Where are we on the “$4,800 Before I Turn 48″ State Senate fundraiser, with six days left? Making good progress, as Bush liked to say: we are only about $1,500 shy of the goal. And that’s amazing, really. Of course, that’s when it begins to hurt the most, when you’ve drunk the glass of eggs, run to the top of the Philadelphia Museum steps, yet Burgess Meredith is still hitting you in the stomach to toughen you up because it’s not over yet. If you can help us raise this last chunk, help us be something more than just another bum from the neighborhood, thanks in advance. The easy Act Blue contribution link is here.
Late Update, Saturday, 4:00 pm:
A number of people have helped out since Friday, but we’re still just lagging the pace we’ll need to bring it home by lights out on Wednesday: about $1,300 shy now.
So we present this inspirational HD quality video montage of Rocky Balboa, running around in training pants that seem a little dorkier than we remember, but still trying hard and reaching the top of the steps and making up for all of the horrible sequels and action rip-offs that would later follow. An undeniably nice moment, emblematic of this dogged campaign, and now text-enhanced for Spanish-speakers [Meat-Punching Warning For Vegetarian/Vegans]:
Later Update, Sunday 4:47 pm:
Yes, we’ve been here at the tiller all weekend long, nursing the harsh black coffee, afraid to let our eyes close, coaxing this thing along through the fog, slowly closing the gap on the Wednesday goal. Some wonderful folks checked in today, and have brought us ever nearer: just $1,100 dollars short of the goal.
But with just three full days left to go.
One last thing to think about: how long would a CEO like Entergy’s Wayne Leonard need to think about a little over $1000? Leonard, remember, makes $40 million over 5 years, which figures out to 21,917.80 per day.
Or $913.24 per hour.
So let’s look at it like that: Entergy’s CEO could close the gap for us with the salary he draws on his lunch hour. And Entergy the corporation, if it chose to exercise its God Given Right to Free Speech, could fill the gap with less than 5 seconds of their yearly profits.
That’s why small time campaigns, like this one, need you, and the small donation repeated until it amplifies the voice saying: enough.
Monday Afternoon Update, 12:16 pm:
Still moving doggedly forward: down to triple figures now, with only about $850 left to raise, but also with time running low. Just two and a half days left.
You know, Sarah Palin spoke to the Tea Party crowd a few days back, and mocked the “Hopey-Changey thing.” It was the same tone she used, back at the 2008 Convention, to mock community organizing.
And they ate it up in Tennessee, because they’ve doubled down on failure at this point.
But when you put out a fundraising challenge as a small candidate, in order to power a campaign for green power and against the status quo on Yankee, for universal broadband and against underfunded schools, and you watch people come to the digital rescue, not just in the County but from all over Vermont, it does keep hope alive and it does enable change.
Which is to say that we’re not ready to throw in the tea towel yet, not by a long shot.
I like to think this early campaign, by speaking openly and loudly and clearly on Yankee, affected candidates who got into the race at a later point.
And I like to think that all those candidates, speaking together, have forced the Governor out of his protective crouch on the issue.
Not to say change couldn’t have happened without this campaign. What I’m saying is that what change we’ve been able to produce thus far couldn’t have happened without you. And that’s true of this last distance to the goal too.
At the risk of saying we told you so, VDB has no choice but to say we told you so, because we certainly did: in a remarkable coincidence unmatched in the long annals of completely unrelated accidental synchronicities, Jim Douglas’s super-stern call for a shake-up in management at Vermont Yankee was followed very quickly by VP Jay Thayer being placed on “administrative leave.” Exit stage right, Jay.
And, as predicted, the Governor can now go ahead with the new talking point, that Entergy gets it, and is willing to let heads roll. Or rather head. And not really roll but sort of vibrate slightly, for a few months until the heat’s off.
In short, the same old scripted song and dance between Entergy and Douglas. And VDB was pretty disappointed, because where’s the fodder for humor in ethics-free predictability?
Back in the day, before becoming the New Jay Thayer, Hebert recorded a long, painfully earnest version of Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” a poem beloved by Chambers of Commerce and CEO’s nationwide, for reasons VDB has never fully appreciated. Joined to Hebert’s reading are a series of haunting images, and the whole Hebert designed as a manly “tribute to the men and women in the power industry.”
Of course, as you might expect, the performance takes on some serious ironic overtones given the recent revelations about Entergy’s vexed relationship with the truth.
And given not-so-recent revelations too: among the haunting images are scenes of hurricane flooding, painfully ironic given criticism of Entergy’s corporate behaviour in Louisiana, following Hurricane Katrina.
The link is here (the embedding code has been removed “by request,” according to YouTube). It’s enough to make hair grow on your chest, man or woman.
A quick Monday morning fundraising update: after Friday’s announcement of the Blue Light Special on copies of Dream of the White Village, the pace of contributions picked up substantially. For which I am extremely grateful. We should be crossing the halfway mark at some point today, leaving another $2500 to be raised in the next ten days, the cut-off point being lights out on my birthday on the 10th. Will say this: a good number of the contributions last week were from hard-core supporters who gave once or more already earlier in the campaign. And God love them.
