If you haven’t heard already, Windham Senator Peter Shumlin has returned to his old position as Senate President Pro Tempore, defeating Windsor Senator John Campbell for the post.

Congratulations are due to Shumlin, an able legislator and articulate spokesperson for Democratic values. As I previously diaried, there was reason for optimism and concern had either candidate won, but Shumlin has often reached out to the activist left and has come out in favor of many issues near and dear to the hearts of progressives (such as IRV and state-initiated impeachment options), so there is certainly reason for optimism.

However, Shumlin did earn a reputation last time around for playing political hardball, not only against political opponents, but on occasion against allies as well (such as progressive advocacy groups and some Democratic colleagues). In this era of blogs, citizen journalism and an energized base that expects a bit more from its elected representatives, that sort of thing is not liable to fly. I’m optimistic that Senator Shumlin will be able to step up as a true leader who will respect both his caucus and the voters and help continue the process of making Vermont a national leader in progressive policy.

UPDATE about 5 minutes after I posted this: I’m even more confident now. I guess when I come home and blog, I oughta check my inbox first. Waiting for me was an email from Sen. Shumlin in response to the diary from yesterday, and sent before this afternoon’s meeting where the leadership was decided. It was a great and encouraging email, and I don’t think he’d mind me reprinting this last paragraph:

It is a close race, and I am grateful to John Campbell for running a thoughtful and ethical campaign.  We have done the same. At the end of today we will put our arms around each other and work together.  We have much to do based upon the challenges that Vermont is facing and not enough time to get it done.  Working harmoniously will be our key to success.

Amen, Peter, and welcome back.

Two years ago, Entergy Nuclear’s Vermont Yankee exceeded  state regulations for radiation released offsite at the Vernon reactor, according to measurements by the VT Dept. of Health.

Vermont’s standards are stricter than the federal standards, and Vermont Yankee almost exceeded those, too.

Entergy’s response was, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying instruments?” Since then, the state and Entergy have been “negotiating” the issue.

Windham Regional Commission is sponsoring an event to give the Health Dept a chance to explain on Thursday, November 16, 7:00 P.M. at the American Legion Hall, Linden St. Brattleboro. It’s billed as “The Vermont Department of Health and Vermont Yankee”.

Sevaral diaries on Daily Kos, including this one by KevinNYC, are reporting that Chad Castagana, the man arrested yesterday for sending anthrax scare letters to Nancy Pelosi, Keith Olbermann, David Letterman, Jon Stewart and others, was a frequent poster at Free Republic.
My love note to them, and my immediate demise as an occasional irritant on that website, are detailed on the jump.

Too cool for school.
Look at this post from the dKos thread linked above.
Here is the screenshot of the posting, which was pulled within three minutes, as well as my user ID having its posting privileges revoked.
Oh well.
Recently, when I got into wingnut trouble behind my calling out Bush on the air over habeas corpus, the diary I linked in the preceding became my most sucessful effort to date, and spawned a sequel.
From the original diary, I wish to quote kossack Delaware Dem, who has been proven right time and again:

The one thing I have learned about wingnuts. (29+ / 0-)

  They are cowards.  Little chickenshits.  They talk tough and make threats.  But they never back them up and run crying like little babies when challenged. 

  If you are receiving threats, immediately report them to the police or the FBI.  Terroristic threatening is a crime.

  Have courage. 

  My Photoblog, Milhouse’s Glasses

  by Delaware Dem on Fri Oct 20, 2006 at 07:47:46 PM EDT

  [ Reply to This ]

Banned from Free Republic. AGAIN. Heh. That’s my second damn screen name.
Guess I’ll have to come up with another one.

Zephyr Teachout writes an interesting op-ed in today’s Burlington Free Press.

Following an example from Estonia where “the legislature created a Web site called “Today I Decide” that tracks all upcoming legislation and allows citizens to propose legislation. If any citizen proposal gets a sufficient number of e-votes, the parliament commits to reviewing it.”, Teachout discusses the various ways we could “now use the Internet for engaging citizens in setting priorities, identifying problems, and drafting and passing legislation.”

