Look, we had a lot of fun with John McCain back during the 2008 election cycle. Which was okay, then: he was still a powerful Senator, with a 45% chance of winning the White House. But it’s 2010 now, and the man is confused, and sad and rudderless, and VDB won’t stand for any jokes about his latest political ad, foregrounding the word “danged.” We especially can’t countenance any humor at the expense of the line, “The plan’s perfect . . . it’ll work this time.” Because laughing would be Wrong. Especially wrong because steely border commando Senator John McCain is One of Us, rather than one of them, dorky baseball cap or no.

Quick show of hands: Is there anyone out there who thinks that Jim Douglas will reach an agreement on taxes and spending with the Democrats, no matter what Democrats bring forward, when vetoing the budget will a) allow both Jim and Brian to portray Dems as rapacious tax-and-spenders in need of Dubie’s oversight; b) force several of Dubie’s competitors to stay in Montpelier as opposed to campaigning; c) give the Governor a chance to replay the disastrous veto override of last session, this time with a much more partisan election-year dynamic; and d) complete a pattern of Lucy/Charlie Brown-style “negotiations” that Douglas has engaged in every year for the last four terms?

We thought so. VDB too.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: the race for the Chittenden County State Senate is the toughest in the state, shy of a statewide campaign. Maybe the toughest thing about it? It’s way too large to cover door-to-door, and way too small to attract pollsters. So how do you know when you’re making headway, given that no one has cast a ballot yet? You know you’re making headway when Shay Totten says so. This week’s Fair Game takes a look at the field and argues that this campaign now “leads the pack.” Which is fitting, for a campaign that adopted the sled-dog team as mascot a year ago this month. Long race, fast team. Check it out.

You have to love it: a neighborhood that borders the train tracks in Essex Junction decided it was time for a major spring cleaning, and after intense negotiations with Amtrack, they got an agreement to shut down all rail traffic for one hour this past Sunday. All traffic halted. Boom. Amtrack calls this “Track Protection,” this grant of time to the local community. Amazing that the Junction got that time, and typical of the Junction that they didn’t waste it.

Of course, operatives on the ground had contacted the State Senate campaign in advance, and we’d gone into full-scale volunteer mode. The network was activated. The big ugly gloves were pulled out. We got our game faces on.

And at the scene we hooked up first with Dave Crawford, the Village Manager, for a little serious talk about how the Village is building a revitalized rail system into their plans going forward. Great guy, Dave. Big into trains.

Jim Douglas rides into town this coming week to celebrate the infusion of money to upgrade tracks north to St. Albans, but the Village has another plan to complete an upgrade to Burlington. A brilliant idea, we think.

More and better and faster rail, that’s our motto.

And then at the stroke of one, Track Protection kicked in, and the volunteer contingent fanned out. It was a fantastic crew, maybe a quarter from our campaign and three-quarters from the neighborhood bordering the rail yard. Wonderful people, and very dedicated to reclaiming this spot. Maybe even expanding to a bike/walking path.

Because really, do neighbors ever look any more cool and heroic than when they’re pitching in to make the larger neighborhood new again? Not likely.

Do kids ever look more worthy of eventually inheriting the planet than when they’re tending to it with their parents?

Not to brag, but I scored the best find of the day: an extremely sharp pocket knife, a green plastic-handled knock-off of the Gerber Mini-Magnum. Found a couple of other things that cannot be mentioned in a family campaign blog, but suffice it to say that the railroad continues to occupy a romantic corner of the American heart.

Even the Swedes got into the picture, good friend Marie in this case, who came early, stayed late, and made her stretch of track as clean as the Swedish countryside. Which is saying something.

And miracle of miracles: somehow we wound up in possession of a photograph of Kathy FitzGerald, campaign photographer, and the woman responsible for the fantastic photos you see here and in other campaign related materials. Many, many thanks to Kathy, for making the picking up of trash seem so photogenic.

Here’s looking at you for a change, kid.

As with drilling in ANWAR, the push to expand nuclear power in the US rests on an industry-driven idea of next-generation technology. Bush liked to say that we could drill in ANWAR and leave no footprints; the nuclear industry likes to say that tomorrow’s nuclear plants will not only be goof-proof, but capable of more or less consuming their own waste, leaving us with plants that can pass the white glove test. Case in point: Westinghouse’s newest reactor design.

The AP 1000 is supposed to be light-years ahead of Vermont Yankee’s reactor in terms of basic safety; its unusual containment structure is designed to allow “air flow” between the concrete shield wall and the stainless steel liner.

