As regular readers know, we took a Sacred Vow months ago: to travel personally to Denver, to do battle with anyone who would seek, for any reason, to impede Obama’s nomination there. And of course, we would also act as your eyes and ears behind the stage-managed curtain. But that involves being elected from the State Convention down in Barre, itself a logistical nightmare just two weeks away.
Offers of help continue to come in over the transom, but remember the numbers are stark: only 3 male Obama delegates will eventually go to Denver, and last best estimates place the number seeking a plane ticket at 50 or more. And of course, some of those 50 are well-known politicos with their own built-in constituencies.
But we have you.
And at this point, we really need your help.
If you’ll be in Barre for the State Convention on the 24th, and would consider giving us a boost, please get in touch. Hit the “Contact” button at the top of your screen; we haunt the keyboard 24/7/52, jonesing for email, so the wait won’t be long before we’re talking strategy.
Even if you won’t be there, but know someone who will, you can help. Turn them on to VDB, and let its narcotic effects work their junkie magic.
Ohio superdelegate Representative Zack Space: “My position hasn’t changed, and I’m not going to back anybody anytime soon . . . . once it becomes apparent who the nominee is, I’ll make my decision.” Don’t misunderstand: we here at VDB stand in awe of the manhood and steely nerve of Space. Still, we have one niggling question.
Can it still really be called a “decision” at that point? Just a technical point.
Zack Space, indeed.
Late Update, Friday, 9:43 am:
Then again, some of these folks apparently have some internal structural formation performing the function of a spine: three more superdelegates have come out for Obama in the last few hours, one of whom represents a switch from Clinton. Effectively, a movement of 4 in Obama’s direction.
And you know what that means, baby: ABC News is now reporting for the first time that Obama has surpassed Hillary’s lead among the superdelegates, 267-265.
Which is sweet news. But why do we feel, in an odd way, like James Caan at the end of Misery?
We asked a simple but unanswerable question last week: would the presence of Anthony Pollina in the Governor’s race, particularly in the absence of a declared Democratic candidate, be enough to scare Governor Jim Douglas straight on the Yankee Decommissioning Fund bill. Well, the question is pretty answerable now. No, in a word.
For those of you who missed it, the bill would have forced Entergy, in the event that they spin off another fledgling company to hold the bag on their unregulated nuclear assets, to substantially strengthen its financial committments in the area of decommissioning.
But Douglas, who has consistently shielded Entergy from aggressive oversight, seems to have made a very clear-eyed decision: that having given Pollina six months to firm up his reliable 25% of the vote, and having waited until early May to begin organizing behind Symington, Democrats are in no position to make him pay substantially at the polls.
And maybe so. But maybe not. This is an issue that won’t go away, especially since as the ball game goes forward, Entergy will need Douglas to set more than a few more gubernatorial picks. And each time, as we go forward to November, more and more people in the stands will be paying attention.
But what can we do in the meantime?
Well, this whole issue has us waxing nostalgic for the Audio Dream Theater trilogy that we turned out last year with sound wizard Alex Ball and aspiring voice deity Neil Jensen.
The premise? Douglas and Dubie are two hapless superheroes, just muddling along trying to raise corporate profits and sully the environment, when suddenly they’re drawn into an epic battle with their worst Democratic nightmares.
And Episode III: Statehouse of the Living Dead, prophetically enough, features a battle to the death between Douglas and Gaye Symington.
Think Firesign Theater meets Monty Python meets, like, the Rutland Herald. It’s full-tilt audio, with some of the best and snarkiest humor you’ll hear on an overcast Thursday morning in May.
If you’re new to VDB, and you managed to miss these productions, they’re listed on the right sidebar under “The Jim Douglas Trilogy.” But here’s the first to get you started. And remember, no politician truly fears for his political life until the jokes start. Enjoy.
A thought: VDB might just close up shop here in Vermont, and drift down to the Carolinas. Which of those Carolinas isn’t too important, at this point: either South Carolina, which ignited Obama’s post-Nevada tear, or North Carolina, which dramatically re-ignited it last night. Sure, they’ve never heard of creemees that far South, but we’re open minded. Pecan pie never hurt anyone.
Did we want Indiana as much as the next guy?
Probably more: it was past 2 in the morning last night when we finally gave up praying over that last remaining Lake County percentage point. But even without it, it was a sweet night, more than enough to remind you what happens with this candidate when the media end the negative roadblock, and let his voice come through again.
But to our muttons.
