s about as many civilians as could possibly have still been there when the city came under attack)

So the fact is, it’s a bit tricky to cleanly label good guys and bad guys between the two in the overall sense. It kind of depends on your view of ethnic separatism in general. In the Georgians favor, even taking into account the relatively brief period Gamsakhurdia was in power, the Ossetes were basically always running the show in their territory and were not particularly oppressed. While the start of the war in the 90s led to horrific atrocities (on both sides), up to then they were not like the Kosovar Albanians, who were truly oppressed. The Russians would be well-advised to take that into account in their comparisons. On the other hand, the US would be well advised not to jump on the Georgian bandwagon as if they were somehow the good guys in the two-way conflict.

Of course, US complaints are all about Russia, not the Ossetes. And as far as Russia is concerned, there is plenty to complain about. Even before Putin, Russia was intent on maintaining the uncertain status quo in Abkhazia and South Ossetia to maintain a degree of control over Georgia. With the paranoid Putin in power, this desire became even more strong. And then it went off the charts when people protested the rigged election that put Shevardnadze back in power, leading ultimately to the “Rose Revolution” that brought pro-American Saakashvili to power.

This was the point at which Putin established himself quite definitively as the most destructive influence on democracy and human rights in the former Soviet Union since 1991 – and maybe earlier. Here’s the weird-paranoia equation: Saakashvili, educated in the US with Soros funds, was clearly put in power as part of some Soros-Bush-CIA conspiracy (yes, you read that correctly) aimed at Russia. (If you suggest to many in Russia and its neighbors that Soros and Bush are not exactly pals you’ll get a roll of the eyes and be dismissed as naive. Never underestimate the degree to which the various powers that be in the countries of the former Soviet Union – including Putin himself – are utterly delusional about American politics.)

The Central Asian countries and Azerbaijan bought into this thinking 100 percent, and began harassing and kicking out local and international NGOs at a rapid rate, particularly those with anything in their missions about democracy and human rights. Putin also has an intense hatred for environmental groups, which he’s quite openly called bastions of spy activity. Then came Ukraine and to a lesser extent Kyrgyzstan, and these feelings simply grew. That both of those elections were also clearly rigged was deemed irrelevant. Then came the massacre in Uzbekistan, which was not election related, though the same folks tried to pin that on the West as well, though that was even more of a stretch.

The bottom line is that Putin is virulently against democracy in the former Soviet Union because he knows that ultimately he can’t rely on controlling democratic governments.

But with all of this, Saakashvili has always remained Putin’s enemy number one, more so even then Yukashenko. By all accounts, his hatred of Saakashvili is pathological. Saakashvili better have good body guards – with good radiation detectors. Seriously. I don’t think anyone seriously doubts that Putin’s primary obsession in all of this is overthrowing Saakashvili.

As for the US, South Ossetia aside, the US support for Georgia (and Ukraine) is certainly warranted. As we all know, it’s far too often that the US gets way too cozy with nasty governments due to “strategic” reasons. And while Georgia is a strategically located country, with the Caspian-Turkey pipeline running through it and all, right next door you have far more resource rich, far more strategic, and also Russia-wary Azerbaijan. But the US has considerably more touchy relations with Azerbaijan, for the single reason that the US, and the West, complain about the lack of democracy and human rights in Azerbaijan. Now, ultimately those criticisms get fairly muted, but they infuriate the President of Azerbaijan, nonetheless. (He just went on an anti-Western tirade a couple weeks ago due to such criticism.) So, with Georgia and Ukraine being clearly the most democratic, open countries in the former Soviet Union (outside of the Baltics of course), the US has, in the big picture, actually got the right idea in this case.

And Saakashvili’s friends in the US are certainly diverse. No world leader has better relations with Bush. Or McCain. At the same time, Soros paid, out of his own pocket, the salaries of Georgian civil servants when Saakashvili came to power as a favor. One wonders what Soros’ take on things is right now, but Georgia has always been considered the model political transformation in the eyes of folks at his flagship Open Societies Institute. Saakashvili’s administration is filled with others who studied in the US through Soros sponsored programs. And to Saakashvili’s credit, he’s done by all accounts a remarkable job reducing corruption. And the economy has picked up as well. And unfortunately, South Ossetia (like Abkhazia and Trans-Dniestria) is very much a land of old-school political thought. That Stalin still enjoys tremendous popularity, even among the young, shows that it’s not exactly a land of progressive thought.  

