Today’s post is a report on campaign finance which also appeared on the VT Digger web site.

But first a note: The News Guy’s intent was to include with Wednesday’s post a photograph, taken by himself, of the view from the Dunn property, the subject of that post. Owing to technological deficiencies (of, as it turned out, the person, not the system) the photo did not get attached. Subsequently, it has been (we can all learn) and readers are encouraged to scroll  down to take a look.

It’s campaign time, and all around Vermont the candidates for governor are on the job and on the road.

The five Democrats have appeared together at close to 40 forums, or “debates” as they are not quite accurately called. (Lt.Gov. Brian Dubie, assured the Republican nomination, declines invitations to participate). All of the contenders sit for interviews with reporters, speak to various gatherings, and even do a little street-corner glad-handing.

But there’s one thing none of them stop doing—raising money.

On their web sites, on their cell phones as they head from one event to the next, early in the morning over breakfast or late at night over whatever, the candidates are asking for money. They ask supporters, friends, family, acquaintances, businesses, unions, interest groups, and lobbyists, who have a vested interest in contributing at least a little bit to any potential winner.

The fund-raising beat goes on all around Vermont, and beyond. Though all the campaigns like to brag about how they rely on the small contributions of individual Vermonters, they also raise as much as they can out of state. Sen. Peter Shumlin was in Boston the week before last at a fund-raiser featuring appearances by best-selling authors Stephen King and John Irving. Earlier this month, Dubie went to Washington for a fund-raiser hosted by Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.

And how much are all these candidates raising?

Patience. The answer to that question is not far off. The candidates have to file their campaign finance information with the Secretary of State’s office on July 15. Then the world will know how much they have raised and spent since the last time they had to file—a year ago, July 15, 2009.

No, that was not a typo. Under Vermont law, candidates have to file their “finance disclosure” forms on July 15 of the odd-numbered year, and then “40 days before the primary election (that’s this July 15) and on August 25, September 25, (and) October 25.”

That’s all until the election. The law says that “not later than 40 days after the general election, candidates must file a final report which lists a complete accounting of all contributions and expenditures.”

But by then, whoever has won has won.

According to Mike Wessler of the National Institute on Money in State Politics, Vermont’s campaign finance reporting requirements are by no means the most lenient in the country. But they aren’t among the most stringent, either. In fact, they are among the weakest in the Northeast.

Were these candidates running in New Hampshire (all this info from the National Institute’s web site), they would have had to report their financial information last May and November, once this August, twice each in September and October. The candidates in Maine have six reports due from last summer until Election Day, New York candidates have to file eight times, and Massachusetts statewide campaigns must file 10 financial reports in the election year alone, after a year-end report last December.

Not long from now, according to some experts, all this filing deadline business might have become a quaint memento of the past. The technology already exists, they say, to make public campaign contributions as they come in and expenses as they go out.

“There’s no reason you couldn’t have all online contributions and expenses in real time,” said Gabriela Schneider, the communications director of the Sunlight Foundation in Washington.

By and large, Vermont’s campaign finance laws are among the nation’s weakest. Corporations and unions are allowed to contribute to candidates, which is one reason the recent, controversial Citizens United v. F.E.C. U.S. Supreme Court decision has no impact on state races in Vermont (though one day it could affect elections for the U.S. Senate or House).

None of this means that there is a lot of campaign money hanky-panky going on in Vermont. In fact, one reason the laws are relatively mild is that, historically, nothing harsher seemed necessary.

“In Vermont, there’s so little corruption and there’s so little money, there’s been no need for tougher laws,” said Kevin Ellis, who has been following Vermont politics for years as both a reporter and now one of Montpelier’s most influential lobbyists.

Not everyone agrees with Ellis’ assessment.

“I don’t buy that argument,” said Gayle Zatz of Vermont’s chapter of Common Cause. “Things happen here. They happen on a smaller scale than in New York or California, but they definitely happen. Because they’re smaller, we don’t know about them.”

She could be right, but so vague an argument is unlikely to persuade many voters. One of Zatz’s colleagues, who did not want to be identified, pointed to the close connection between the Douglas administration and Entergy, the owner of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.

