Thanks to a little detective work by fellow front-pager BP, we now know the source of Randy Brock’s mediocre website. No, it’s not Burlington, or Williston, or Montpelier, or Rutland, or St. Johnsbury; it’s Indianapolis, Indiana. Specifically, the offices of The Prosper Group, an e-campaign consultancy that serves right-wing candidates. They do websites, e-mail marketing and fundraising, robocalls, etc.

The IP address for Brock’s website is 174.129.24.4. It traces back to the Prosper Group. The same IP address is behind the campaign websites of Michigan Republican Pete Hoekstra*, Indiana Republican Mike Pence, Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock**, and Minnesota Republican Pete Hegseth***, all of whom are PG clients. (Other past/current PG clients include Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Scott Walker’s Wisconsin GOP, and nutball Congressman Allen West!)

* Whose moment of infamy came on Super Bowl Sunday, when he ran a blatantly racist TV ad (in Michigan markets) with a Chinese-American actress speaking pidgin English and thanking Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow for weakening America with her careless spending. The ad never aired again, and the actress had to issue an abject apology for portraying a racial stereotype.

***Oops, he lost already.

One more thing: that same IP address is shared by the website of Vermonters for Health Care Freedom, the absolutely 100% (cough) local (cough, cough) grass-roots (cough cough hack hack hack) organization devoted to killing Gov. Shumlin’s health care reform plan. The VHCF website was registered by a Prosper Group staffer in March 2011. According to the Vermont Press Bureau, VHCF was founded in April 2011 — the month after PG registered its website — by Darcie Johnston. The same Darcie Johnston who’s now a top aide in the Brock campaign.

Small world, hmm? Maybe she got a two-for-one deal on the VHCF and Brock websites.

Anyway, the fact that Brock’s website is being run out of an office in Indianapolis explains why (a) the site looks so slick, and (b) it’s so dreadfully short of content and hardly ever updated. Considering that Randy Brock probably has a smaller budget than most of PG’s other clients, I suspect they’ve given him a cut-and-paste template website and are doing little or nothing for maintenance and updating.

It’s sad, really. Brock could have done better for a lot cheaper by hiring some computer-major Young Republican from UVM. and getting himself a WordPress site.

After the jump: is Brock’s campaign a Trojan horse?

This is one more sign of how Brock’s campaign is hard-wired into the hard-right national Republican network, and how little it’s being tailored to the undecided and Shumlin-leaning voters that Brock will need if he’s to win the race. The most recent poll gave Shumlin 60%, Brock 27% and only 11% undecided — so Brock not only has to sweep the undecideds, he has to convince at least 11% of Shumlin’s voters to switch sides.

Hard to imagine him doing that with the campaign he’s running.

So is Randy Brock stupid, or is his campaign about something other than beating Shumlin?

There are those at GMD who think Brock is basically a kamikaze pilot: not meant to personally win, but to inflict maximum damage on Shumlin and his health care plan. That would certainly explain a lot. The way Republicans are talking these days, it sounds like they’ve half given up on 2012 already. It would also make sense with Bruce Lisman’s costly Campaign for Vermont pounding on the liberals and trying to sway the course of public opinion for the long haul.

I lean a bit more toward “stupid” — or, to be more precise, lacking imagination. I think most Republicans are trapped in a Fox News/Rush/Wall Street Journal bubble, in which all their opinions are reinforced and magnified. They can’t see anything outside that bubble, and they don’t realize that their ideas lack broad appeal. Jack Lindley seems to honestly believe that it’s only a matter of time before Vermont voters wake up and smell the free-market coffee. Or smell what the Brock is cookin’.

(Yes, I’ve been waiting a long time to use that line.)

I don’t think the current VTGOP has enough imagination or creativity to do anything else. Now, if Jim Barnett and Neale Lunderville (a.k.a. The Nasty Boys) were still running things, I’d lean more toward the conspiracy theory. To me, the way the VTGOP is generally floundering, I don’t think they’re playing a long game. I think they’re just trying to stay afloat.  

We might learn a lot more on July 15, the first campaign finance report deadline for 2012. If Brock has a bigger-than-expected war chest, especially if it’s stuffed with out-of-state money, then we’ll know that the VTGOP is being bought out by the conservative Billionaires’ Club, and Vermont Republicans have bought into the idea that money can buy them love. If not in 2012, then somewhere down the yellow brick road.