Of course, “air flow” and “radioactivity” are not normally concepts you want to pair in a single sentence, and sure enough, turns out there’s a tiny potential problem with the design: small metal baffles direct the air flow, but could also potentially collect moisture, leading to what scientists call “rust,” leading to what are referred to technically in the industry as “holes.”

And since the whole structure is in effect a 130-foot high chimney, radioactivity could then be vented directly into the atmosphere at levels potentially ten times the NRC limit.

Or so says Arnie Gundersen, the guy who called the cooling tower collapse and revealed the extensive underground piping at Yankee, the existence of which plant officials had repeatedly denied.

Reading this latest write-up at one of the New York Times’ blogs, VDB could only imagine a certain breakfast scene down in Louisiana, home of Entergy Corporation:

A BREAKFAST TABLE, fine linen and silver, at the edge of a terrace overlooking the ocean. The CEO is multi-tasking: checking stock valuations and overnight spikes and troughs, browsing the New York Times business section, and spooning poached TURTLE EGG absently into his mouth. The wind ruffles his hair lightly.

The turtle egg is done to a turn. Life is quite good.

And then he sees the DIAGRAM of AP 1000 (CUT TO DIAGRAM), depicting the potentially fatal flaw in design. Camera DOLLIES IN to EXTREME CLOSE-UP, as CEO’s eyes narrow, lips tighten, teeth grit. BEAD OF SWEAT suddenly visible at hairline.

“Gundersen,” the CEO mutters finally, under his turtle breath.

Never let it be said we didn’t climb that extra mile when this election is over. Had a house party out in Jonesville on Sunday, a glorious sunny afternoon, way up the mountain on Stage Road. The address was 1690, in fact, and the air starts to thin out after 1200 or so. But talk about a gorgeous spot.

My hosts, Daniel and Angela, are both poets, Daniel hailing originally from the Midwest and Angela from Dublin. And they live in this spot now where fishers yowl in the night, and bears knock down the bird feeder and then feast on it, holding it upright like an ice cream cone.

And their friends are all concerned, active people, with questions about special education funding, and single-payer health care, and how Democrats can field five major candidates for Governor and yet come together on the day after the election in November.

My friend Erik Filkorn brought his two very cool kids, and they contributed in their own very cool ways: his son blew a duck call as counterpoint through my living room spiel, and his daughter drew this fantastic campaign poster for me, because she really wants me to win.

Thanks much, Daniel and Angela and all who turned out. A very nice time. Lovely, in fact, as the Irish would say.

It started as a glimmer in the eye of one Charity Tensel: why not put together an event for all the online and new media types out there, people who have connected up with the campaign digitally but not physically? Why not reach out to Facebook folks, Twitterites, the digital film people, the bloggers and online marketers. So we decided, why not?

And so yesterday we finally got it together, at the New Moon Cafe in Burlington, what we hope will be the first of a series of casual get-togethers for people interested in the digital side of Vermont’s future.

And in one way, it was like getting the band back together.

We got to hook up with old friends from the early days of blogging, back through the mists of time, circa 2005. People like Haik Bedrosian, my new fellow Commissioner on the Burlington School Board, and Charity herself, who’s back at the blogging with a very nicely designed new template under the name Shatter Nicely.

And people like top Washington blogger Steve Benen, of Political Animal fame, who also happens to double as just another regular guy from Essex. Benen’s latest smash hit? Coining the phrase “Former half-term Governor” to refer to Sarah Palin, a meme that dropped into an SNL skit just a few weeks back. Which is not easy for a meme to do.

And this State Senate campaign wasn’t the only people-powered new media campaign represented: NTodd Pritsky, currently running hard for the House up in Franklin County, brought his youngest by for a muffin. A child raised in the ancient ways of the Grateful Dead, this boy will run all electronic media in Vermont by the year 2025.

Many smaller, nimbler, hungrier digital start-ups represented. Two cases in point: Anna Palmer (left) and her company WinWinApps, facing off against Rich Nadworny of Digilicious, a marketing firm specializing in new and social media. Very smart folks making their way in a very competitive field. And doing it with style.

Matt Goudey, our campaign videographer, doubles as a consultant on computer issues, turns out. Matt and Selene Colburn, campaign social media maven, swapped stories about applications and code and plug-ins that no one else could quite understand.

And we had some folks who were drawn in by other, more traditional media, and God love them: Joel, left, has for no apparent reason read a couple of my novels, and Dan, right, came because he was intrigued by the mailing our campaign sent out to Essex voters a few weeks back. Nice to know that three-dimensional objects still have their place.

Of course, it wasn’t one big electronic utopia.

As mentioned earlier, the online world is a hyper-tough, competitive environment in the Year of Our Lord 2010. So occasionally it’s like a shoot-out at the OK Corral: somebody inadvertantly insults somebody’s operating system or cellphone cover, and things get tense.