“If we delved into Entergy’s contributions,” she said, “we might find out why” the administration supports relicensing the plant.

And what was the extent of Entergy’s contribution to Douglas’ campaign?

According to researchers at the National Institute on Money in State Politics, it was zero.

At least as far as we know.

But there’s a lot we don’t know because Vermont’s campaign finance laws are so weak. Unlike most states, Vermont does not require contributors to list their employers or their professions. So unless someone can get a list of the names of all officials and employees of Entergy (or any other company or interest group) it’s all but impossible to know how much that company and its supporters contributed to a candidate.

Out at the Helena, Mont., headquarters of the National Institute (or its easier to remember nickname “followthemoney.org”) researchers try to subvert Vermont’s lack of transparency.

“I look for patterns,” said Anne Bauer, the researcher who handles Vermont. “I look for multiple contributions from certain towns or addresses. I might Google a name to see if I can find a connection. It’s good old-fashioned research.”

But in the case of Vermont, she can find only a little more than half of the employers or professions of the contributors.

In addition, she said, there are many ways to hide the real source of contributions. A company can urge its workers to contribute to a political party, which in turn can make unlimited contributions to Vermont candidates. Republican Party committees were Douglas’s biggest donors, contributing about 18 percent of his campaign funds.

None of this means that Vermont is a sinkhole of political corruption. Kevin Ellis was right. There is “so little money” in Vermont politics relative to, say, national politics, that the potential conflicts of interest involved are not nearly comparable.

Members of Congress need (or think they do) millions for their re-election campaigns, and are constantly raising money. Much of that money is raised by lobbyists who host fund-raising receptions, arrange direct mail contribution drives, or arrange for their clients to do the same. When that lobbyist visits a congressional office, then, it is often the lobbyist who is the dominant party, the member of Congress who is the supplicant, ready to do the bidding of the lobbying firm and its clients.

It doesn’t work that way in Vermont. To begin with, few Vermont legislators have offices for lobbyists to visit. More important, running for the Legislature in Montpelier is cheap. With the exception of Chittenden County senate races, legislative campaigns in Vermont are likely to cost between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars. With a little help from the family and close friends, many a lawmaker can finance his or her own campaign, meaning the legislator is not beholden to the lobbyist seeking support for a pet issue.

There is, though, one exception to the state’s low-budget politics: the governor. Running for governor, even in Vermont, has gotten expensive. The candidates need money, meaning they are tempted to take it from anywhere they can get it. Jim Douglas spent more than $1.2 million getting re-elected in 2008. Already this year, a Dubie campaign aid boasted that the lieutenant governor’s campaign has raised $800,000. If true, Dubie is on track to spend perhaps $2 million before the election.

In last year’s filings, Democratic Secretary of State Deb Markowitz had raised more than $190,000 for her campaign for governor. Her campaign manager, Paul Tencher, said the campaign would cost at least “several hundred thousand dollars” up to the Aug. 24 primary. With all the Democrats likely to raise at least a few hundred thousand dollars, total spending for the 2010 campaign will probably top $3 million, and while the winner won’t necessarily by the one who raised the most money, he or she will have raised a lot, and will owe something to his or her fund raisers.

The traditional political response is that, in the words of former Gov. Howard Dean, “Money gets you access; it doesn’t get you the decision.”

When it comes to politics and governing, though, access is worth a lot. No doubt the contributors think it is worth what they pay. The traditional political response to pleas for tighter campaign financing laws is that transparency is all the public needs. Possibly true, but real transparency is not, right now, what the public gets.

Almost all the politicians, professors and journalists who took a look at all that money the Democratic candidates for governor reported raising last week concurred that the big bucks presaged a more competitive race next year, and therefore a longer and more expensive election season ahead

They were sort of right.

Yes, the early start and generous donations to Democrats do indicate that Gov. Jim Douglas (assuming he seeks a fifth term) faces a sterner test than he did in his last three cake-walk re-elections.

But you know what? Even if he didn’t, the 2010 governor’s race would be longer and more expensive.

