And from the department of hmm….?

local/regional, , ,

‘Meant to pass this along earlier, but it slipped my mind.

On or around May 5, some Vermonters like me received a robo-call ‘survey’ paid for by Phil Scott for Governor, or some similarly named group. Only I got the call four times in a row within less than an hour.  I wrote a few word about the anomaly on Green Mountain Daily and gave it no more thought.

I welcomed the opportunity to triple whammy the GOP guesstimator, but others may have been less amused by the calls.

A few days ago, I received a phone call from an attorney in Chicago, who asked if I had given my consent anywhere to being contacted by the Vermont GOP, and I told him that I had not.

Somehow, he had gotten wind of my blogpost and was investigating the possibility that the Scott campaign had violated campaign regulations.

I couldn’t provide him with much information beyond what I had already written, but I promised to direct anyone else who received the call(s) to contact his firm.  So I am passing the information along to our GMD readers/writers to use as they see fit.

It might just be a tempest in a teapot, based on my imperfect memory of how the survey was introduced or framed; or it might have something to do with the number of iterations…I have no idea.

BP checked and the law firm appears to engage in ambulance-chasing excursions, so we doubt the veracity of the attorney’s assertion as to who told him to contact me (unnamed in this post.)  I have therefore also removed his contact information from the post. 

 

 

 

 

The DNC as Chicken Little

National, , , ,

“The sky is falling! the sky is falling!” “Donald Trump is gaining on Hillary!”

It’s Chicken Little time at the DNC.

Following the dust-up at the Nevada Convention all artifice of civility has been suspended.

No, I’m not talking about the handful of Bernie supporters in Nevada, but the hyperbolic response from the DNC as it closes ranks with what it thinks is the best argument for shutting Bernie down.

This is what it’s come to.

Bernie has been saying since he entered the race that he is in it until the Convention, but apparently the Party elders didn’t believe him.

You don’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs and you don’t mount a revolution spouting nothing but platitudes and  pleasantries from a place of no-contest.

Suddenly, Bernie Sanders is evil incarnate and has to throw in the towel so as not to ‘damage’ Hillary.

Newsflash: she’s already damaged; she was damaged coming into the race.

As intelligent and experienced as she is, she persistently transmits inauthenticity and entitlement in an election year that despises both. Even if there were no Bernie Sanders, these traits would not win the day.

And dragging out her equally damaged husband as her standard bearer in the crisis only makes matters worse. It plays to the worst stereotypes about women; the ones we had hoped the first female presidential candidate would kick to the curb.

This is a teaching moment for the DNC: never assume.

Why was Martin O’Malley the only card-carrying Democrat to challenge Hillary for the nomination? There certainly is plenty of talent out there, from Elizabeth Warren to the Castro Brothers and Joe Biden; but no, this one was for Hillary. It had been earmarked by the Hillary camp since 2008.

O’Malley’s only hope was to conduct himself so well in the campaign that he would become the Vice-Presidential nominee. No one was looking at poor O’Malley; quite a decent guy, at that.

Bernie was supposed to be a blip of comic relief; here today and gone tomorrow. No one would really support a democratic-socialist for president! Maybe if Hillary was not so damaged from the start, Bernie’s revolution wouldn’t have taken hold; but she was, and it did.

Just like the Republicans, who refused to believe that Jeb Bush wasn’t inevitable, the DNC made the same mistake about Hillary; only the RNC got ‘lucky’ and a bona fide arsonist named Trump dispatched Jeb and set the revolutionary tone for his own party long before Hillary even took notice of Bernie. Oh, the humanity!!

Now, the RNC is way ahead of the DNC at restoring itself to at least functional unity.

The DNC is still in denial of its diagnosis while the RNC is already at the acceptance phase in the process. They may not like Donald Trump but it it won’t be the first time they’ve gotten lucky with a feckless idiot, and they know that. Think George W. Bush and the miraculously (and posthumously) rehabilitated Ronald Reagan.

Instead of watching and drawing a valuable lesson from Bernie’s ability to engage a whole new and untapped electorate, easily matching those enlisted by DT on the other side, the Hillary Camp (and the entire Party hierarchy) plucked superficially from the message to garnish Hillary’s presentation, like parsley on potatoes.

Only the parsley proved to be much more appetizing than the potatoes and Bernie began to actually win votes no matter how much the convoluted rules worked against that end.

