I’m looking ahead to July 15th, when the campaign finance reports are due at the Secretary of State’s office. There will obviously be an unusual amount of interest for an off-election year, summer filing because there are already 3 announced Democratic candidates for Governor, two of whom have been actively fundraising (and one reportedly setting unheard-of goals for Vermont).

Campaign finance reports and the impact they have on buzz are much more about the fine tuning of perceptions, rather than simply the bottom line of a balance sheet. They are sort of like stocks in that way. At the end of the day, they are about expectations, projections, trends and the numerous threads that tie together the long haul of a statewide campaign.

Or at least that’s what they’re supposed to be. It’s what they are in other states. Unfortunately, in Vermont, the process gets painfully dumbed down. I got all happy when I saw the headline in the Times Argus, this morning (“Campaign Coffers Clue to Political Potential“), before reading to find that it only presented nuggets like this:

Eric Davis, professor emeritus of political science at Middlebury College, says Markowitz will likely reveal the deepest campaign coffers at next week’s deadline…”It’s a useful marker and it gives us information but there’s still a long way to go before voters are really in large numbers making decisions on this,” Davis says.

Yawn. I mean, no freaking kidding folks.

So it’s not Davis’s fault, and it’s not reporter Hirschfeld’s fault, but there is so little political analysis and discourse in this state that everytime there is such an article, it is so rudimentary as to be utterly dull and completely without impact. When there are half-a-dozen such pieces in the press a year, each one is necessarily an elementary primer for a readership unaccustomed to digesting political analysis.

If you want to see the kind of ongoing, behind-the-numbers analysis that really puts state-level, political nitty-gritty things like campaign finance reports into perspective (at least in any kind of sustained, ongoing way), you’ve basically got GMD and Totten’s column to lean on (and now Margolis, to some degree) – and that just aint enough to advance – let alone develop – a meaningful statewide discussion that can build on itself to get to anywhere (side note: this is not to disrespect Philip, but he does something different than the sort of thing I’m talking about… we couldn’t really pull off what he does).

To fill the gaps, the pressure and expectation falls on the woefully depleted ranks of the Statehouse reporter corps. Given the industry’s cuts and the steady brain drain to the army of gubernatorial mouthpieces over the years, there is already an insufficient number of such reporters to inform the public of what they should be informed of – let alone to play pundit at the same time (a dubious dual-role under the best of circumstances, as punditry generates a personal investment in events playing out in a certain way, creating an obvious pressure antithetical to journalistic neutrality).

The stage on which this plays out is VPT’s Vermont This Week, which features editors and Statehouse reporters all playing analyst for about 5 minutes per topic. And it’s always some combination of the same handful of people which generates groupthink at worst, or simply – again – inadequate depth of analysis at best.

Reporters report, and by necessity have to have a laser-like degree of focus on what they are working on. Editors focus on running the paper and necessarily have a certain degree of detachment from many of the particularized political ebbs and flows of the moment. At the national level, you see analysts and pundit-types filling the gaps that require a more aggregate approach to news and politics with an eye for the trends, the buzz and the dynamics of it all. But here in Vermont, its a handful of reporters and editors – already inadequate in number to fill the needed responsibilities of the fourth estate – playing the roles of deliverers of information, as well as the roles of interpreting what the information means at a deeper level.

It’s not enough, and it has the effect of keeping political discourse in the public sphere incomplete and simplistic – which then has the effect of leaving Vermonters with an unsophisticated, simplistic perception of politics in the state.

And if there’s one thing that’s true in politics, it’s that perception often becomes reality.