So it’s a mess. And a complicated mess at that. Coming to the defense of Tskhinvali is by no means one of the more objectionable things the Russians have done in the former Soviet Union in recent times. And like I said before, it may not be clear who started it, but the Georgians clearly escalated it, raising the bar on civilian casualties. It’s hard to defend that.  

But the way the Russians recently gave ethnic Ossetes new Russian passports, basically to serve as a pretext for invading, is pretty disingenuous at best.  Due to the war in Chechnya, and the fear of other Chechnya’s elsewhere in Russia, Russia has always been (officially) adamantly opposed to separatist movements, and ardent supporters of governments’ right to do anything they want to anyone within their sovereign borders. So the Russian passports gave the Russians the excuse to invade without really violating Georgian sovereignty, as they had to “defend their citizens” – as well as their peace keepers. Moreover, the Russians appear to moving troops out of Abkhazia and out of South Ossetia well into Georgia proper. If they’d left it at defending South Ossetia, they would be in a much more defensible political position.  

Meanwhile, when things started, the US was way too uncritical of Georgia. Saakashvili’s good points are all well and good, but they really had nothing to do with the actions against South Ossetia. As such, the US should really have looked at that situation in the more immediate, narrow context. As for Saakashvili, who knows what the hell he was thinking.

So ultimately, Putin (or uh….I mean Medvedev…..ha-ha) will likely come out stronger still. If there’s any room for his popularity to rise, it probably will. And unfortunately, a stronger Putin is always a bad thing for democracy and human rights across the former Soviet Union. And I shudder every time Bush opens his mouth on the topic. (Hearing Bush talk about anything I might agree with is far more sickening than listening to him talk about things I don’t agree with) And the Europeans, as usual, are useless. They basically live in fear of offending Russia (who can turn off Europe’s gas at any moment) and therefore will only timidly criticize, with the exception of course of the British, who get rather uppity about Russian government officials running around London with highly radioactive material.

I am so sick of these stories of taser abuses by police. I am even more sick of Attorney General Sorrell’s complete indifference to them. With clear standards and an enforcement regime, he could shut this nonsense down virtually singlehandedly, but he continues to give Vermont police a virtual blank check for the casual deployment of a device which should only be used as an alternative to deadly force. In fact, if it were only used as an alternative to deadly force, you’d be hard pressed to find any Vermonter who would oppose their deployment.

But in Vermont, with the AG’s blessing, they continue to be used as high-tech cattle prods. There’s a word for the use of pain to coerce behavior, but this is the era of looking the other way, isn’t it?

Put another way:

UPDATE:  Friday morning. Remsen picked it up, looks like she largely confirms what’s in this diary… Barlow, unfortunately, uncritically parrots the Douglas line, leading with “Gaye Symington’s tax return for 2007, released to the public last week.” – even though the point is, it was not Gaye Symington’s tax return that was released to the media. /UPDATE

It’s Thursday night. What will the headlines be tomorrow? That depends on how smart the Vermont press corps is… or isn’t.

All things being equal, the headlines you would read concern the beginning of the Senate hearings on the sex offender issue, and the Brooke Bennett case in particular. Jim Douglas has been push-polling, spinning, and promoting ineffective populist solutions as loudly as he can, all to keep the public from catching on to the fact that his own Department of Corrections screwed up in cutting the likely offender – Michael Jacques – loose. And admissions to that effect were forthcoming at the hearings:

“With the benefit of hindsight we were wrong, the department was wrong, and the prosecutor was right,” said Vt. Corrections Commissioner Rob Hofmann.

And to make a bad situation for Douglas worse, the hearings have already included admissions that the Governor’s proposed policies wouldn’t have mattered in this case, and – most explosively – that Jacques had actually violated his probation, but the Probation officer did not inform the Judge when the decision was being made to release him from that probation early.

Now, if you think that Jim Douglas and Campaign Manager Denise Casey are going to sit back and let that be the headline tomorrow, you’re kidding yourself. Their response?

To try and change the subject, of course – but since they’ve got nothing to work with, they’ve chosen to take a page from the Bush/McCain playbook: smear their opponent.

And it’s a real whopper they’re selling. Big enough that when it hit my ears in its raw form, all I could think in the first few seconds was “Ho-lee Shit… what has Symington done?” A little investigation, and I come to see that it was all a load of particularly sleazy crap… but the question remains, will the press corps have the wherewithal to realize that (or to be able to tell when they’re being played… and played crudely at that).