She includes a GMD shout-out for good measure…

Connections: The Internet may be the greatest tool for solving collective action problems in the last few hundred years, but unless there are opportunities for people to connect laterally, it becomes another broadcast tool. Wherever a politician posts information online, they should also be sure that there are chances to respond and discuss. If one of the issues on their Web sites is “Energy,” I’d hope they include a section that asks for solutions, and another that asks for help on legislative research. Even connecting to lively, preexisting forums — that they don’t moderate — will enable political connections that would otherwise dead-end after the last sentence. This year’s election season brought out Scudder Parker’s Campaign Blog, Welch’s insta-letter-to-the-editor software; the “Exit Voices” video and blog site for post-voting stories; Philip Baruth’s citizen-interviews; John Odum’s community site, and the Freyneblog that allows you to read Peter’s screed daily, instead of weekly … and screed right back at him.

And she closes with what amounts to a challenge…

A little state like Vermont — following the lead of a little country like Estonia — can lead the way in using the power of the Internet to open up government and engage citizens in the messy, muddy, chaotic world of political decision-making, by bringing the life of politics, not just politicking, online.

So what’re your ideas for doing what Zephyr proposes?

At this point, the word is that the Senate President Pro Tem race is a two-man one: Returning Windham Senator Peter Shumlin vs. Windsor Senator and Caucus Majority Leader John Campbell. Returning Chittenden Senator Doug Racine – who will inevitably be an influencial force in the caucus – will not seek the top spot. As you might imagine, behind-the-scenes conversations have been underway for some time, and the scuttlebutt is that the caucus is in a virtual even split.

First a reminder to activists who may consider this discussion overly “inside baseball” or irrelevant; the winner of this contest will have unique power over the legislative agenda. The Senate leader will not have the wild-and-wooly crowd to deal with that House Speaker Symington does, and will be more able to put a stopper on many, many initiatives if he so chooses.

Only a week ago, my own perspective on this matchup seemed completely clear, but after conversations in recent days with a couple people I have tremendous respect for, the landscape seems much murkier. What is clear is that each of these Senators will present unique challenges to those of us who would like to resurrect many progressive priorities that fell – or were cast – by the wayside in the last legislature.

It wasn’t that long ago that Shumlin was the ringleader, and it is likely that he would exercise power in much the same way. Shumlin is unmatched on the stump and in front of cameras as a voice for Democratic values. He is also a proven fundraiser for the caucus and it’s election operations.

Shumlin has also gone out of his way to court the activist wing of the party that would like to see Vermont take more of a lead in progressive policy making. Shumlin was very nearly unique among his peers in his signing of the online petition directing the Vermont legislature to pass a state-based impeachment petition to the US House under Section 603 of the Jefferson’s Manual – an early guide to governmental procedures that was the basis for the so-called Rutland Resolution that – along with the Town Meeting resolution movement, personified by Dan DeWalt – made up the Vermont impeachment movement that became so influencial nationally (man, it’s a shame they don’t give out prizes for run-on sentences! Wa-hoo!). Here is an excerpt from the petition:

Looking good, but Shumlin presents challenges as well. First, he controlled the agenda tightly, letting only a small group of trusted allies in the Senate into his inner circle. He is accused by some outside of that circle of actively marginalizing foes or rivals – even when those rivals were ideological allies.

He is also often accused of being an “operator,” which is a code word for both playing hardball politics with interest groups for support and access, as well as having a tendency to tell others what they want to hear a bit too readily. When the dust settled, he had a solid lefty record, but many advocates will suggest he often had to be dragged into it.

Campbell presents other challenges. He is widely regarded as the most conservative in the caucus, and does not have the reputation of – shall we say – being terrifically receptive to alternate points of view.