Nothing can be done about this trend, meaning there is no point in decrying it, as some of the more foolish politicians and commentators did. Vermont in many ways is different from most of the rest of the country; money has not been as major a factor in elections here as in the bigger states.

But no state is an island, and Vermont can not remain immune from reality. Even here, money helps win elections, and every year it has become more important.

That’s why more of it gets spent every year, competitive race or no.

In 2006, Douglas spent $828,038 to whump Democrat Scudder Parker, who spent $633,847, according to the account of followthemoney.org, which compiles state and local campaign finance statistics. Last year, Douglas spent $1,232,216 to beat Democrat Gaye Symington (who spent $485,000) and independent Anthony Pollina (only $250,000).

Nor was it just the governor’s race that got more expensive. In 2006, all Vermont candidates for statewide office and the Legislature spent $3.5 million. Last year they spent $4.9 million.

In almost every case, the candidate who spent more got elected

So all a candidate has to do is spend more money to win the election?

No, as proven right here in 2006, the year big-money politics really came to Vermont when Republican Rich Tarrant spent $7,315,854 (much of it his own), only to lose the U.S. Senate race by a large margin to Bernie Sanders.

But Tarrant, who had never before run for office, turned out to be a very rich man but a very poor candidate. He hired a crew of outside “expert” political consultants who didn’t understand Vermont and launched a series of television commercials featuring harsh personal attacks on Sanders. They backfired. But that only proves that spending a lot of money stupidly can’t guarantee victory. Had Tarrant combined big spending with political smarts, he would have come closer.

He still probably wouldn’t have won. But that’s because Sanders raised and spent a lot of money, too. Because Tarrant was spending so much, Sanders went all out to raise money from all around the country. He ended up with $5,544,466, still quite a bit less than Tarrant, but he didn’t need as much; he was already well-known and popular. Besides, 2006 was a bad year for Republicans all over the country.

The lesson of that campaign was that while a candidate doesn’t necessarily need more money than his opponent to win, he needs enough. Enough to pay a top-flight staff, organize a get-out-the-vote operation, and (especially) to buy enough television advertising to get his message across.

‘Enough,’ in most cases, means ‘a lot.’

And sometimes, more money can mean victory. It may have meant victory for Douglas in his first race for governor, in 2002.

The late polls that year showed that then-Lt. Gov. Doug Racine (now a Democratic state senator and running for governor again) had a small lead over Douglas. When Douglas won, the conventional wisdom was that the pollsters had goofed.

They may have gotten a bum rap. Racine’s lead was small and the polls showed quite a few voters still undecided a few days before the election. It’s just as likely that, for three reasons, almost all of them broke to Douglas.

Reason one was that there was a nationwide (remember, no state is an island) swing to the GOP in the final days of the campaign. Reason two was that Racine wasn’t really saying anything except that he was a decent, enlightened fellow, and it was his turn. Decent and enlightened he seems to be, but it’s never a candidate’s turn. He has to convince the voters.

Douglas was saying something. He was saying, “Jim = Jobs.” Not true, as it turned out; even before the Recession, private-sector job growth under Douglas was anemic. But perhaps effective.

Reason three may have been money. Douglas had more if it, and he kept spending it on radio and TV ads and automated phone calls to voters right through election day. Racine couldn’t compete.

This gets a bit delicate. The obvious suggestion is that voters – yes, even Vermont voters — who were undecided, even some leaning toward candidate A, can be persuaded to vote for candidate B by a few 30-second or 60-second ads repeating a meaningless slogan. Are the American people sheep?

No. Sheep don’t make political decisions. But people are persuadable. “Men are convertible,” Emerson said. He meant they could become better, including more rational. But conversion can go either way, and there are a lot of people spending a lot of money to “convert” folks to buy products, hold opinions, and support or oppose candidates.

Advertising works. If it didn’t, businesses wouldn’t be spending at least $150 billion a year in the U.S. alone to convince consumers to buy their brand. Nor would politicians and interest groups have spent more than $2.6 billion trying to convince voters to support their causes and candidates last year, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group.