Is Hillary dropping out today? Not on your latte, friends. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: what Clinton is engaged in now amounts to an aggressive strategy not to win the White House, but to claim the Vice Presidency, and the vacant undisclosed location.
Bill and Hillary Clinton can bear most anything; they are very durable political figures. But Clinton, at this point, cannot bear the thought of losing both spots on the ticket, and no doubt the idea that Obama will most likely look elsewhere for a VP drives the “Onward to the White House” attitude projected last night.
Toward that end, expect to see the kitchen sink reconnected to the plumbing; expect the Clinton camp to float the idea, through surrogates of surrogates of surrogates, that the reason Clinton is staying in the race is to ensure a place at the table for her large coalition of voters. The Presidency will begin to float, linguistically, at this point: what is being discussed will undergo a period of transition in the next three weeks.
In Kentucky and West Virginia, Clinton will not gin up the “He’s Not Like Us” mentality she tried so hard to stir in Indiana. For one thing, her leads in those states are very comfortable, and she can hit her marks without cost-prohibitive attacks.
But too, we are entering the Final Re-Invention, in which Hillary will seek, as best she can, to convert her image as a junkyard dog into a new image, something more emotionally inflected: not junkyard dog but Old Yeller, faithful, worthy, and more sentimental with each step toward political death she takes.
Late Update, Thursday, 9:37 am:
Didn’t take long for that prediction to bear fruit. Yesterday we wrote that Clinton would begin to make an indirect argument with regard to the Vice Presidency.
We phrased it like so: “Toward that end, expect to see the kitchen sink reconnected to the plumbing; expect the Clinton camp to float the idea, through surrogates of surrogates of surrogates, that the reason Clinton is staying in the race is to ensure a place at the table for her large coalition of voters.”
Here’s Clinton yesterday, speaking to a largely female audience:
“The Democratic Party has to know that women are the core, women have to be at the table and women are going to be heard as we continue in these contests until they finally end.”
At the table, which is mid-2008 Clintonese for On the ticket. Expect to hear the phrase frequently, and from an overly helpful media as well, over the next 30 days.
Later Update, Thursday, 2:15 pm:
And here comes the mainstream media. Charles Gibson puts the Veep question to George Stephanopoulos, who, after all, knows something about the ambitions of the Clintons. Says George:
“There are various exit strategies right now. Number one would be, go out on a win. So, stay in until West Virginia, where Sen. Clinton is likely the winner, and Kentucky on May 20, and after that, bow out. Two, negotiate for the imposition of Michigan and Florida, to get those delegations seated, declare victory on that, and get out. But the big one, Charlie, and this is what some people close to the Clintons are talking about: Is there a way to negotiate a settlement with Barack Obama to have Sen. Clinton on the ticket?”
The Clinton campaign is still flogging the gas tax holiday out in Indiana, and they’ve now matched Obama’s final pushback on the issue with a final counter-pushback of their own: an ad painting Obama as elite and out of touch with hurting Americans, tagged “What’s happened to Obama?” Which sounded awfully familiar to us, like some nasty high school taunt that you’d finally managed to repress.
That’s right: it was the tagline for Rich Tarrant’s disastrous series of anti-Bernie attack ads, except then the line was “What’s happened to Bernie?”
Tarrant was flogging the sexual predator issue back then, and implying in more ways than one that Bernie had somehow thrown in his lot with the pedophiles, and the drug dealers.
The two negative campaigns do have their differences, of course. The old Tarrant ads showed a shifty-eyed Bernie, in slow motion, as tragic piano music played. The Hillary ad, by contrast, seeks an upbeat tone, even as it attacks.
But the similarity is impossible to miss. Both use the same tag for the same reason: to peel away those who’ve supported Bernie or Obama in the past, by insinuating that their candidate has changed.
Not just changed, but altered, weakened, degenerated even.
This is what Hillary has left, folks.
But not to worry. Tarrant spent about $10 million of his own money, and now spends his days in a gated community down Florida way, looking for the sunscreen and thinking about what might have been.
On the other hand, what’s happened to Bernie? Last we heard he was down in Washington, in the Senate, kicking ass and taking names.
Late Update, 11:00 am:
That’ll teach us. We ended the above post with a big high-five to Bernie for being such a voice of sanity in the Senate, only to have Mischa write in with inexplicable news: Bernie is pushing the gas tax holiday, albeit with a greater emphasis on taxing windfall oil profits.