It is only fair that I issue a personal disclaimer of sorts here, and in doing so share an anecdote that may actually illuminate the concerns many have over a potential Campbell ascension.

My first election cycle with the Democratic Party was the year Campbell was elected to the state Senate (2000). My primary duty was maintenence and development of the Party’s “voter file’- that database of Vermont registered voters that contained demographic, polling and contact information. I was brought on to do what had been done the year before, basically (a job this last cycle performed by two staffers under, shall we say, far more technologically conduscive conditions). The lists were a disaster and the job was a bear, but what I learned that cycle informed the upgrades and process of improvement the following cycle. This process continued under highly capable guidance after I left, and became fully manifest after the E911 process had finally run its course, and under the regime of the new statewide voter checklist available from the Secretary of State’s office.

But that first year was hard. Despite all the paid professional cleaning and enhancing, as well as the work of a network of about 90 volunteers statewide, mail would bounce back from bad addresses like nothing I’ve seen before or since. There was a period of about three weeks – when several high-quantity Senate mailings went out – that we all had to deal with a cascade of complaints from candidates who looked at the stacks of 10%, 15%, even 20% rates of returned mail and assumed somebody must have blown it.

Generally, it wasn’t the case, and candidates grudgingly came to understand why (particularly hearing stories from officeholders who’d been around longer and remembered when it had been even worse). But I did find one case when I had sent a universe of names to a mailing house that I had inadvertently neglected to run through a standard bad address filter – and that was a mailing for John Campbell. It was depressing, although in retrospect under the rather insane conditions, I’m surprised it didn’t happen more often. I and others in the Party bent over backwards to compensate (within the bounds of our legal expenditure opportunities, of course). Campbell’s response?

He demanded I be fired.

Am I being petty? Sure, maybe. But yeah, you’ll understand that a Campbell regime makes me personally uncomfortable. On the other hand, it’s hard not to consider this a window into his temperment, labor ethic and style.

…and yet, some of the most progressive Senators for whom I have tremendous respect are backing Campbell, and feel confident that he is committed to leading in an inclusive, consensus-driven manner. If this truly is his intent, it becomes a strong argument in favor of his support by the activist left.

The reality? I think it’s anyone’s game right now, but my gut tells me that it’s advantage Campbell by a smidgin. I suspect that in either case, the leader of the Senate is likely to prove to be a challenging hurdle to implementing some of the legislation that progressives and activists are expecting the enhanced, veto-proof majorities in the State House and Senate to deliver on.

So don’t get too comfy. We’ve got a lot of work to do.

Here tis:

With the exception of the early Dem Lite Guv primary poll which had I think 200+ responses, our lil GMD polls never net more than mid-thirties in votes. Even our first poll ever on the 08 Presidential contenders in our first week of existence had 35-ish respondents, and that was back when we had about a sixth of the traffic we do now. I wonder if it’s the same people voting?

There’s little to comment on here with so few numbers and a fairly predictable spread. I would dispute the conclusion that the votes for Scudder Parker are pure sentimentality (as has been suggested in email to me). There are plenty of people who thought this election for Governor was a foregone conclusion, and should be considered part of a two-cycle strategy for building support and name recognition to oust Douglas.

A couple weeks before the election, I ran into my old boss at the Clavelle campaign – former Campaign Manager Jennifer Wallace-Brodeur. She expressed frustration at what she predicted would be yet another qualified, compentent candidate for Vermont Chief Exec who was likely to be trounced by Douglas, and who – like the last one – would likely respond by picking up his electoral toys and going home. “One of these guys has got to stick with it,” she told me (or words close to that… don’t remember exactly). Her opinion came from the historically supportable perspective that first time statewide ballot candidates rarely win – but often do find success when they persist and build up their name recognition and positives over several years. Underlying this history is the real possibility that it may well necessitate back-to-back runs in order to ultimately retake the governorship. If so, by refusing to recognize this and embrace “campaign part two,” Peter Clavelle (and possibly Parker as well?) could arguably serve to set us back a full two years by walking away with an easy acceptance of defeat.