All that money doesn’t persuade most voters. Partisans, ideologues, and well-informed independents know who they’re going to vote for and why. But many – maybe most – swing voters aren’t all that well informed. They tend to decide on the basis of personality more than policy. They are the one who are the targets of most of the political ads.

Which is where most of the campaign money goes. Candidates also hire workers, pay for targeted mailings (often to raise more money), finance their travels from town to town to make speeches. But in almost every competitive race, a substantial majority of the money goes for advertising – on radio and over the Internet, but mostly on television, because those commercials are both more expensive and more effective.

What this means is that in many close races the pivotal voters are the least informed, the least interested, the most receptive to hucksterism which can be meaningless if not downright dishonest. There are no truth-in-advertising laws for campaign ads. That would be unconstitutional. So the candidate with the biggest bankroll – and the fewest scruples – has a big advantage.

It is considered impolitic to discuss this phenomenon because it demeans the American people – or at least a sizeable subset thereof. Obviously, politicians never want to suggest that the American people are anything but wonderful, and for some reason most commentators have gone along. Perhaps for good reason. Suggesting that at least some of the American people are clods is probably not effective marketing.

But impolitic or not, it is true. Some American voters are clods. Some American elections are effectively determined by the flightiest, the most ignorant, even the most mean-spirited segment of the electorate. After all, is it not the couch-potato who is most vulnerable to the distorting appeal of the clever commercial?

Furthermore, big spending and flashy (and perhaps dishonest) advertising could play a part in next year’s Democratic primary, even though primary voters tend to be well-informed, and most of them are at least comparably partisan.

But there is not much ideological difference among the prospective Democratic candidates, all of whom are centrist liberals. The campaign, then, could get personal and divisive, just the kind beloved by political consultants who write and produce campaign ads.

And don’t suppose that centrist liberals are any less inclined to create misleading or dishonest campaign ads than anyone else. That’s why it was important that Secretary of State Deb Markowitz is raising the most money, but also that Racine seems to be raising enough to counter any attacks on him that her campaign decides to put on the air.

No assumption here that things are going to get nasty. After all, this is Vermont, where that kind of politics hasn’t worked.

But don’t think it can’t. All that money is going to be used, most of it on television, for good or for ill.

Third?

Jim Douglas finished third?

Take a look. There it is in black and white, In the latest political contribution reporting period, Douglas’s campaign raised $91,203.

That’s less than the $102,416 raised by State Sen. Doug Racine, who is one of the Democrats who wants Douglas’s job. It’s a lot less than the $190,737 raised by Secretary of State Deb Markowitz, who is another one.

Enough numbers. Numbers are booooring. In and of themselves, campaign finance reports are booooring. But sometimes there are stories behind the numbers. Sometimes there are even mysteries, which of course are not boring. This is one of those times.

We have here two questions and two mysteries. The questions apply to the Democrats, and we will get to them presently. The second mystery is really not so much a mystery as a secret, the secret of why campaign money is so important. It is a secret kept though the answer is in plain sight, but never discussed by the insiders, including political journalists.

We’ll defy the fraternity rules here, but thanks to the other mystery, it looks as though we won’t have time or space to do it today. So this will be a two-part exercise, to be completed Monday.

OK, let’s get to that first mystery: Does the (relatively) paltry Douglas report indicate that the governor might not seek a fifth term next year?

Probably not. It’s early. So early that there is still time for State Sen. Susan Bartlett, who says she is running but has raised no money, to become competitive. So early there is time for State Sen. Peter Shumlin, who has not yet said he is running, to announce his candidacy and get into the game.

So certainly there is plenty of time for Douglas to raise enough money by next year at this time to give him a huge financial advantage over whichever Democrat wins the primary (which won’t even have happened a year from now; it’s scheduled for September 14, 2010).

Douglas himself noted that the Democrats need more money earlier than he does, because Racine and Markowitz (at least) will be running against each other in that primary, while Douglas will be unopposed for the Republican nomination.

“They now have more money to beat each other up with,” he told the Barre/Montpelier Times-Argus.