Mischa has the unsettling details over at her place, the always readable Impatient Sufferance.
Everybody has obsessions. Very occasionally those obsessions intersect, which can be very good news, or very bad news. And once in a blue moon, those obsessions don’t merely intersect but overlap, in a way that alters the world entire. That’s the way we felt yesterday, when a stray line in a reader email prompted us to run a standard search, linking the terms “Entergy” and “Hillary Clinton.”
We’ve written hundreds of thousands of words here about both those subjects, independently of one another: Entergy’s corporate shell games and linguistic obfuscation; Hillary’s disingenuousness on the campaign trail; Entergy’s poor safety record and ham-handed corporate spin; Hillary’s manufactured outrage, her willingness to change the rules of the game, her win-at-all-costs approach.
But what we ran across was an article that appeared originally in the Guardian, an article that links Entergy with the Clintons going way back, deep into the Clinton years.
And it was like someone fired off 50,000 flashbulbs with no warning. Everything was illuminated.
Turns out that Entergy began in Arkansas; only later did it expand into Louisiana, to take advantage of large deposits of natural gas there.
Turns out that during the 80’s, Hillary and her firm successfully defended Entergy in court against a major drive to curb their rate increases — a drive mounted by Bill Clinton, who used the issue to win a tough race for Attorney General. Not the first time the couple would mix aggressively populist campaign rhetoric with dexterous corporate outreach.
Turns out that by the 90’s, all was forgiven and forgotten: during the Clinton Presidency, the power company developed deep ties to the infamous Indonesian Riady family. In fact, they were partners and worked hand in glove with Ron Brown, Bill Clinton’s Commerce Secretary, to secure a billion-dollar power contract with China.
The Riady family, of course, would also pony up $100,000 for Web Hubbell when his ongoing legal troubles stopped his personal income stream.
You can read the article, which has been fairly widely distributed, for yourself. It’s a bit lurid, and not as impeccably sourced as we’d like. And it’s worth noting that since becoming Senator of New York, Clinton has talked tough on Entergy and their Indian Point facility, which sits just over the horizon from the Clinton residence in Chappaqua.
But man, did it rock our world.
It was like Batman suddenly discovering that the Joker and the Penguin were actually one guy, or like running a routine search for “Rick Santorum” and bringing up a single grainy, black-and-white photo of the ex-Pennsylvania Senator leaving an “RU12?” dance in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco with an anonymous white-haired gentlemen who turns out, under closer inspection, to be a leather-clad Joe Lieberman.
God love Google. For the cheap thrills, if nothing else.
CNN currently running this breathless and breathtakingly circular come-on: “How Obama Can Get Beyond Reverend Wright.” What, in other words, can Barack Obama possibly do to make our newsdesk here at CNN cease covering Jeremiah Wright as a desperate way of boosting our flagging ratings? Tune us in and find out.
Late Update, Thursday, 10:34 am:
In case you thought we were being overly pessimistic or dismissive of CNN’s journalistic integrity, the network makes its circular stance doubly clear today: “Can Obama Close the Door on Wright?”
At CNN? Never in a million freaking years, apparently.
Back in the day, Philip Morris really had it working: they produced the world’s most profitable brands of tobacco, the nicotine levels of which they were secretly manipulating, and they owned half the US Congress, which made it difficult for anyone to complain. But after decades of anti-smoking activism, the words “Philip Morris” became synonymous with death and wasting disease. Ouch.
Their support in Congress collapsed not long thereafter. Activists beat the brand, in other words.
And so the two words “Philip Morris,” like a blackened pair of lungs, were exchanged for something new and minty-fresh: Philip Morris became Altria.
Suddenly no one cared a whit that the maker of Marlboro cigarettes also marketed Jell-O and Kool-Aid.
Those of you in marketing (a staggeringly high percentage of the VDB demographic, actually) know this move well: bring in a neutral created term, built from partial syllables with vaguely positive connotations.
Which brings us to Entergy, owner/operator of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant, the safety record of which has become something of a running joke over the last year.
As we’ve reported at various points over that same year, Entergy is involved in a multi-stage attempt to transfer corporate responsibility away from the parent company, and in so doing, to rebrand the entire effort, moving away from the whiff of incompetence and mendacity that now drifts in when the name “Entergy” surfaces in conversation.
That effort is now seriously upon us.