There’s a lot of truth in that sentiment – and quite possibly a lot of wisdom. It’s a perspective the grassroots and the potential ’08 candidates should be considering now – before the legislative session starts in January and consumes all political discussions. Sitting around licking our wounds is for losers, and I, for one, am not content to be a loser.

Here’s the picture: a powerful elite conclude that a specific political leader with a lot of resouces they see as potentially dangerous should be eliminated, and quietly make active plans to do so. When an event captures the public attention, this elite sees an opportunity to piggyback their agenda of regime change onto it and bully their constituency into supporting their plans.

Iraq? HA! You wish…

From The New Republic via MyDD:

Some big name Democrats want to oust DNC Chairman Howard Dean, arguing that his stubborn commitment to the 50-state strategy and his stinginess with funds for House races cost the Democrats several pickup opportunities.

The candidate being floated to replace Dean? Harold Ford.

Says James Carville, one of the anti-Deaniacs, “Suppose Harold Ford became chairman of the DNC? How much more money do you think we could raise? Just think of the difference it could make in one day. Now probably Harold Ford wants to stay in Tennessee. I just appointed myself his campaign manager.”

Where to begin? Now if you’re like me, you may need a minute to pick up your jaw after reading this…and the comparison to Iraq, while cutesy, only goes so far. 9/11 WAS a disaster, and to make his point, Carville is trying to cast the recent election as a Democratic disaster – which is laughable on it’s face.

Who exactly did win last Tuesday? And who lost? Many of the tight races that went the other way were DCCC and DSCC favorite targets such as Tammy Duckworth and Harold Ford. And as has been famously reported, many of the pickups were in races nobody had taken seriously before the polls started turning so dramatically. And if you don’t think that the 50-state strategy wasn’t critical in providing the infrastructure necessary to make the most of that rapid change in sentiment nationwide, just ask the local party leaders in red states where there were Dem pick ups who deserves more of the credit; Howard Dean or Rahm Emanuel.

Well, the hell with that hack Carville, I sez. I’m so tired of beltway insiders (and those who model themselves after beltway insiders) who seem exclusively concerned with maintaining their own status and primacy within an increasingly decentralized (and re-energized) Democratic left they see spinning out of their personal control. And that Carville and his ilk can look at the same election results as the rest of us and cast it as some kind of disaster in the face of all reason, logic and evidence should show us all once and for all what their judgment is truly worth. And we should make no mistake – the extent Carville views Dean as his enemy is exactly the extent to which he views you and me as the enemy, as we all represent the same thing; he and his crowd’s loss of influence, power, respect and credibility. I guarantee you that Carville draws little distinction between Dean and the blog crowd in his contempt. These are the “stay the course” Democrats who believe their own, obsolete model of Democratic power must be propped up at all costs.

As Kos said:

Dean was elected. If Carville has a master plan to stage a coup against Dean, I’d love to see it. But I doubt the state party chairs who provided Dean’s margin of victory are going to get too torn up about the fact that Dean is helping fund their resurgence.

Carville needs to shut the fuck up. If he wants a war, we’ll give him one.

And it won’t be a war that DC can win.

There’s more of us than there are of them.

Amen.

We obviously have a lot to celebrate this year, both in Vermont and nationally, and we should. We should also take this opportunity to learn from what happened, and to try to figure out what to do next time. I have several thoughts about this and I’m sure I’ll have more. Still, here’s a start:

1. The Fifty State Strategy worked. It was just a few months ago that I was asking whether the Fifty State Strategy was nuts, and now here we are, winning Senate and House seats all across the country. It certainly appears that Howard Dean was right in arguing that we should be building the Party and contesting elections all over the country.

But . . .