The charge they’re shopping to reporters? That, because they didn’t want Symington’s husband’s finances to be included in her recent financial disclosure (an awful, awful decision, by the way…), the Symington campaign deliberately altered her tax form and presented it to the media as the original. Scary, huh? Could even be a campaign-ending screwup, along the lines of Rainville’s plagiarism or Elizabeth Ready’s resume alteration.

And, again, it’s bullshit. This is just so many layers of wrong, words just don’t seem adequate. Details, with supporting documentation below the fold…

It’s a big charge to make, and again, it could be a campaign-ender if true. Douglas is obviously eager for that “magic bullet” that eludes them, but this is just sloppy. So sloppy, it further smacks of desperation, suggesting that Douglas’s poll numbers may not be as rosy as he’s come to expect.

The problem is, that this doesn’t necessarily mean that the press won’t dutifully parrot it anyway and put the sneaky-cheater-phony narrative Douglas & Casey are trying to propagate about Symington into circulation.

Again, the charge is that Symington released modified (read: fake) tax returns to the media.

But the fact is, I get all those press releases as well. Here’s the one with the attachment in question (emphasis added):

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Michael Carrese

July 31, 2008 802-651-7141 or 760-8832

RE: Release of Personal Financial Information

Candidate for Governor Gaye Symington is voluntarily releasing her personal financial information for the last four years.  The information includes her income from private employment as well as her public salary and assets.

Note: attached are a one page summary of the Speaker’s financial information and pro-forma tax forms prepared by her accountant.

“Pro forma”:

Accounting. indicating hypothetical financial figures based on previous business operations for estimate purposes: a pro forma balance sheet.

In other words, this was not a copy of a tax form. It was an accountant’s statement in lieu of an actual tax form – in this case, the accountant being Peter Sweeney of Burlington. Something tells me he would know better than to be a partner to an alteration of legal documents.

Why is Symington vulnerable to what sounds like a crude attack that wouldn’t fool anybody?

Because she offered her pro forma report on tax forms. Regular old tax forms.

Yeah – freakin’ brilliant.

Symington’s campaign manager told me that this was done for easy comparison, and at Symington’s accountant’s advice to aid in transparency.

Mistake? Yeah. Big one. Weird decision. But the fact remains that the press release clearly states that this is not a copy of her tax return. That right there makes the charge moot.

And they’re obviously generated from a tax-form template program like Turbo Tax or somesuch. Take a look at the circled portion…

It may have been a dumb move, but having 999-99-9998 as both her and her husband’s social security numbers right up front for all to see indicates the campaign’s sincerity. There’s obviously accounting software in play that requires a social security number, and Symington’s accountant opted to put in a dummy number so the report would run without compromising that bit of information.  To put something like an obviously phony SS# (shared by her husband, no less) front and center would have to mean that they were the dumbest scam artists ever, or that they think the press is pathologically stupid.

So the notion that Symington altered her tax forms is obviously ridiculous. Douglas and Casey must clearly know that its patently ridiculous.

But they peddled it anyway. Why? Because they are desperate to change the conversation.

…and because they obviously do think the press is stupid.

Here’s hoping they’re not proven right.

There's often a little friction between the different lobes of the Democratic electoral effort, usually united under the “Coordinated Campaign.” A certain amount of that friction is always generated between whatever out-of-state staffers are brought onboard and the locals. It's never that big a deal, but it's a dynamic that does annoy some folks mightily – often the local county activists who bristle at being told what's what by the latest passing up-and-coming field organizer.

This year, that frustration seems to be more focused at the Presidential operation than usual. While the Gore and Kerry operations had very small footprints in Vermont, the Obama campaign has paid staff devoted to every state, and is directing their field operatives nationwide to meet specific field benchmarks. How these staffers have been interacting with the local Coordinated Campaigns has varied. In Iowa, there has been some eyebrow raising as the Obama campaign has seemingly taken over the Coordinated Campaign, lock stock and barrel, while in Colorado, there's talk that the Obama campaign is simply ignoring the CC.

Here in Vermont, the Coordinated Campaign hasn't come together as readily or as cleanly as it has in the past (a story for another diary, depending on how it goes…), but the Obama campaign is moving forward regardless, ruffling a few feathers in the process here and there. But the thing that's really got people pissed off? The schwag. The stuff. The campaign gear. Wanna show your support? That'll be a dollar for a bumper sticker, and a whopping five bucks for a lawn sign. The fees have got local Democrats pissed off enough, the Lamoille County Committee recently passed a resolution condemning them in light of the Obama campaign's stunning fundraising.

