Could everybody please calm down?

Apparently not. If present trends continue, before Vermont’s campaign for governor ends, at least one of the candidates, several of their aides, and perhaps an innocent bystander or two are going to be overcome by palpitations, acute angst, fainting spells, or delirium.

The last of which has already surfaced.

In, just to take one example, the apparent inability (or disinclination) to accept the fact that when people speak extemporaneously they don’t always say exactly what they mean.

So in a radio studio on Monday, morning,  in the first debate between the candidates, Republican Brian Dubie, asked how he would balance next year’s budget, said, “we’re going to have to look at our programs and target the most vulnerable.”

Target the most vulnerable? The man is mad! Under Dubie the streets would be cluttered by freshly homeless crippled old paupers who had just been denied their food stamps and low-cost pills after their public housing units had been sold to be developed as luxury condos.

Or maybe he flubbed.

People misspeak, you know, especially when they’re talking into microphones without referring to notes or a prepared text. His campaign quickly explained – quite plausibly, because no politician would say otherwise – that he meant he would look at programs and protect the most vulnerable, just as he had said earlier in the debate.

Plausibly? Democrats don’t care about no stinkin’ plausibility.

“This is a difference between me and Brian Dubie,” Peter Shumlin said at a news conference a few hours later. “While Brian will sacrifice the most vulnerable citizens in order to give tax cuts to the wealthiest, I will continue to find the balance between fiscal responsibility and compassion.”

Of course he will, So will Dubie. So would any candidate. What’s important is where each candidate will find that balance.

You’d think Shumlin would know better because just a couple of weeks ago he got the same treatment from some Republican politicos and commentators (though Dubie was not one of them). That’s when Shumlin said, describing Dubie’s policies, “you can’t cut taxes at the same time you’re reducing spending.”

Sure you can (perhaps you must). But, as with Dubie’s “most vulnerable” goof, that’s not what Shumlin meant. He meant that it’s irresponsible to propose cutting taxes without specifying where you’d cut spending to make up the difference.

But if only over-reacting to slips of the tongue were the worst of it, It is not. Consider the press release emailed to reporters shortly after that debate, the one headlined, “Peter Shumlin caught in Lie.”

Lie? Wow! That’s tough talk.  So tough that most news organizations in the state either ignored the allegation or reported it in passing. So toxic is the word “lie” in politics that it is rarely used, if often implied. So a candidate will accuse an opponent of being “economical with the truth,” or “not being entirely candid,” or even “making things up,” to avoid using “the L word.”

Yet there it is right in a Dubie press release, though atop a statement not by Dubie but by his campaign manager, Corry Bliss. In fairness to Bliss, he might be correct. At the very least, Shumlin “did misspeak when referring to a sales tax percentage” during the radio debate, as acknowledged in a statement by his campaign manager, Alex MacLean. And he might have otherwise misstated the facts about what he did and did not do about taxes in the 1990s.

But a person who is confused about events of 15 or 20 years earlier is not necessarily lying about them. The “lying” accusation is so rare and so harsh that the burden of proving it falls on the accuser. It is a burden Bliss does not meet.

He cites two sources to support his contention that, rather than being an advocate of sales tax cuts, Shumlin’s “record is one of raising taxes and either calling it a ‘fluke’ or lying about it.”

The first is a short article in the Vermont Tiger web site on August 22 by conservative writer John McClaughry, challenging an earlier Shumlin claim that he had helped reduce the sales tax. Not so, said McClaughry, who claimed that on the contrary, Shumlin was among the legislative leaders who kept the five percent sales tax permanent instead of letting it revert to four percent.

McClaughry might be absolutely right, though he does his cause no good by suggesting that in 2003, when Shumlin was not in the Legislature, the reason Gov. Jim Douglas got the sales tax increased to six percent was “to hold down property tax rates for two or three years,” a most debatable analysis.

But the important thing for today’s discussion is that, right or wrong, McClaughry provides no evidence – references to newspaper stories, bill numbers, recollections of other observers. This is entirely within his province. He’s a polemicist (an honorable profession) not a disinterested observer. But his article provides no support for Bliss’s allegation that Shumlin lied.

Neither does Bliss’s other citation, a March 1, 1991, Associated Press story in the Free Press which does confirm Bliss’s claim that in the Legislature that year, Shumlin proposed an amendment “that sought to prevent income tax surcharges from expiring.” But a legislator could have proposed such an amendment once, and then voted to cut taxes several times earlier and later.

Besides, that amendment (it failed) was to a tax increase bill, and according to campaign manager MacLean, Shumlin voted against that bill, as he voted against a tax increase bill supported by Democrats including Gov. Howard Dean in 1993. (The Legislative web site does not provide roll call details for bills that far back, so MacLean’s assertion could not be conclusively confirmed).

In short, Bliss has asserted but not demonstrated that Shumlin “lied” when he “claimed he led the charge in the Legislature to cut the state sales tax and income tax in the 1990s.”

Those are Bliss’s words, not Shumlin’s, who is not quoted in the Dubie campaign press release. The honest way to call a person a liar is to quote the exact words of the alleged lie, and then to demonstrate the dishonesty of those words. Making the allegation any other way is…well, this site will never (or almost never) say anyone lied. It’s such a harsh word.

So let’s just say that the allegation is “ethically challenged,” a term used advisedly, because the Dubie camp hardly lets a day go by without claiming that Shumlin is Vermont’s “most ethically challenged legislator,” a finding based on…well, essentially on nothing, as will be discussed anon.

Tomorrow, candidates have to file their campaign finance reports, revealing how much they’ve collected, and from whom. How much they’ve spent, and on what.