Even burying the debates in impossible time slots did not protect the presumed nominee from damage.

Bernie was apparently not expected to lay a glove on Hillary, and when he actually raised salient questions about her ties to Wall Street, her judgment on matters of war, and the sacred memory of her husband’s global economic policies, the Party twitched visibly but still plastered a strained smile on its lips.

Bernie, they said, would ‘toughen’ Hillary for her ultimate clash with Trump, and that was ‘a good thing.’ Behind the scenes, the Party of Hillary tightened the screws on the inevitability machine even more. Unfortunately, their collective slip was showing, and some Sanders supporters, new to the rigging process, began to cry ‘foul.

The Nevada DNC’s biased chairing of ‘their’ caucus proved to be the last straw for a a few attendees who became loud and abusive in their language, but not violent.

Despite breathless news reports to the contrary, there is no evidence that a chair was thrown. Video shows one man picking up a chair, then putting it down again. There were nasty phone calls and social media outbursts, but these have not by any means been confined to Sanders supporters.

The Sanders campaign condemned the bad behavior, but also condemned the biased conduct that had prompted it. Apparently Bernie was expected to dress in sackcloth and cover himself with ashes, never mentioning the pattern of bias that has permeated the primaries under Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. He did not, and the floodgates of Democratic establishment figures aching to tell him to F.O. was suddenly opened.

One state, one caucus, a handful of Sanders supporters behaving badly, and everyone is insisting that Sanders should do the ‘decent’ thing and drop out before the convention.

Meanwhile, finally under some impulse control by the RNC, Trump has risen in the polls and Hillary has fallen. Much as the DNC would like us to believe that this has something to do with Bernie’s continued resistance to her inevitability, that is not the case.

Trump is proving to be an armor-clad wrecking ball of nastiness. He needs no help from anyone. It’s what he does.

With her extremely long and checkered political history, Hillary is the softest target imaginable.  Whether or not she can successfully prevail in the general is looking more and more like an open question.

Further alienating that energized Bernie base by going all Head Prefect on their chosen candidate will not help.

Suggestion? Stop insisting that it’s up to Bernie to unify the party ‘because that’s what Hillary did in 2008.’ This isn’t 2008 and Bernie’s revolution won’t be politically disciplined by a promise of support for 2016.

If the Hillary camp values the support of Bernie’s base, they will have to convincingly demonstrate a willingness to include at least some of that base’s priorities in the party platform, not just pay temporary lip-service and claim to be a ‘progressive.’

Dollars to donuts she won’t call herself a ‘progressive’ in the general, and that’s okay because its only a word; but if she continues to beat a path to the right as she has already begun to do with that remark about having Bill balance the country’s checkbook, she will only reinforce Bernie supporters’ conviction that she doesn’t represent our interests.

There’s only so much that Donald Trump (or Hillary) threats can do to blackmail a disenchanted electorate into turning out to hold their noses at the ballot box.

Time to reassess the fairness and efficacy of a two party system.

The First Presidential Psychopath?

National,

My buddy, Perry Cooper, sent me the following in response to my most recent musings on the prospects of Trump (“Donald as the Princess and the Pea”). It was so apt that I thought I’d share it with GMD readers as a stand alone blogpost:

The June issue of Discover Magazine, discover.com, has an article titled “The Psychopath & The Hare.” The hare is Robert Hare, a Vancouver forensic psychologist who created a ‘Psychopathy Check List,’ PCL, and a revised PCL-R.

“It’s now the top violence risk assessment tool used by forensic psychologists in North America, the significant majority in post-sentencing and parole hearings of the most dangerous, high-risk prisoners.

The checklist’s 20 items include:

            glibness/superficial charm,
            grandiose sense of self-worth,
            need for stimulation/proneness to boredom,
            pathological lying,
            conning/manipulation,
            lack of remorse/guilt,
            shallow affect,
            callousness/lack of empathy,
            parasitic lifestyle,
            promiscuous sexual behavior,
            early behavior problems,
            lack of realistic, long-term goals,
            impulsivity,
            failure to accept responsibility,
            many short-term marital relationships,
            juvenile delinquency
            and criminal versatility.”
 
“The clinician scores each item with 0 (no presence), 1 (uncertain) or 2 (definitely present). Psychopaths score 30 to 40 points. The general population typically scores less than 5, while the average score for prisoners is 23.”

