So the reports are out now — must be true since Leno said it the other night — that Bush has “no plan” for dealing with a Democratically controlled Congress after the mid-term elections.

The pessimists I talk to suggest it’s because the election will be “postponed” (perhaps under martial law) or once again stolen. They regard the 2000 presidential election as a coup and the repeat in 2004 as an extension of the coup. This midterm election would be the beta test version of how to steal lesser federal elections.

Some folks think we’re near a popular uprising, while others see the bill signed today (abolishing habeas corpus, approving “hard treatment short of torture”) as one more link in the chain our elected officials have forged.

From the Cape Cod Times:

David Atkinson, hemp-loving nudist, tree surgeon, extoller of the virtues of civil disobedience and former Provincetown selectman, has somehow ended up running for the Vermont House of Representatives as a Republican.

This peculiar twist in the fabric of the universe has humble, almost Huck Finn-ish origins: ”The Republicans couldn’t find anyone to run, so they advertised for candidates,” said Atkinson, reached by phone at his Braintree, Vt., home. ”I was walking in Randolph (Vt.) one day and I saw an ad for candidates on a bulletin board and I called them up.”

Amazingly, Atkinson – who once proposed raffling off a pound of marijuana to fund a Cape campaign – advanced to the general election with a Republican primary win over a candidate who was hobbled by a Southern accent, said Mary Daly, Orange County (Vt.) chairwoman of the state Republican Party.

”From a personal perspective, I would be extremely surprised if David does much in the general election,” said Daly. ”He’s a little far out there.

An ad for candidates on a bulletin board? A Provincetown selectman? Raffling off marijuana? A primary candidate was “hobbled by a southern accent?” Where to begin? And Orange County? Will the Randolph Herald be forced to endorse a (gasp) Democrat?!

Oh well. I’d vote for him before I’d vote for most other Republicans…

[The following was written for my Vermont Journal column, and appeared in last week’s issue]

Opposing candidates spend a lot of time working out the differences between themselves on the important issues of the day, and everybody jumps at the opportunity to make one’s opponent’s campaign the issue. It’s a one way argument that keeps the other guy on the defensive. The most obvious example is the US Senate race, where Rich Tarrant’s unprecedented attacks on Bernie Sanders have become a potent issue all by themselves.

In the US Congress race, the Welch campaign has been focused on the positive, and has therefore not trumpeted the fact that the Rainville campaign has also become an issue among political observers – not for going negative – but for questions of competence. Consider the unique record the Rainville operation has of repeatedly shooting itself in the foot.

First there were questions raised as to whether or not she was raising funds for her exploratory committee above what is allowed by law, while being cagey about whether or not she truly intended to run. Then there were her suggestions that she could run for office while keeping
her position as Adjutant General, a theory she continued to advance even when this garnered scads of bad press. After eventually promising not to campaign in uniform, her operatives raised six figures for her run while she was still in her military position, again needlessly drawing bad press.

When she became an official candidate and stayed away from committing to any meaningful policy positions, the media by default found other things to focus on – specifically her record of accepting money from sleazy sources. Her back and forth over how to handle each one was an astonishing display of campaign ineptitude. She wouldn’t accept tobacco money, but she’d accept money from those connected to tobacco. She’d accept money connected to jailed Congressman Duke Cunningham, but decided to return money connected to a high-profile Republican spouse abuser. Connections to disgraced former GOP leader Tom DeLay were also okay.

And it would only get worse when she would try to speak about issues. Asked whether her wishy-washiness on Iraq was an attempt to have it both ways, she responded “I think if we’re smart, we’re all at one point supporters, and we’re all critics, because we need to think for ourselves, and we need to cut through to the truth” – in effect doing John Kerry’s “I voted for it before I voted against it” line one better by taking two positions simultaneously.

Next was her use of a VT Guard IT staffer for her campaign website – a violation of military rules. Then followed the back and forth on whether or not Donald Rumsfeld should step down. There were the public spats with Sen. Patrick Leahy (Vermont’s most popular politician), over whether she intended to run for office as a Democrat years earlier, and again over the revelation that she had lobbied the Senator for legislation that could financially benefit a contributor.

Then there’s the continuing plagiarism scandal (as activists continue to find further examples of lifted material on her website). This week heralds an inappropriate use of Senator Jim Jeffords image in an ad, coaxing an endorsement of Welch from the Senator who had previously intended to remain neutral. If the brewing scandal (reported in Seven Days suggesting that she protected Guard members who were distributing homemade pornography in violation of military rules ever breaks open, there’s no telling how Team Rainville will make a mess of that one.

I’ve never seen such a display of ineptness on either side of a major election. As a new political candidate, Rainville gets extra room to learn the ropes, but this has been going on for the better part of a year, and the follies show no sign of lessening.

Faced with this history, voters must not only weigh the candidates’ stances on the issues, but must also ask themselves if Rainville is competent enough to do Vermonters justice in Washington.