Now, this is not without precedent. The last two presidential campaigns initially attempted to charge for stickers and signs (presumably its an opportunity for in-the-bag Vermont to help subsidize the overall effort), but the pay-to-promote paradigm eventually fell by the wayside as the Election approached, and in light of activists who would drive across the border to battleground New Hampshire, stock up on freebies, and come back home to pass them out.

Still, if the state Democrats want to break the impasse, my neighbor – usual suspect Dem activist and eco-lobbyist Matt Levin – had a brilliant gordian-knot-cutting idea. The Vermont Party should just pay to print their own, and use the opportunity to make a slight modification, as demonstrated by the image to the right.

So, what's the Obama campaign gonna say? Stop it? Be serious. If the VDP were to hand out this particular free option to all the deprived Obamaphiles, Symington's profile would jump immediately, and in the most positive possible context… and it would have the added bonus of creating an implied “McCain-Douglas” image in the minds of passersby. So hey, VDP – what're you waiting for? I'll be by to pick mine up this weekend…

I had to be home watching my youngest today:

Zane is 4. When he grows up, there are a few basic things I’d like for him, especially since he isn’t starting with any class or financial advantages. I’d like to think it would be important enough to Zane’s community, state and nation that he have access to a good education that they/we decide to put some money behind helping him get there if the prices are out of his reach. When he gets into the workforce, I’d like to think if he gets caught by a downturn in the economy and finds himself temporarily between jobs, that there’ll be a social safety net to keep him afloat until he gets back on his feet.

I’d like to think, by the time he’s an adult, that if he becomes sick or injured, we’ll have made the collective commitment to be sure he can get the health care he needs, regardless of his situation. I’d like to think if he turns out to be gay, that he can marry whoever he wants to and live in a community where he can feel safe. And when he gets older, I’d like to think that he’ll be able to retire without wondering how he’ll afford to survive.

And I’d like to think the community will make a commitment to keeping his air, water and land clean and safe – enough that he can raise his own family.

I could go on, but you get the idea. The question is – is this all too much to ask for?

From Hallenbeck (emphasis added):

Douglas said there are certain businesses from which he won’t accept money, including drug and tobacco firms. However, his campaign finance report lists a $3,000 donation from Mylan Inc. PAC, the political action committee for a pharmaceutical manufacturer with plants in St. Albans and Swanton.

Casey said the situation with Mylan is different because it’s a local company. “They’re important to the economy of Franklin County,” she said.

Oh, you see its okay. He hasn’t broken his word. Apparently there was a secret, unspoken clause if it was a local company. But he couldn’t mention that cuz it was a secret.

This particular local company is based in the local Vermont town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and was founded in West Virginia. It has a presence in 92 countries, employes 12,000 people and brings in revenues of $4.2 billion. That’s some local success story, eh?

Of course, this is the Jim Douglas definition of a local company apparently. That donation from Wal Mart? Just another good, Vermont company. And AT&T as well. Same for Anheuser Busch, or Century 21. All good, local businesses. Say, Vermont must be booming after all!

So support your community by buying local the Jim Douglas way. Be a good localvore and go buy yourself a Chicken McNuggets value meal and hop on over to a quaint, traditional Vermont institution like Wal-Mart and pick up one of those local products, like a Sanyo TV or something.

From today’s editorial:

The company was launched in hopes of securing a better milk price and more control over products for local farmers. But Acting CEO Dennis Myrick said the company has laid off several workers and owes money to creditors. Part of the problem is the economy, with higher fuel prices and even higher milk prices eroding the bottom line. But Myrick said a lack of solid, long-term financial planning has also hurt the company, which makes milk, ice cream and yogurt. State agriculture officials should offer any reasonable expertise to help stabilize The Vermont Milk Co. because a healthy company is beneficial to Vermont’s struggling family-owned dairy farms and the buy-local focus of agriculture.

There are some on the internet who are getting a lot of snickers over the problems faced by this company. It’s one thing to question anonymous infusions of cash as they relate to an interest of a gubernatorial candidate, as we have – but its another to take joy in what’s happening.