Using the seventeen items in the list from the article, I scale Trump at 32. The three missing items could only increase the score. Trump is a psychopath.

Read the article at http://discovermagazine.com/2016/june/12-psychopath-and-the-hare.

Perry Cooper

Phil Scott supports Hillary Clinton!

local/regional, , , , ,

Republican gubernatorial primary candidate Phil Scott is helping Hillary Clinton run for President. It must be true: Newt Gingrich thinks so.ScottHRC

 Gingrich : “You’re either for Hillary Clinton or you’re for Donald Trump.

If you’re not for Donald Trump, you are functionally helping Hillary Clinton. I think it’s just that straightforward.”

He can still frame an issue with the best of them, but it seems Gingrich lifted this concept from the Bush era war on terror refrain: you are either with us or against us.

Scott’s declared presidential choice, former Governor Jim Douglas, could prove problematic for those who agree with Gingrich. Bruce Lisman, Scott’s primary opponent, hasn’t jumped on the imaginary Douglas-for-president bandwagon, and significantly, he hasn’t ruled out supporting Trump.

Notice Rubio carried only six precincts !
Notice Rubio carried only six precincts.

Gingrich’s framing also leaves most of elected VTGOP leadership (who endorsed loser Marco Rubio) at odds with local Trump supporters — the biggest block of VT Republican primary voters.

Considering the GOP’s state of disarray it isn’t exactly farfetched that Vermont’s Trump Republicans may start snarling at Phil Scott’s ploy. After all it isn’t much more than a marginally clever dodge to avoid dealing with his party’s presumptive presidential nominee.

The big elephant in the room, at the end of May when the VTGOP convenes to choose delegates, will be Trump. Rightwing Republican star John “Tig” Tiegen will be the VTGOP’s featured guest. He is one of the “Heros”of Benghazi (depicted in the movie 13 Hours), a conservative rock star of sorts and an avid Trump supporter.

When he endorsed Trump for President, in February Tiegen said: “Americans want a strong leader, one who cares more about the safety and freedom of the American people than he does winning elections, or what the press might think.”

In the face of Republican cries for a strong leader, it may prove a delicate task for Scott to hide behind his Jim-Douglas-for-president ploy. And even more so when, as the general election heats up, like it or not, he will have to run the race for governor under the Trump flag.Trumpjumping

But for now let’s adjust Gingrich’s remark specifically for Phil Scott: If you’re for Jim Douglas, you are functionally helping Hillary Clinton. I think it’s just that straightforward.

Doug Hoffer on EB-5

local/regional, Uncategorized, ,

Green Mountain Daily is pleased to host this op-ed, written by our  state auditor, Doug Hoffer, who has been an occasional contributor to our pages for many years:  

The unfortunate situation with the EB-5 program presents an opportunity to reflect on the State’s approach to economic development. Among other responsibilities, the State Auditor’s office examines various programs to determine whether they achieve the goals established by the legislature. That is, are we getting our money’s worth?

To answer the question, we conduct performance audits according to Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards. To do this, we need evidence that is sufficient and appropriate (i.e., quantity and quality). In the absence of such evidence, we cannot reach meaningful conclusions or make recommendations.

Unfortunately, some economic development programs present serious challenges. Here are some examples.

 
1.  By statute, the Vermont Training Program may only award grants for training that is supplemental rather than replacement. That is, taxpayers should not pay for training that would have occurred anyway. For example, if a company routinely trains new hires, it would be difficult to justify a training grant intended for new employees. Although applicants are asked about the nature of the proposed training, their statements are not validated. Therefore, we cannot determine the program’s effectiveness because there is no evidence that the grants are only for supplemental training.

 
2.  The primary performance measure of the Department of Tourism & Marketing (T&M) is the annual increase in rooms and meals tax revenues. This assumes that growth in revenue is due to T&M spending. However, the legislature’s economist reported in 2015 that “current taxpayer-financed advertising expenditures for the tourism sector are estimated to represent a mere 3% of total industry advertising expenditures.” Thus, it is impossible to evaluate the impact of state spending when it represents such a tiny percentage of the total.

 
3.  The statute that created the Enterprise Fund (e.g., $1 million to Global Foundries) required the administration to submit a memo to the Emergency Board making the case for the award. Among other things, the Board was supposed to consider whether the information presented was sufficient for the State Auditor to conduct a performance audit. I reviewed those confidential memos and the answer was no. As a result, we cannot audit the impact of the grants.