Actually Trav (left) and Steve (right) got along just fine, but if they hadn’t, tireless intern Mark (middle) was prepared to throw himself into the scrum.

In all it was a great night, with a lot of conversation about digital access in the state; communication between Montpelier and voters; how the school board, in Burlington and elsewhere, should or shouldn’t communicate, should or shouldn’t use cameras in hallways; and finally, how small digital start-ups can power a resurgance of jobs in Chittenden County, and how we can help them help us.

Thanks to all who helped organize: Rich, Charity, Selene. Thanks as always to star campaign photographer Kathy FitzGerald, for all the fantastic shots, only a fraction of which are shown here. And thanks to all who ate more than their share of muffins, thus saving me and my own family from pastrying ourselves into a stupor.

Look for AWOL II sometime in July.

That’s right. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the coffee shop.

Late Update, 11:15 pm:

Haik has a write-up of the New Moon event up over at Burlingtonpol, and NTodd gives his over at Dohiyimir. That’s what VDB calls rapid response politics.

Brian Dubie is famous for a few things, but most famous for a slack campaigning style. Credit where credit is due: that slack style has worked spectacularly well. Why would those two things both be true, and true simultaneously? Because while Vermont Democrats perennially make an issue of Dubie’s pronounced debate avoidance, the Vermont press corps generally does not. And of course that’s all that matters in matters political: how they are portrayed.

So when Dubie ducked a series of early debates with his potential Democratic rivals, we didn’t bat an eye. It was as business as usual as business as usual usually gets.

But when Dubie finally agreed to accept an invitation, so long as the questions would be posed exclusively by middle-schoolers, our ears perked up. Surely this would get him roundly mocked, and then pressured by the mainstream press to give primary voters due diligence.

But no. It passed essentially unremarked. Until now: Dubie has dissed the middle-schoolers too.

His campaign is making noises about a prior engagement with his family, but make no mistake: gubernatorial candidates place their feet very carefully, and if they refuse to place their feet somewhere, anywhere, it is because that place has been deemed a cost-prohibitive environment.

That is, the negative press from the middle school event could conceivably overwhelm the positive press. Hence now no Dubie.

But here’s the thing: the Vermont press corps knows that this has been Dubie’s style, and they know further that they’ve been at least partially complicit in the past on allowing the Lieutenant Governor to avoid head-to-head match-ups in front of voters. And they will want to make clear, VDB predicts, that this time out of the gate they will hold Dubie to the higher standard.

Which is to say that dissing the 7th graders is the tipping point, especially in that Dubie is running a series of Facebook ads touting the idea that he’s the front-runner.

A front-runner who won’t debate is a huge target, and rightly so. So expect some target practice, and relatively soon.

George Bush Jr. learned the hard way that you don’t diss librarians. Governor Schwarzeneger learned that you don’t diss nurses. And soon Brian Dubie will learn that even a sitting Lite Governor with no primary opposition disses middle-schoolers at his peril.

And high time too.

A reminder about the event tomorrow at the New Moon Cafe in Burlington, from 4-6. We timed it to coincide with getting out of work, being hungry for some sort of small treat and a cup of coffee before you make your way home and deal with making dinner and the kids’ homework and the broken garbage disposal, that sort of thing. And everyone is welcome. And the muffins and the wifi are free. Be nice to say hello and talk over the issues of the day in person.

Let’s imagine for a second that you’re someone who’s been following this State Senate campaign, maybe you’re even a Facebook or Twitter supporter, and yet you’ve never hooked up with us for an event around the County. If you’re a Facebook supporter, in fact, there’s a great chance we haven’t had a chance to talk in person yet. So we’re out to rectify that situation. This coming Thursday, on April 22 from 4-6, the campaign is hosting an event called After Work Off-Line (AWOL) at the New Moon Cafe in Burlington. The idea is to bring together all the digital stakeholders we’ve met over the last year, as well as all the social media types who’ve signed on digitally but whose hands we haven’t shaken in the physical sense.

Should be an interesting group: Facebook folks, Twitterites, bloggers, digital designers and software CEO’s, as well as a few digital filmmakers. Come say hello after work, and sit a spell. The coffee will be hot, the pastry free, and the wifi powerful. You’ll see top political blogger Steve Benen, of Political Animal fame, and blogger turned House candidate NTodd Pritsky, and of course the charming Charity Tensel, formerly of She’s Right.

Oh, and why should people like us unite? Take a closer look at the Vermont download speed map above. Clearly we need to send some sort of message this cycle. Be nice to get together on that.