But I do hope I can convince some of you out there who’ve yet to settle on a campaign to watch this cycle, yet to contribute to a campaign this cycle, that the Chittenden County Senate race is worth your attention. And that this campaign is already having an impact on issues you care about: Yankee, universal digital access, single-payer health care, sustainable energy.
Jim Douglas, whatever else one might say about him, possesses an absolutely superb tactical sense. He knows that the days of fronting for Entergy without paying a steep political price are over; he knows he must appear to oppose Entergy, to the extent that he can. But how to so appear?
Well, let’s say you also happened to have a few executives highly positioned in the out-of-state energy company under fire, executives who were already looking hard for a way to take the money and run? What sort of new twofer arrangement could you work out?
In unrelated news, VDB noticed this graf in the Free Press this morning: “Gov. Jim Douglas made a surprise call for a change in management at the Vernon plant and asked for delays in a decision about spinning off the plant into a new company and the Legislature’s vote on the facility’s future.”
For some odd and highly personal reason, this reminds me of Hillary Clinton offering Barack Obama the Vice Presidential nomination, on the eve of the crucial South Carolina primary, when she happened to be in second place to Obama’s first. The same unwillingness to accept hard fact, the same desperate attempt to bargain from an utterly compromised position.
If VDB could take the liberty: Let it go, Jim. Your instincts are telling you this issue is radioactive for a very good reason. It is radioactive.
Unexpected dividend from last year: Barnes & Noble selectsBrothers Boswell for their Best Books of 2009 list. Came in at #92, which could have been worse. And which they owed me, let’s face it, for taking my kids there every weekend of their lives for hot chocolate and Dora the Explorer books.
An update on the fundraising push we launched on Monday. As it stands, we’re on pace to raise about half of what we set as a goal: if contributions continue at the same rate we’ll reach about $2,500 by February 10, rather than the $4,800 we were hoping to see. But this is America, after all, and failure is still not an option. The State Senate race is too important, this year of all years, and we’ve come too far.
So as a way to help pick up the pace, we’ll make you this offer: for every donation over $25 made between now and Monday morning, we’ll send a copy of The Dream of the White Village, a long-ago novel about dirty politics in a small, charming city in northern New England called Burlington, Vermont.
Are these copies rare, out-of-print collector’s items?
The older I get the less I believe in coincidences. To take one choice example: Howard Dean showed the Left – and the world – that it was possible to fuel an insurgent, progressive political campaign with an outpouring of online donations. Barack Obama took that tactic to its logical conclusion: neither the Clinton nor the GOP machines could match the resources Obama drew from small-dollar donors. And so now the Supreme Court has green-lighted unlimited expenditures from multi-national corporations.
Coincidence? Please.
The first answer to the Left’s online fundraising prowess was the attempt to allow telecommunications firms to tier their services – that is, literally to slow the information feed to small-scale websites, sites like VDB. But the net-neutrality campaign, and the Democratic majority of 2006, stopped that effort, at least momentarily.
So the Roberts Court picked up the ball, and ran with it.
It was a troubling decision for everyone in America, but for me it was troubling in a fairly direct way. I’ve spent the last eight months talking about Entergy-Louisiana’s deceptive corporate behavior, and the need for Montpelier to rein it in. Part of the reason I want to represent Chittenden County in the Senate is specifically to introduce legislation that will affirm Entergy’s responsibility to pay for clean-up of the Vernon plant once it’s taken off-line. Because it’s either their bill, or the taxpayers’, and I’m not okay with the latter.
As the Senate President Pro Tem will tell you, the Senate votes will be close indeed.
And so now a split High Court has given Entergy the ability, should it so choose, to directly and overwhelmingly influence the election of the Senators and the Governor who will make the key decisions about decommissioning.
In fact, if you follow the Court’s logic – that corporate money is vigorous political speech, and democracy depends on good citizens speaking early and often – then Entergy would be ignoring its civic duty if it didn’t attempt to influence the coming 2010 elections.
So what do you do if your own speech is limited to one plain human voice? You go to house parties thrown by people with very big hearts. And extremely big dogs.
My wonderful co-hosts in the New North End of Burlington, Maggie Gundersen and Marie Lorrain. Marie baked the elegantly branded cookies at the top of the post.
The wonder that is Hobbes.
You go to pancake brunches thrown by devoted party committees in neighboring villages.
Good as her word, early supporter Sue Grab (with her son here) wore her fashionable long-sleeve campaign shirt to the Underhill-Jericho brunch. Thanks again, Sue.
This past weekend I did both. And it was great fun. But I’d be a fool to think that this race can be won simply by talking with people in living rooms, and eating home fries with people in middle school cafeterias. We’ll need the money to do direct mailings, and to advertise on a County-wide basis.
