The horses are barely out of the gate and we’ve got a bit of Franklin County melodrama to mark the day.

Sitting Senator (R) Norm McAllister had a letter in the Messenger saying that one of his Democratic opponents, Bill Roberts,  told a neighbor that he was “running with” McAllister:

I was shocked to hear that Bill Roberts, a Democrat running for the Senate, was soliciting signatures and told a neighbor that he and I were running together. I don’t know the exact circumstances of the conversation, but I do know that she came away with that impression and I’d like to set the record straight.

It’s pretty easy to guess what happened.  Roberts must have said to her that he was running for the Vermont Senate, to which she might have  replied that her neighbor, McAllister, was also running for the Senate.  

Roberts probably then explained that they were both in the race, and that there were two seats up for grabs, or something like that; and she confused this with a claim to be McAllister’s “running mate.”

This is just conjecture, of course, but it would be completely absurd and pointless for Roberts to deliberately lie to the “neighbor.”  

What would be the point?  Does McAllister actually believe that his political mojo is so powerful that a Democrat might try to steal it, voter by voter?

Instead of making the obvious assumption that there had simply been some misunderstanding on his neighbor’s part, McAllister leaps into print on the very first day of the official campaign to accuse an opponent of malfeasance.

The utter pettiness of the letter is pretty stunning from a sitting senator.  He goes on to whine:

I look forward to the coming campaign, and I welcome all candidates to it, but I don’t appreciate any candidate misleading my constituents about my views and beliefs. That’s not how we do things here.

Well, “how we do things here” is an opening to remind our readers of the 2012 campaign in which somebody who had an interest in the three-candidate Republican senate primary targetted Joe Sinagra, one of the three candidates, with an attempted dirty trick.  It backfired because whoever was responsible tried to involve me and I had no interest in helping the other two Republican candidates to cull the herd.

McAllister, of course, went on to win the seat.

Now that, apparently, was

“…how we (Republicans) do things here.”