So let’s beware the danger of over-interpretation. The danger in reading the tea leaves is that they may contain no message at all.

And yet….and yet…something seems out of kilter here. There is no doubt that had he really wanted to, Douglas could have raised much more. He has two overwhelming advantages: He’s the incumbent and he’s a Republican. Incumbents can always raise more money, and so can Republicans because, even in overwhelmingly Democratic Vermont, most of the overwhelmingly rich people are Republicans.

Conventional political wisdom holds that you take every advantage you can. Coming in with the biggest financial report gives you a few days of news coverage as being the top dog. Douglas could have raised $250,000 or even more, effectively sending a message to the Democrats saying ‘all right, children, you’ve had your fun. Here’s how we play in the big time.’

Not only is this conventional political wisdom; it is Jim Douglas’s method of operation. As a candidate, Douglas has been relentless. Even when he’s been 20 points ahead, his campaigns have attacked his opponents. Just think of the attack (deserved but unnecessary) on Gaye Symington last year after she refused to disclose her family’s financial information. For Douglas, passing up a chance to make himself look stronger than his opponents seems almost out of character.

But pass it up he did. It isn’t just that he didn’t raise that much money; it’s that he reported only 101 contributors. It’s as if he wasn’t trying.

So far, Douglas has not had a good year. Until this past spring, he had suffered but one political defeat in his life, failing to unseat U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy in 1992. Since then he’s won every election he’s contested. As governor, he never got everything he wanted, but for six years he could block everything he didn’t want.

Now, after two of his vetoes were over-ridden, he faces a Legislature which not only has more Democrats, but shrewder and more aggressive Democratic leadership. He is also facing at least two more years of being governor when the state has no money. Generally speaking, being governor is fun when the governor can cut taxes and increase spending. Doing the opposite is clearly less fun.

It would hardly be surprising, then, if at least every now and then the words, “Why do I need this?” ran through this governor’s head. He’s just starting his year as head of the National Governor’s Association. Not a bad stage from which to take a final bow.

On the other hand, he’s only 58. And of the three candidates, only Douglas has spent money on actual politics (as opposed to logistics and organization) all year. Last month, according to his financial filing, he paid Public Opinion Strategies, the prominent Republican polling firm in Alexandria, Va., (creator of the famed “Harry and Louise “ads against the Clinton health care plan) $8,000 for “survey research.”

He’s also raising money. The same day he paid New Hampshire fundraising firm SCM Associations $4,000 for “fund-raising expenses.”

So he’s in the game. For now.

As to those questions about the Democrats. The first question is whether both Markowitz and Racine raised enough. They answer is yes. Obviously, raising more is better, but she didn’t raise that much more. Not enough to establish herself as a clear front-runner.

She has more cash on hand right now — $128,635 to roughly $82,000. But Racine, who didn’t start serious fund-raising until after the Legislative session ended, has enough in the bank, and has been raising money at a fast enough clip to be competitive.

But Markowitz had many more donors, almost all of whom can make more contributions to her campaign.

Another question is whether Markowitz was smart in trumpeting her fund-raising success on the liberal blog Daily Kos.

“I wanted to post a diary here to introduce myself and to announce the spectacular results of our first filing,” she wrote, before giving the web site’s millions of readers her campaign email address.

Smart, because it could help her raise more money and make her appear the established liberal favorite?

Or not-so-smart because it gives opponents, especially the Republicans, ammunition to attack her as being too far to the left, even for Vermont?

Actually, Daily Kos proprietor Marcos Moulitsas is less an ideologue than a pragmatic Democrat. But the web site’s strong stance against the Iraq war has linked it in the public mind with farther-left groups such as Moveon.org. Not that being strongly anti-war is a political liability in this state. But the blogosphere’s vibes have their negative connotations.

The biggest question of all, needless to say, is whether bringing in the most money assures ending up with the nomination, and then with winning the office. So far, Racine has done better than Markowitz at getting endorsements from legislators and other top Democrats. He has had the energy. She has the money.

Which is more important? Why? Why won’t anybody talk about it? Why is the importance of campaign money increasing in Vermont?

Tune in Monday.