 
4. The Vermont Employment Growth Incentive (VEGI) is predicated on a statement from applicants that “but for” the incentive, the promised jobs and capital investment would not occur, or would occur in a significantly different and less desirable manner. However, such statements are subjective and cannot be audited. Therefore, it is impossible to know whether some of the economic activity would have occurred without the program. That means that claims about the program’s impact cannot be verified.

 
The EB-5 situation highlighted another area of concern with some economic development programs; namely, the inherent conflict of interest between promotion and regulation. Bureaucrats charged with promoting development are unlikely to be unbiased in their oversight of those viewed as “partners.” In addition to EB-5, we see this in the decades-long relationship between the state and the ski areas that lease public lands.

 
Clearly, the state has an important role to play in creating and enhancing conditions for job creation. As the legislature and the new governor consider their options as to how best to allocate scarce resources, I hope they will insist that all programs are designed to provide the evidence necessary to measure their effectiveness. Without that critical information, how can Vermonters know whether we are getting a fair return on our investment?

If we can’t measure a program’s performance, we’re left with faith, which I can’t audit.

Doug Hoffer

Donald as the Princess and the Pea

National, Uncategorized, , ,

As Donald Trump and Paul Ryan, on behalf of the entire RNC, engage in the dance of mutual castration, Democrats have reason for cautious optimism.

By the time the Democratic Convention crowns its nominee, Mr. Trump may be showing a little wear even for his most devoted accolades. That’s because the Republican nominee is as sensitive as the ‘Princess and the Pea.’

Behold a few of the metaphoric mattresses atop which his presidential hopes fitfully sleep:
1)    Cooperating with anybody, let alone ‘establishment’ Republicans is not a good look for the Donald; yet, he now needs them as much as they need him because he isn’t prepared to self-fund his campaign in the general.

2)    He can no longer claim to be self-funded and not beholden to anyone. We already
know by his own words that he understands the quid-pro-quo game all too well and
accepts as fair that there will be no “quid” without the requisite “quo.”

3)    His almost uncontrollable inclination to contradict himself, sometimes going back and forth in a dizzying display of indecision, has finally caught the attention of the media. Decisive he can’t claim to be.

4)    His unlimited need for attention has provided a life-time of stupid and offensive remarks ripe for the picking. If the Republicans didn’t have the balls to do it, Democrats will not hesitate to dispatch them in volleys.

5)    Unlike his Republican rivals, the Democratic nominee can and will resist the temptation to get down in the mud with him because there are plenty of capable surrogates like Elizabeth Warren (not Bill Clinton, please!) to do the job for her or him. Elizabeth Warren ties knots in Donald Trump without breaking a sweat…and both Hillary and Bernie are cool heads under pressure. The Bloviator-in-Chief  is decidedly not.

If, as seems increasingly inevitable, Hillary walks away with the nomination, she just has to leave Bill at home watering the plants, and she’ll be fine.  She’ll owe Bernie BIG time for mobilizing his minions to support her, but I think they can work out that deal so long as he keeps the faith with his supporters all the way to the Convention. It’s the policies that matter most to Bernie and its the White House that matters most to Hillary.

6)    Just because none of Donald Trump’s “unforgivable” insults have proven to be the ‘silver bullet’ necessary to disqualify him for Republican primary voters doesn’t mean
he’s out of the woods. The power high of winning the nomination will only curb his appetite for sensation temporarily. Dollars to donuts, he’s just one or two soundbites away from the next big goof. He’s programmed to offend. He can’t help himself.  And he’ll find that general election voters, reflective of the true diversity of the country, are not nearly so forgiving.

7)    No one even pretends anymore that he might know what he’s talking about. Ignorance ispretty much baked into his identity at this point. His supporters don’t care, but anyone not already in that delusional state is not likely at this point to be persuaded that he is the ‘smart’ candidate, no matter how much money he has…or says he has.

8)    Which brings us to his taxes. The longer he resists releasing them, the more everyone will be convinced they contain a bombshell. Why is the guy whose brand is supposed to be
spontaneity and transparency suddenly so secretive?