That’s expensive stuff. It can cost anywhere from $8,000 to $10,000 just to put a single piece of direct mail into the hands of the universe of voters you need to reach in Chittenden County.
So I sat down with my campaign advisors, and we came up with an admittedly corny idea: trying to raise $4,800 by the time I turn 48, which is to say by lights-out on February 10th. That gives us just 17 days from today.
Which is not a lot of time.
What we’re hoping is that if you’ve been planning to give to the campaign at some point, you’ll consider giving now, or consider nudging a like-minded friend.
The Act Blue link is here. Just click and it will take you through an unbelievably simple 3-minute process, a process that ends with a longish note telling you how much I appreciate your stepping up to the plate.
Given that we started this campaign very early – on May 18, to be exact – it’s now actually half-over, with the heavy lifting left to go. As we did with our first fundraising push, we’ll track this one over the next two and a half weeks on VDB, and let you know where we are, and how sunny or how dire the situation becomes.
And if you want to see where we’ve been so far, you’ll find that the campaign’s main website – Baruth2010.com – has been updated with new video, and a new navigation tab at the top. If you’re tuning in to the campaign for the first time, and you’d like to know what sort of wild-eyed insurgent drive you’d be funding, you’ll find most everything you’d need to know.
But if not, drop a line with a question, and I’ll do my best to answer it quickly. And if you visit please sign up at the top of the page, or join the Facebook group, so we can keep you in the loop.
Elections are about to get much more costly, and much more contentious, because the biggest players will not actually be human beings. They’ll be far-flung corporate entities with no real ties to the community, and no hesitation about overpowering smaller opponents.
But even a pebble can stop a tank, if it gets wedged in there just right. That’s all we’re asking for really is the pebbles. And, if you have the energy come door-knocking time, a little help doing the wedging. More soon.
Now this is beautiful. You might remember a week or two back VDB mocked Entergy’s slick new website, IAmVY.com, as a blatant attempt to hide behind a few of their more telegenic workers. But in the interim, of course, Entergy has had to admit to more than a few lapses in both safety and honesty, with Entergy VP Jay Thayer himself admitting that the company had misled investigators on tritium piping.
It turns out that another company employee who misled investigators was a Chief Engineer by the name of David McElwee, who just happened to be one of the folks profiled on IAmVY.com. Well, guess what’s changed at the website since the revelations about leaked radioactivity?
Dave’s gone. Vanished. Disappeared.
And along with Dave, a line from his profile that pretty much said it all, had we only known how to read it at the time: “not for one second of one day . . . has Dave worried about the safety of Vermont Yankee.”
Indeed.
And that’s not all. When it launched IAmVY.com, Entergy also decided to make a heartwarming human interest story out of the fact that Dave’s daughter, Beth, had come to work at the plant too. So her original profile played up that connection: “Beth’s dad, Dave McElwee, is a 28-year Vermont Yankee veteran . . . . And she couldn’t be happier working side by side with her dad.”
But if you’ve disappeared Dave, you can’t very well warm viewers’ hearts with him when you’re profiling Beth. So the connection between father and daughter has also gone down the memory hole, as no longer operative or desirable from a corporate standpoint.
The new profile sort of cools your heart, in other words.
But it makes you really appreciate the Supreme Court’s bold defense of the First Amendment yesterday, its decision to allow corporations to spend as much as they please as often as they please in support of candidates who serve their particular bottom line.
Because if you can’t trust corporations, who can you trust? Ask Dave McElwee. Assuming you can find him. Or ask that happy and attractive all-American financial analyst Beth, who used to be Dave’s daughter, once upon a time.
Read more than one pundit attributing Scott Brown’s win to the fact that he drove his state in a pick-up truck, which VDB thinks is the worst sort of hooey, especially in that Brown’s pick-up seems to have cost more than VDB’s house. Be that as it may, our campaign also believes in traveling the district, early and often. So we’ll be in Milton this Saturday, the 23rd, having breakfast at the Diner with a few early supporters.
If you live out Milton way, we would love to have you drop in for breakfast with us, say, 9:30 am? Drop a line to say you’re coming, or just show up. It’s all good, as the kids used to say before Scott Brown won Massachusetts and the much-feared 41-vote Senate majority put an end to all laughter.
Sat down today at the Skinny Pancake for a long talk about socially responsible business with Main Street Landing developer Melinda Moulton, but before I could order she pulled me out into the hallway behind the Pancake, to show me the Hall of Endangered Species being painstakingly created by artist Ron Hernandez. Just goes to show: behind every side door you think you know in a city like Burlington lies a universe of Change, and Change for the better, more often than not. At least slightly more often than not.
So as a way to help pick up the pace, we’ll make you this offer: for every donation over $25 made between now and Monday morning, we’ll send a copy of The Dream of the White Village, a long-ago novel about dirty politics in a small, charming city in northern New England called Burlington, Vermont. 
