This week’s round of mass-media spending makes one thing very clear: the conservative Super PAC Vermonters First is focusing the bulk of its financial might on a single statewide race. In the past two weeks, Vermonters First (funded almost entirely by camera-shy heiress Lenore Broughton) has spent $108,000 on behalf of Wendy Wilton, Republican candidate for Treasurer. It also spent $39,000 for Republican legislative candidates; but not a dime for former VF fave Vince Illuzzi.

With Illuzzi off the list, VF has focused its attention on Wendy WIlton, plus a slate of no-hoper legislative candidates. Seven Days:

With 10 of 48 House Republicans retiring, even party leaders concede they’ll be lucky if they maintain their already depleted numbers in the 150-member body.

“We wanted to have a lot more candidates than we ended up recruiting,” says House minority leader Don Turner (R-Milton). “It is discouraging.”

Remind me not to hire Don Turner as a motivational speaker.

Conclusion: VF’s investment in legislative races might, at best, help the Republicans avoid further depletion of their caucus. That won’t change the balance, which is VF’s stated intent.  

No, its sole hope for “balance,” the payoff for Lenore Broughton’s huge investment, can only be the election of Wendy Wilton as Treasurer. And what will it expect from its chosen candidate? A voice of “balance” (i.e. partisan attack) against the Shumlin Administration, and particularly against its health care reform plans. Which, after all, was Wilton’s stock in trade before she launched her campaign for treasurer.

I’ve previously noted that Broughton’s personal money bomb is absolutely unprecedented in Vermont politics. It’s also unprecedented — and ought to scare the pants off any clear-thinking Vermonter — for one wealthy individual to single-handedly underwrite the campaign of one particular candidate.  

Broughton has spent far more to elect Wilton than the candidate and her party have managed to raise and spend. (Exactly how much, we don’t know, thanks to a loophole in state election law.) Her money, and her money alone, has turned Wilton from pretender to contender.

And if elected, Wendy Wilton will be beholden to Lenore Broughton.

I’d call this a clear case of political corruption — the open buying and selling of a top state office — except that Wendy Wilton doesn’t need to be corrupted. When you look at her political record, it’s clear that she’s a devout conservative. During her one term in the State Senate, she was one of its most conservative members. As was pointed out this week by Senate Democrats, she was in a tiny minority on issue after issue.

So she doesn’t have to be bought; she agrees with Broughton’s agenda, and would be an enthusiastic proponent of it. Her current protestations that she’s a technocrat who simply wants to be a good treasurer are belied by the entirety of her record.

A record that includes service, with Broughton, on the board of Vermonters for Better Education, a group that promotes “school choice,” that lovely conservative buzzword. VBE leans heavily on “reports” from the Ethan Allen Institute, the far-right free-market “think tank” funded, to an unknown degree, by one Lenore Broughton.

It’s a very tight circle, and Wendy Wilton is on the inside. So she doesn’t have to be bought by Vermonters First; she’s a willing participant.

But as for her assertion that she wants to be a numbers-oriented, apolitical Treasurer? Nonsense.

It doesn’t fit her record, and it certainly doesn’t fit the agenda of the person who’s spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in support of her candidacy.