9)    Donald Trump has no sense of humor. We’ve all known people like that. They love to
ham it up and make jokes at other people’s expense, so long as they themselves aren’t the
butt of the joke.  In fact, they are particularly thin-skinned; apt to flush in anger and behave unwisely when teased.   I think we can guess what lies ahead in that department.  We’ve all seen the tape of his angry face at the Correspondent’s Dinner when the President poked fun at him.

10)   Donald Trump himself is not at all sure he wants or can even do the job for which he is
competing.  I swear I read somewhere that Trump once said that if he ever ran for President, he’d do it as a Republican because they’ll believe anything. Maybe I dreamt it, but it just seems so like him.

11)   DT says he “does great” among women; but what he really means is Republican women, which is, of and by itself something akin to an oxymoron.  He maintains the same fiction about his popularity with minorities. It was difficult to adequately test those assertions in the Republican Primary, since relatively few minority voters were involved, and there is a certain expectation of dysfunction from  women who identify with the party that would consistently act against their best interests.

The general election is a whole different animal. As unmotivated as minorities were to
vote in the Republican Primary, they will be doubly so motivated to vote Democratic in
the general election; firstly, out of a sense of outrage; and secondly, in preservation of
their own best interests that have been so conspicuously under attack from Donald Trump.

More than half of all women self-identify as leaning Democratic. Roughly 36% self identify
as Republicans. It can safely be assumed that most of these are women who also
self-identify as ‘conservative’ and many generally support conservative principles and
regional Republican candidates, but see Donald Trump as neither conservative
nor invested in their regional Republican concerns.

According to Newsweek (March 15 2016) female voters in the Michigan Republican Primary dividedtheir vote more or less equally between Trump and Cruz and Katich. That’s not a very impressive validation even from the relatively narrow pool of Republican women. As late as March of this year, 47% of Republican women “could not imagine themselves voting for Trump.”

This weekend, the New York Times  announced open season on Donald’s ‘female troubles’ with a scathing retrospective on his playboy years.

A theory that’s been going around is that Trump never really wanted to be president. This whole campaign was just an opportunity to burnish his brand and get a whole lot of face-time.

Now, it’s “Be careful what you wish for” time.

He clearly never prepared to win the nomination. Assured as he thought he was that the GOP would never let him have the nomination, I think he honestly believed he could play the aggrieved losing candidate to a sea of adoring Twitter followers for years to come, ensuring a new reality TV show and all the sycophants he could exploit for the remainder of his vapid life.

He’s not stupid (although he plays a stupid person on TV). He knows that if, God forbid, he ever did land in the White House, he would quickly become the most unpopular president of all time. His negatives would dwarf those of his campaign, and provide absolutely no amusement for him, because he would be stuck in the narrative that he himself recklessly created.

If Obama has had to endure eight years of abuse, can you imagine what thin-skinned Trump would experience in the same office?

I think he can.

Instead of being able to fling his feces at both the President and Congress,
from the safe distance of an ivory Trump Tower, he would himself be the target, day-after-day-after- endless day of blunders, indecision and head-on collisions with reality.

He’s already uncomfortable answering demands for his taxes and questions about his butler.  Even attempts to deflect to Hillary Clinton are failing to engage as the news media belatedly tries to drill-down on his pathological lies.

In what may have signaled the beginning of cognitive breakdown under pressure, Trump now appears to have double-punked the press, first by leaking an old tape of himself pretending to be a press agent boasting about Trump’s romantic conquests, then lying about the lie.  The permutations of his deceits are positively dizzying.

And I expect it isn’t fun anymore.

 

Thursday insta-diary

Business, local/regional, ,

Here’s something quick with a chart and a Vermont connection.wolrd_military_spending_barchart_large

In an editorial Monday titled: A Better not Fatter Defense Budget the NYTimes.com suggested the time has come to take a look at throttling back US military spending. And one of the most expensive aircraft ever, the F-35 (scheduled to be based in Burlington VT 2019)caught their eye.

The Pentagon can do with far fewer than the 1,700 F-35s it plans on buying.

[…]For nearly a decade after 9/11, the Pentagon had a virtual blank check; the base defense budget rose, in adjusted dollars, from $378 billion in 1998 to $600 billion in 2010. As the military fought Al Qaeda and the Taliban, billions of dollars were squandered on unnecessary items, including new weapons that ran late and over budget like the troubled F-35 jet fighter.

Did Scott Milne just launch a run for U.S. Senate?