Though money and politics is the subject of the bulk of today’s post, those filings will not be discussed here Friday. As regular readers know, the intent of this web site is to cover the stories nobody else is covering, and almost every major news organization will send a reporter to the Secretary of State’s office Thursday afternoon to get the info.

All those reporters can read and do arithmetic at least as fast and as accurately as this one, who is happy to defer to them.

Sen. Bartlett: Enough money?

This one will, however, get copies of the filings, look them over, and discuss them Monday if there is anything worth discussing that the other folks have not already covered.

Speaking of politics and money, a housekeeping note and an appeal. The News Guy, who has a life outside these postings, is going to take some time off in August (exact dates to be determined). Aside from the time off, many of the 39 days and (roughly) ten posts between now and the August 24 primary will be devoted to covering that primary, primarily the contest for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

This means going to campaign events, which in turn means driving around the state, which in turn means buying gasoline and occasional lunches and possibly a motel room or two if an important event ends too late and too far away to drive home safely.

It means, in short, spending money, and despite those advertisements you see over on the right, the News Guy’s major source of revenue is reader donations. Readers who have not donated are urged to do so.

Just Look over on the right under “Pages,” where it says, “Donate. It’s easy.

Speaking of politics, money, and news coverage, kudos to the Burlington Free Press, which, first of all, did not run last week’s very bad Associated Press story about the race for Auditor as if there were two, not three, major candidates. Then on Monday, the Freep had a front page story centering on the other guy, Doug Hoffer, who is challenging State Sen. Ed Flanagan for the Democratic nomination. (The winner will take on Republican incumbent Tom Salmon).

One of the papers that did run the bad AP story, the Brattleboro Reformer, then used the AP’s corrective (but not correction; it didn’t acknowledge the earlier story) about the Democratic primary, and also had a staff-written story about Hoffer.

But the Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus and the (jointly owned) Rutland Herald only appended a semi-correction to a letter to the editor, promising to do better in the future and saying “(T)he Associated Press was in error by not including Doug Hoffer in its article.”

Yeah, but you were in error, too, fellas. Editors ought to know who is running for major statewide office.

Okay, now to those campaign finance reports, even though we don’t yet know who raised how much.

Except that we sort of do.

One may take, as the saying goes, to the bank, that Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie, the only Republican seeking the governorship, will report having raised more than any of the five Democrats. A couple of weeks ago, one of Dubie’s senior campaign staffers mentioned the figure of $800,000. Sure, he could have been bragging. But that would have been foolish. The exact figure will be known to all the world Thursday evening. The smarter move would have been to low-ball the expectation. Dubie has probably raised more than 800 grand.

As to the Democrats, it’s all but certain that Secretary of State Deb Markowitz will report raising more money, and Sen. Susan Bartlett less, than their three competitors. Markowitz’s campaign aides have not thrown around a number, a la the Dubie camp. But they are obviously operating under the assumption that their candidate will lead the money parade as she did in the earlier filing last summer.

Bartlett effectively acknowledged she’d be last, issuing a statement Tuesday afternoon conceding that after the numbers are in the “conventional ‘wisdom’ will be that my candidacy is in last place.”

But Bartlett argued that “there have been many Vermont elections in which the highest spender hasn’t been successful, I’ve won some of those elections and plan to do it again in August.”

Leaving the three guys, Sens. Doug Racine and Peter Shumlin and former Sen. Matt Dunne, perhaps in that order.

Or perhaps not. Dunne will no doubt have the least of the three, but Shumlin has bought television advertising time while Racine has not, perhaps meaning that Shumlin has more money to spend.

Or just that Racine is biding his time and saving his money for later. Amy Shollenberger, his campaign manager, said the campaign was “working on  a paid media strategy for sure,” and exploring “different options.”

Which could mean that the campaign isn’t sure it will be able to afford much TV time.

“We’re running a really grass-roots campaign,” Shollenberger said.  “It’s different from some of the others. We relying on a lot of volunteer help.”

So say officials of all the Democratic campaigns except Markowitz’s.

“The ground game in this race is going to be very important,” said Shumlin Campaign Manager Alex MacLean. “It’s going to be mail, phone calls, and canvassing, because we’re targeting such a small number of people.”

Kevin  O’Holleran of the Dunne camp had a similar message, saying the candidate who “comes in with the most money and is able to buy a whole bunch of TV time isn’t going to be successful. We’re building up more of a grass roots campaign.”

All that could be the denial and/or desperation of losers.

Or, in this case, it might be true.

Because the turnout really is likely to be quite small. Political Scientist Eric Davis suggests no more than 60,000 voters in the Democratic Primary. And the estimates go down from there, down to as low as 30,000.

Just to put this into some context, in 2008, Democratic candidate Gaye Symington got 69,534 votes finishing third in the governor’s race after running one of the most bumbling campaigns ever. Not just ever in Vermont. Ever anywhere. Yes, that was a general election, Still, her total would have to be considered the rock-bottom Democratic vote, a rock-bottom not likely to be reached next month.

If these low estimates turn out to be accurate, reaching the “masses” (even just the Democratic-voting masses) may be less important than mobilizing committed supporters, appealing to two or three socio-political niches, and getting loyal voters to the polls.

It would be kind of like “the old days”(“old” meaning back about 1980) when primary campaigns worried less about TV ads than about “identifying your ones and twos” (committeds and likelies) and arranging for enough high-school seniors and bored housewives to drive them to the polls.

An old-fashioned election. How Vermontish. It’s the political equivalent of eating local food, fixing up vintage houses, wearing fleece vests to dress up. It might work, Susan Bartlett is right. More money does not necessarily lead to victory.

But not enough money necessarily leads to defeat. The Democrats may be about to find out how much is enough.