2. The Fifty State Strategy worked. Look around at the winners, and we can just take the last two who were declared, Jon Tester and Jim Webb as examples, and we see that a lot of the new Democratic Senators and Representatives are not the kind of Democrats that we here identify with. The D’s will organize both houses of Congress, and get all the committee chairs, but liberal Democrats won’t necessarily be happy with everything they do. Among other things, this will mean we need to keep the pressure on them. It also means, of course, that the wingers who keep claiming that the Democratic Party has been completely taken over by bomb-throwers whose politics run from Howard Dean to Fidel Castro have always been either lying or self-deluded.

3. Rove isn’t as smart as everyone claims. Sure, the wingers were all over the place in the last few weeks before the election, proclaiming their confidence that the R’s were going to hold the House and the Senate. That was clearly just spin, and there is no way that they actually believed it. On the other hand, they didn’t fire Rummy until the day after the election. This seems like pretty good evidence to me that they either thought they were going to win, or they thought they had a good shot at it. If they thought they were going to lose they would have had to figure that firing Rumsfeld might help, and yet they didn’t do it.

4. John Odum was right about what it would take to defeat Douglas. The problem was partly that the Parker campaign didn’t do it, but partly that there was’t enough time. Douglas has held statewide office all but two years since 1980, which means he had many years to give people the impression that he was a reasonable, moderate guy. Maybe that used to be the truth, but the new Douglas, Douglas 2.0–gubernatorial model, is entirely different. He is not either moderate or well-intentioned, and his competence appears limited to campaigning. If you talk to almost anyone who works in state government, at any level, they can tell you how his appointments have weakened the administrative agencies and have often been at odds with the mission of the agencies themselves. We have two years to get the truth out, but it’s not going to happen if we wait until 2008.

5. Moveon.org is great, and needs to get even better. Moveon members made literally millions of calls across the country to mobilize support for Democratic candidates. This is a tremendous grass roots resource, and we need to strengthen ties between the Democratic Party and Moveon.org. They clearly had the message that we’ve always needed that you can’t stop campaigning until it’s over: on Tuesday night, probably after midnight, I logged on and they were having me call Alaska to get supporters. I thought this was just great.

On the other hand, they seemed to be a bit lacking in the LOS research. Even on Tuesday the scripts I was getting for calls were persuasive scripts, whereas here in Vermont we were doing purely GOTV calls to known supporters. It’s hard to believe we were going to change anyone’s mind on their way out the door to vote, so the last day push should have been all GOTV. Maybe that’s one of the next steps.

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s what’s right at the top of my head.

Good work, everybody!

( – promoted by odum)

Ok, I said I’d talk more about the Washington County Senate race when it was over. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but as you know, the incumbents stayed in, Kim Cheney was 4th, Donny Osman was 5th. Republican businessman archetype Jim Parker was 6th (which became my joke du jour, as I was constantly lambasted for playing it safe in that one prediction I was sure of).

The Osman campaign was the first campaign I worked on. My job was basically to brainstorm, come up with various tactics to get the word out, and to craft the message. I also designed the bumper stickers and those blue signs some of you saw everywhere. And I learned quite a bit about campaigns and campaigning.

One of the most profound things I learned was that the poison that infects national politics, and to a lesser extent, our statewide races, was nonexistent in this campaign. Peter Young, the campaign manager, and Donny often tempered my instincts to go for the jugular. I’m not talking about dirty tricks or anything, just a bit more aggression in challenging the others on the issues. The idea of running a clean and more importantly, congenial campaign was going to be the way things were done.

We had some pretty good advice getting out the gate. Early on, we had dinner with Doug Racine who offered us some tips on campaign strategy. We also met with the Democracy For America people and a rather popular Barre politician.

Donny worked his ass off, knocking on over 6,000 doors in Washington County. He seemed to have a lot of support in Montpelier. My concerns were the other three big towns, none of which nearly as liberal as Montpelier. Northfield is a tough town for a liberal. Donny even noticed a difference in the demeanor of people in the different towns, depending on the political leanings of the town.