Business, local/regional, , , , ,

Scott Milne recently sold his stake in his family travel agency and began floating serious trial balloons about running against longtime Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy. In March he discussed his qualifications with vtdigger.com:

[…] you know, I’m a travel agent and I think I got a shot at taking out the longest-serving senator in Vermont history and currently the longest-serving senator in the United States,” Milne said.

He now, it seems, is exploring whether the investigations into the (alleged ) “Ponzi” scheme at Jay Peak and Q-Burke is an issue that Senator Leahy, a champion of the Federal EB-5 program, may be vulnerable on. Could it have legs for Milne?

mobbingIt seems unlikely, so we will see, but Scott Milne didn’t wait and  jumped head first into it:

“Peter Shumlin and Patrick Leahy have both displayed a lack of competence and a lack of leadership in the way the EB-5 program has been structured and managed,” Milne said, lumping Leahy in with the Democratic governor he nearly defeated in 2014. “On the federal level, I think it just wasn’t structured with auditability and transparency built into it.”

Milne may not have thought this one through. You see he and his business partner Attorney David Boise (his former college roommate and largest contributor to his failed campaign for governor) explored using EB-5 program to help finance their mixed use Vermont development.

B&M Realty and Development has been attempting to build a mixed used development, Quechee Highlands in Hartford near the intersection of Interstates 89 and 91. B&M’s project has been wrangling in the courts over regional land use regulations (one of Milne’s signature issues).

In 2009 at their own expense, B &M partners Milne and Boise joined an EB-5 road trip to Asia with then-Governor Jim Douglas.douglaseb-5Saigon  Milne must have enjoyed the trip.He returned impressed with EB-5 and sang praises to its entrepreneurial qualities without qualification.

“To me, it [EB-5] is the perfect storm of government policy capturing the best of entrepreneurial spirit,” Milne told the Valley News a week after returning from Asia. “I was pleased beyond my expectations.”

Although still hemming and hawing a bit about challenging Sen. Leahy, Milne says former Vermont Republican Party chair Jim Barnett has been advising him.

I’d think Barnett might have told Scott Milne not to tie his shoe laces together if he wants to run … or walk in the election. Penny loafers might be a safer bet for this Republican.milnescottdouglas

Phil Scott and Donald the “misguided missile”

local/regional, National, , , , ,

You might think every savvy GOP politician would have been paying attention six months ago when Republican strategist Ward Baker spelled out strategies to deal with Trump the “misguided missile.” The widely leaked National Republican Senatorial Committee memo warned Republicans to prepare and guard against collateral damage should Trump prevail and win the GOP presidential nomination.

Scott supporter Kurt Wright (R-Burlington) isn’t worried about Trump at the top of their party’s ticket harming the VTGOP. Wright is counting on what he believes is the provincial nature of Vermont voters.

Wright said. “They [voters] don’t care about the national politics. Vermonters are great at separating out what Vermonters do … as opposed to what’s going on in Washington.”

But Wright’s response kind of ignores that much of Trump’s appeal is that he claims not to be a Washington creature.

I guess putting distance between yourself and your own party’s presumptive “misguided missile” candidate is a tough task.scottwhome

At a press event Thursday Scott tried hard to keep the topic orbiting around the state budget. However only a couple days after Trump crushed all opponents in the Indiana primary, he was pressed to respond to the obvious question: Do you now or will you ever support Donald Trump for President?

Scott deserves credit for declaring he will not vote for Trump. Unlike Bruce Lisman who unbelievably says he intends to “[…] carefully evaluate Donald Trump’s candidacy and listen to what he has to say.” That leaves me more than a little curious over what on earth Trump might say to win over Lisman.

But with six months’ lead time to prepare a winning strategy for coping with Trump’s run at the White House, couldn’t Scott have done better than this?

Scott, who declared he would not vote for Trump, revealed later Thursday he has decided to write in former Republican Gov. Jim Douglas as his presidential choice in the November election.

“He’d make a great president,” Scott said about the four-term governor.

Aww, isn’t that just precious VTGOP fandom! I’m sure Jim thinks you could be a dandy Governor too, Phil! You could be the Governor Dubie Jim Douglas never had.

But it is still pretty early in the game for Scott to put down his Jim Douglas trump card — we’re not even through the primary yet! I’ll bet he’ll need to play that one a few more times before November.