The VMC was/is a noble effort to help local farmers. It is, possibly, an unsustainable effort, as it’s somewhat predicated on a reaction to the market-driven inequities in the ag sector by setting up a corner of the market and simply deciding not to play the way everyone else is. That attitude usually leads to failure, the same way it would if you were to join a basketball team, get in a game, and decide you didn’t like the game after all, would rather play checkers, plopping down with a board in center court. It’s probably not gonna go well.

This is because leftists are better at critiquing the system than fixing it. Why not? The challenge of making the system better cannot be overstated.

But whenever a patchwork attempt such as VMC or Catamount Health fails, or looks likely to fail, it makes it that much harder for other outside the box thinking (maybe even outside the box thinking that comes with more comprehensive, realistic, and innovative long-term planning for its survival) to get taken seriously and funded.

So now is not the time to mock or scoff. We should be hoping they pull it out, and even – if we’re in a position to do so – offer our own assistance to make it work in the long term.  

AQ observes in the comments:

I am surprised by the amount of Douglas spending. He usually doesn’t spend this much this early.

There are a lot of conclusions you can draw from that but they more or less all lead back to… Douglas is worried.

Wishful thinking? Here are the facts: at this point in the last two election cycles, Douglas had spent almost exactly the same amount… somewhere in the $180,000 – $190,000 range. This time it’s $387,764.13. Now he’s raised significantly more money at this point in the game than he had in those previous cycles as well, so one might argue that he’s just spending more because he’s got more, but given that the early media polls suggested some weakness in the Douglas brand, spending for spending’s sake seems like even more of a stretch than it normally would.

But there’s another thought that’s been bugging me; specifically, why have none of the campaigns been leaking results from their internal polling? It’s a little early for that, but there’s usually some hubbub at this point. If the numbers look like everyone expects them to look (say, around Douglas 55, Symington 30, Pollina 10 and undecided 5) it seems like Douglas would like people to know that. If the numbers are not status quo, it seems like one of the other campaigns would like us to know that. I’ve been trying to understand why no one is talking.

Except that, looking at the money reports, Symington is only just getting into the field with polling, and Pollina hasn’t done any. Douglas, on the other hand, has done a few. This changes the question from “why isn’t anybody leaking poll results,” to “why isn’t Douglas leaking his poll results?” A far, far simpler question, yes?

Mix that with the “why is Douglas spending double what he usually does at this point” and AQ’s conclusion starts seeming pretty sound.

(UPDATE/ADUSTMENT: It looks like Douglas and Symington did not reflect in-kind contributions on both the contribution and expense form while Pollina did, which means their cash on hand totals are a bit inflated, figured as they are by both me and the media as a simple function of cash-to-date minus expenditures. This doesn’t amount to anything for Symington who only reported about $200 in in-kinds, but Douglas reported more like $12,000. The adjustments are reflected below)

There’s an awful lot to look at here, so I’ll be doing some research in my (ha!) spare time over the next few days, as well as counting on hearing from some of you election geeks out there who catch things that I don’t. Here are the basic numbers:

• Douglas: $737,596.65 raised, $387,764.13 spent for $349,832.52 $338,850.52 (see update note above) handy (includes a $55,853.93 ’06 rollover)
• Symington: $205,309.90 raised, $70,914.93 spent for $134,294.97 $134,189.57 (see update note above) handy
• Pollina: $166,200.74 raised, $143,321.21 spent for $31,905.77 (woops) $22,879.53 handy

Some basic analysis below the fold.

Let’s start with Pollina. If we are to believe the line from January – that they’d already raised $100,000 – that means in the intervening months he’s only raised $66k. Of course, I have no doubt that they were exaggerating at the time, but still, the reality is a bit bleak. Fundraising is way down, and most of its already spent. Clearly this is yet another sign that the independent move was an crisis-driven attempt to redefine, and reinvigorate what looks to be a very troubled campaign.

Let’s talk Symington. No bones about it, Douglas is kicking her ass financially, which is no surprise. Before today, I told myself she absolutely had to show from $200k to $400k, and she’s eked in at the low end of that, so its hard to feel thrilled about it. It’s at roughly two-thirds of what Scudder Parker had at this time two years ago, but on the upside, she has about $30,000 more on hand than Parker did at this point.

And yeah, its notable that she’s raised this money very quickly. Parker had been working for the better part of a year by now, and Symington has only been in the game for a measly couple months. Nevertheless, Election Day waits for no one, and to all those Symington supporters who were mocking  all of us who were so annoyed at how damn long it was taking for someone to finally decide to get around to running a campaign, allow me to say with no humility whatsoever, that this is what we were freaking talking about!!!!