We had a great GOTV effort, with lots of enthusiastic supporters helping to write postcards, stuff envelopes and such. In dealing with the party apparatus (one that I am incredibly skeptical of), we listened to some advice and ignored some.

Donny went into the studio and cut a folksy radio ad with Colin McCaffrey. We went and then put together a short low-quality video on YouTube. When it was well received, we had a professional film another one, 10 minutes long, about the issues, which was available on Donny’s website as well as YouTube. Donny’s son Daniel set up a MySpace page for Donny as well. We were trying to think a bit outside of the box(at least for a local campaign).

  The frustrating thing about working on a local campaign is that there are no polls, nothing to indicate how you’re actually doing. It really feels like a crapshoot. I did a fairly good job keeping my optimism in check. Throughout the race, right till the end, I had no idea if we’d win. I didn’t want to be like, let’s say, Orrin Hatch’s presidential campaign team where you have to suspend reality just to show up to work on the campaign.

On election night, it was decided pretty early. Donny came in 3rd in Montpelier, a big deal considering that all of the incumbents live in Montpelier. He came in first in his old rep district, Calais/Marshfield/Plainfield. We had put a lot of legwork into Barre, I was kind of surprised that our numbers weren’t higher there. Northfield was no surprise, nor was Waterbury. Even though it was somewhat somber at election headquarters that night, I still felt really good inside (and what was happening nationally helped keep my spirits up,as well). We ran a great campaign, and we worked our asses off. They say James Brown is the hardest working man in show business; Donny was definitely the hardest working man on the campaign trail. And we did get a lot of progressive-minded people very excited.

What went wrong? Well, I think we really underestimated the power of incumbency. We were running against three popular incumbents, in a somewhat benign environment (compared to the civil union days). Kim Cheney was also well known, for it was his 3rd run. Donny is well known in Montpelier and some of the outlying towns; many more people don’t know him (well, after this campaign, hopefully they do). My own personal miscalculation was the heightened optimism I felt when watching the debates. No disrespect intended to any of the other candidates, but I think Donny kicked some major ass, very engaged, impassioned, and personable. Where I screwed up was forgetting that 95% of the electorate didn’t see or hear those debates. If they did, we might have won.

I have my own personal feelings abut the other candidates. In the interest of having a future in political doings around here, I’m not going to let  ‘er rip. Let’s just say that all of them are personable, decent people. Some of them have some pretty bad politics in various areas, and some of them have just been around too damn long.

Running for senate and winning the first time is an uphill battle. It’s important to keep that in mind when doing it, but not to let it demoralize yourself. What does the future hold for Donny Osman? We’ll see… it could be a very different race two or four years from now. I suspect we haven’t heard the last of him. At least I hope not.

You can read more JDRyan (why?) at Five Before Chaos

The K Street Projectile

Basically the strategy of Delay Rove et al was to turn the political system on its head.  Just as Abramoff was not about obtaining influence for his clients, but influence for himself and lots of money to that end.  So the entire Republican strategy was really designed to get lots of money for the advisers, consultants, lawyers, and lobbyists who encircle the elected members.  And this group is not very smart. 

A local example.  The Republican candidate, Rich Tarrant, for Senate spent seven million of his own money to be trounced 2 to 1 by Bernie Sanders.  That?s about $75 per vote.
Much of the money was spent on TV and on glossy mailers attacking Bernie.  Vermont has only one member of the House and it?s been Bernie since 1990; he?s run and won eight times.  The negative stuff works best when the object of the negativity is unknown or the negativity has some basis (however slight) in fact.  Vermonters know and like Bernie.  So why go negative?  Simple, the litteratti of the Republican party know how to play that game and few others.  And Tarrant?s money (ill-gotten from the worst sort of health care parasitism) was good and plentiful. 

In short, why have the Republican members of Congress been so bad and so rubbier-stampish?  What do expect from cash cows?  Rich Tarrant did represent Vermont ? bovine Vermont.  Mooove over.