Sen. Leahy (from his web site)

Until now, Vermont’s 2010 political diagnosis has been stable:

1–The governor’s race would be competitive, but Brian Dubie looked like the early front-runner;

2—Democrats, pretty much maxed out in the State Legislature, might lose a few seats, but would easily keep control of both houses;

3—Sen. Patrick Leahy and U.S. Rep Peter Welch, both Democrats, would waltz to re-election.

No longer. Last week’s sweeping decision from the U.S. Supreme Court in the Citizens United v Federal Election Commission case has altered politics everywhere, even in Vermont. It would be an exaggeration to say that Leahy and Welch are in trouble. It would be accurate to say that their re-elections are no longer certain.

Thanks to that ruling, corporations will be allowed to spend as much money as they choose on political campaigns. Top executives can flood the airways, cables, and post offices with as much advertising as they think their boards and shareholders will allow.

That could be quite a lot, especially for industries whose profit margins depend on what the federal government does – or does not.

That’s almost all of them. But just as an example, let’s take the oil industry. It has oodles of interactions with the government – land use, air and water pollution, anti-trust, tax preferences, and more. It is clear that the industry does not like most of Pat Leahy’s votes – he got a 100 percent rating last year from the League of Conservation Voters — and would be quite happy were he replaced by another senator, preferably a Republican.

The year before last, the five biggest oil companies earned $100 billion in profits. As prices fell last year, so did profits, but they remained in the tens of billions. Halfway through the year, for instance, Exxon-Mobil had earned more than $8 billion. The final 2009 figures have not been reported, but it’s reasonable to assume that the entire industry earned at least $50 billion.

It would not be irresponsible for the leaders of that industry to devote one percent of their profits – half a billion dollars – to political campaigns. It might even be irresponsible for them not to do so. How they would allocate the money remains uncertain, of course, but it’s not unreasonable to suppose that they would divide it evenly between races for the Senate and the House of Representatives.

That’s a quarter of a billion bucks for this year’s 36 Senate races. Until now, corporate political operatives, limited to spending the money specifically contributed to their companies’ political action committees, would have avoided states like Vermont, where the outcome seemed certain. But now that they can spend their own (meaning their companies) money, they can take a flyer on other states.

Of the 36 seats, 11 are in safe Republican (meaning mostly pro-oil industry) hands in the South and West. With $250 million to spend, the oil leaders could decide to get involved in all the other 25 states, spending $10 million in each.

And that’s one industry. Considering all the others who would like Leahy replaced, and who have money to spare, there could easily be $50 million spent in Vermont this year on behalf of Leahy’s Republican opponent.(So far just Len Britton, a relatively unknown lumber store owner; see if some other Republicans start expressing interest).

To be sure, Leahy has raised a lot of campaign money, with $2.56 million in the kitty according to the latest information from the Federal Elections Commission. And he will have more. Labor unions were as liberated as corporations by the Citizens United decision, and there are deep-pocket Democrats in Hollywood and on Wall Street.

But combined, their pockets are not nearly as deep as those on the other side. Leahy and Welch this year, Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2012, could easily be outspent 2-1.

Well, so what? After all, U.S. Senate seats can’t be bought, can they?

Good question, and the one that no one seems to want to answer. Not President Barack Obama or the others (not all of them Democrats) who have assailed the court’s decision. The problem is that answering the question risks insulting the American people, implying that they are sheep, easily fooled by glitzy – and often dishonest –TV commercials.

Those of us who are not running for anything have the luxury to consider the possibility (because all possibilities should be considered) that the American people deserve to be insulted, though probably no more than any other people.

No, they are not sheep. Sheep make no decisions. People do. But they do not (and this is what everyone, and perhaps especially Americans, resist acknowledging) make all their decisions as completely autonomous actors unaffected by impersonal forces and skilled, calculated, persuasion. “Men are convertible,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said, and were they not, businesses would not spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year trying to convert them to buy this product or that brand.

And unlike cereal and car ads, political commercials are not bound by truth-in-advertising laws. Kellogg’s may not tell us that Post cereals will give us the rheumatizz, nor General Motors warn us that Toyota brakes will fail unless they can prove it. But candidate Smith can tell us that candidate Jones is a child molester or a peeping Tom whether or not it is true. The remedy here, as it should be, is at the polls, not in the courtroom.

Those of us who believe in democracy have to agree with Lincoln that it is not possible to fool most of the people most of the time. These days, though, it may be possible to fool just enough of the people on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

There is an honest case to be made against any office-holder, including Leahy. But against an incumbent who has gotten more than 70 percent of the vote the last two times he ran, do not expect his opponents or their “independent” supporters to confine themselves to making an honest case.

And do not think that Vermonters are any less vulnerable to hucksterism than anyone else.