Still, one of the things that’s striking in the Symington report is how many of the usual suspect Dem-moneybag contributors have come nowhere near maxing out to her campaign. One wonders where they are as – like the acronym sez – early money is like yeast, but it does mean that she should be able to raise quite a bit more from this same pool over the next month.

But Douglas too, has quite a pool, in terms of simple quantity. He boasts a better than 3-to-1 advantage in people who have given $100 or more to his campaign. Yes, he’s an incumbent with big lists, but Symington clearly needs to do more to convince the large numbers of Dems in the state that she has a shot if they open up the checkbooks. Her reasonable financial showing, contrasted against Pollina’s malaise may help her to do that.

(And as a side note to all the internet mutterers, yes her husband did give to Anthony Pollina at the beginning of the year, but yes he has since given to his wife, and given more to boot)

…and then there’s the Governor. Big, big bucks, and a huge report to sift through. It’ll take me some time, as there’s quite a bit of giving from corporate sources (everywhere from obvious ones like WalMart and Anheiser Busch, to the more cryptic) that it may take me some time to identify.

Predictably, Douglas gets a lot of money from some of the wealthier businesspeople in the state and tons from development interests. Hardly a shocker. Big state contractors, such as EDS and Clough, Harbour & Associates also pony up. FairPont Communications throws in a token trickle, but I guess they’re kinda strapped these days.

The thing to notice about Douglas at this level, though, is just how much he’s spending. Despite his 3-and-a-half-to-1 fundraising advantage over Symington, he only has a 2-and-a-half-to-1 advantage in cash on hand. A lot of that money we’ll see soon enough; there are a lot of expenditures for ad development, and he’s already making ad buys, of course. But there’s a lot of money to consultants, and a buttload on polling. Traditionally, Dems have always spent money more carefully and efficiently in these things (they’ve had to), so hopefully that will create some equalizing effect as well. Symington has only just started polling, based on her info.

(And speaking of polling – there’s no sign of “Pacific Crest Research” – the folks who were doing the Brooke Bennett-based push poll on Douglas’s behalf across the state – on either Douglas’s or the state GOP’s report. A bit of sleuthing is definitely in order…)

One thing I will say, though, if you’re looking for Entergy money, it looks like you won’t find it on Douglas’s report. He’s too smart for that. Instead, you’ll have to check out the Vermont GOP report for a $2000 contribution (the max) from their ENPAC arm (you didn’t really think that they wouldn’t be pitching in somewhere, didja?).

More on the Party reports tomorrow evening…. or maybe Saturday. While shorter, the Party reports are a bit deceptive, in terms of how the whole financial horse race thing plays out. More on that soon…

Also, (and this replaces some questions I wrote and then removed in my first stab at this diary when my head was much fuzzier from being up too late), there are reporting differences. Pollina reports in-kind contributions on the expense and contribution sides, the other two seem not to. Not sure what standard practice is or should be, and the Secretary of State’s office gives little guidance on how to fill these things out, so you have to make some inferences one way or the other. I will say, Pollina makes it much easier to track in kind contributions on his form, compared to the other two.

More to come.

Just a snapshot of this stuff now, as I have stacks to look at. That’s why I’ll start with the Lite Guv numbers because a snapshot is all there is…

• Dubie: $62,445 raised, $20,523.77 spent for $41,921.23 on hand (includes $21,138 rolled over from ’06)
• Freeman: $1,090.17 raised, $120.94 spent for $969.23 on hand
• Costello: $10,615 raised, $479.04 spent for $10,135.96 on hand

Dubie can phone it in at this point. He’s got a list, a network, people will give and he doesn’t have to break a sweat.

On the Dem side, while Costello has raised quite a bit more than Freeman, its just a handful of big contributions largely from extended family. The actual fundraising doesn’t seem to have begun. Freeman, on the other hand, shows just four contributions over $100, although interestingly for a supposedly “outsider” candidate, two of them come from sitting legislators: $350 from Rep. Maxine Grad and $200 from Sen. Hinda Miller.

Frankly, both Freeman and Costello are at financing levels too low to be taken seriously by Dubie at this point. While its true that the eventual primary winner will quickly be able to capitalize and  bump up their numbers, both need to get moving now if they’re serious.