The faint whiffs of a new legislative session are emanating from Montpelier on the wintry breezes. Committee meetings pick up the pace, gubernatorial news conferences become more frequent… and Bruce Lisman’s vanity proj public advocacy group, Campaign for Vermont (Prosperity) is looking to make good on its threat promise to launch an active lobbying effort under the Golden Dome.

Bruce Lisman, CFV co-founder, said a full time executive director and a manger of advocacy and outreach would be added to take the organization to the next level and mobilize its partners to advocate for its policy proposals in the Legislature.

Let’s assume he meant to say “manager of advocacy and outreach.” Either that, or it’s beginning to look a lot like a CFV Christmas. Maybe Bruce can hire himself a proofreader too, as long as he’s whipping out his wallet. (He’s already spent somewhere close to a million bucks on CFV, and that figure seems certain to climb rapidly with a paid staff on board and campaign-season advertising to be bought.)

The qualifications, for those eagerly stroking your résumés:

Lisman said the ideal Executive Director candidate would be an experienced manager, a capable fundraiser and familiar with public policy development and advocacy in Vermont. Similarly, the Manager Advocacy and Outreach would be someone who has advocacy experience and can sustain the steady growth in membership the organization has enjoyed in its first two years, he said.

Presumably the first one in line will be Jason Gibbs, the ex-Jim Douglas staffer who’s currently an underemployed consultant and sometime adviser to the Lisman Gang. The hiring process should give a good indication of exactly how highly Lisman values Gibbs’ skills. On a broader note, it’ll also indicate how seriously Lisman is trying to maintain an appearance of bipartisanship.

CFV is still claiming to be “the fastest growing grassroots advocacy organization in the state,” which means exactly nothing since it hardly even existed two years ago. Doesn’t take much of a growth rate when you start from square one.  

The press release also claims that Lisman wants CFV to “be an effective and self-sustaining advocacy organization,” which’ll be a lot harder to achieve, considering that the whole megillah is completely underwritten by Lisman’s Wall Street fortune. (Some of which, I cruelly note, was filched from your pension plans and mortgage values in the crash of 2008. Maybe that’s what Lisman means by “grassroots”: paid for by All Of You. It certainly can’t mean “emerged from the bottom up,” since CFV was entirely the creation of one very wealthy retiree and a handful of cronies.)

Lisman closes his job posting by patting himself on the back for seeking to “provide a voice of reason in Montpelier,” which presumes a certain level of incoherence and insanity among our current officeholders. Which hearkens back to the early days of CFV, when it ran wave after wave of ads lambasting the unnamed Lords of the Capitol, Democrats one and all. Which led some people to unkindly conclude that Lisman was a conservative in moderate’s clothing. (I made the same conclusion on different grounds: the policies CFV was promoting, and the things on public record about Lisman’s own views.)

Ladies and gentlemen, the fox is hiring. And he wants to guard your henhouse.

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Annotations:

“Gonna find me a horse”: Gratuitous Frank Zappa reference.