In a press release last week, Entergy announced the creation of not one, but two new companies: “Enexus Energy Corporation,” which will eventually own Entergy’s six unregulated nuclear reactors, including Yankee, and “EquaGen LLC,” a joint venture between Entergy and Enexus which will operate those same plants.
Confused yet? That is, of course, the point.
Under the new dispensation, Entergy will be removed not once, but twice from the activities and liabilities of Vermont Yankee. Activists will need, perforce, to concentrate on EquaGen to influence daily practice, and Enexus to press long-term issues like transparency and decommissioning.
Corporate spokesman Rob Williams, according to industry scuttlebut, will be known henceforth as “Equabob.”
To take EquaGen as a case in point, we should offer the industry explanation of the created term first:
“The goal for the joint venture naming was to capture an identity that would stress the company’s track record of safe nuclear operations and its expertise in leading the industry in a new direction. EquaGen (ekwa-jen) gets its origins from the words ‘equity’ and ‘generation.’ EquaGen stands for a company focused on providing world-class safety, operations, security and productivity.”
The stunning 2007 cooling tower collapse
It’s worth noting that this mass of gibberish comes from the very high-priced shop of an “international brand architect” based in California, the RiechesBaird Company.
We don’t know about you, but if we were looking for someone to rebrand our rapidly aging nuclear operation, we might select a catchier bidder than “RiechesBaird.”
But be that as it may, the new brand names would seem to fit Entergy’s pressing linguistic needs: they are vague, they are built of positive partial syllables, and best of all, neither of them is “Entergy.”
It’s interesting, though, to consider the lengths to which RiechesBaird has gone to control the pronunciation of Equagen, which might well be pronounced “EEK-wa-gen,” if the corporate press release hadn’t specifically instructed otherwise. This fixed pronunciation, of course, is designed to enshrine the word “equity” in the minds of those who find themselves using the new word.
And “equity,” for a progressive state like Vermont, is all good.
But you have to wonder how it figures, in any way, shape or form, into the corporate planning of any of the three E-themed shells now encompassing Vermont Yankee. Yes, everyone has an equal right to purchase the power produced by the plant. But equity exhausts its usefulness as a concept at that point.
But that’s the genius of RiechesBaird. A wave of their cologne-scented hands, and suddenly “equity” is all we talk about when we talk about Yankee.
Back in November we broke a story that was initially dismissed, and then covered with some alacrity by the rest of the Vermont media: Maggie and Arnie Gundersen, two very articulate critics of Entergy and Vermont Yankee, released a white paper with some very striking conclusions, chief among them that Entergy’s Decommissioning Fund was woefully lacking. Back then, we slugged our post, “The Gundersen Report Cometh.” It was some hot stuff.
Today, we’d like to update that headline to something a little more current: “The Gundersen Report Cometh, and Kicketh More Than a Bit of Entergy Ass.”
Arnie, in yellow, left, discusses corporate mendacity with Gorty Baldwin at last year’s Hamburger Summit
What changed? Yesterday, the Vermont House acted (81-58) on the Gundersen’s warnings, and voted to require Entergy to put up either enough cash or a sufficient line of credit to decommission the plant and return it to “greenfield” status.
Not “Safestor,” mind you, but “greenfield.” Which is to say that Vermonters should be able to use the site once it’s decommissioned, rather than drive in a huge circle around it for 75 years or so.
“The legislation, which has passed the Senate, would direct the Public Service Board, if it approves the corporate restructuring, to make sure the new owners guarantee there will be enough money in the fund ‘for complete and immediate decommissioning.’”
Terri Hallenbeck has a nice write-up, with more details. But one thing to note: the margin in the House was far from veto-proof. And they don’t call Jim Douglas the Man From Entergy for nothing.
But what a tasty electoral issue that veto would provide. Or would, if Democrats had a candidate. Want to know why VDB is constantly pushing for candidates to declare early? Look no further.
Maggie Gundersen, Hamburger Summit, 2007
It’s not just that declaring early leaves time to unsettle and out-organize an entrenched incumbent, although that’s the primary reason. It’s also that a declared candidate allows you to manage that entrenched incumbent in the year leading up to the election, to help move him or her to your policy positions.
Will Pollina’s Progressive candidacy be enough of a curb to make Jim Douglas do the right thing in this case? Only time will tell.
But for now one thing is absolutely certain: Maggie and Arnie Gundersen came to play.
Well, this whole issue has us waxing nostalgic for the Audio Dream Theater trilogy that we turned out last year with sound wizard Alex Ball and aspiring voice deity Neil Jensen. 
