Margolis: Scott Milne is letting the parade pass him by

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Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.

And now for an inside look into the Scott Milne for governor campaign.

That is, of course, the campaign of the all-but-officially-endorsed candidate of the Vermont Republican Party, which began June 12 when Milne, the 55-year-old Pomfret businessman, said on a radio program that he would seek the GOP nomination to run against incumbent Democrat Peter Shumlin.

And two weeks later, the campaign is …

The campaign is …

Let’s see. There must be a campaign around here somewhere.

After all, two weeks is plenty of time to … well, let’s say to formally announce a candidacy, like maybe in front of the Statehouse, with a band playing, banners flying, a few Republican legislators singing your praises and bumper stickers being handed out.

It doesn’t take much to put that together. A semi-skilled political operative could do it in a few days.

OK, the band signed up in just a few days might play a little off-key. But at a political rally, who cares? James Levine and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra are probably not going to be available, anyway. So get Pop McGillicuddy and his oom-pah-pah orchestra and be satisfied.

So far, though, no formal announcement, no bumper stickers, no band.

Or how about announcing that a campaign manager has been hired, a polling firm retained, a lease signed for a spiffy storefront headquarters on State Street?

Nope, not yet.

Then let’s try a website. Google “Milne for Governor,” and you get … nothing.

So try the Vermont Republican Party website. Sure enough, under “About,” the website has a link to ‘Candidates,” and then a link to “State Wide,” a click on which takes one to … to … to Lt. Gov. Phil Scott, the only statewide (or “State Wide”) Republican officeholder, who does have a campaign website.

So is there no Milne for Governor campaign?

There certainly is.

For one thing, there’s a phone number, although the one available from Fairpoint’s Directory Assistance is not the new one.

Then there’s Facebook, where there is a “Scott Milne for Vermont Governor” page “for Vermonters & US Citizens to show their support, Network and to assist Scott Milne’s quest for The VT State House.”

(The upper case ‘N’ is in the original, as is the absence of a preposition before ‘Network,’ presumably used as a verb. Among the resources the campaign seems to lack is a proofreader.)

As of mid-afternoon Wednesday, the page had recorded four “likes.” Call it a work in progress.

To be sure, that day he said he would run, Milne issued a news release in which he said he would run “a spirited, but unconventional, campaign,” and so far he has certainly lived up to the unconventional part, even if the spirit is not yet apparent.

But “unconventional” is not a synonym for either “foolish” or “doomed.” In that same news release, Milne said he would “kick-off his campaign around the state’s many Independence Day celebrations,” which is by no means the worst political strategy. Fourth of July parades attract large crowds who are accustomed to seeing political signs and hand-shaking candidates, just what a little-known candidate needs.

Conventional political wisdom holds that a little-known candidate has wasted two weeks of precious time by making himself all but invisible to the public after announcing that he would run. And despite its bad reputation, conventional political wisdom is more often right than wrong. That’s how it gets to be conventional.

But a good case can be made that a candidate who makes his decision to run at the last minute and who’s never won an election ought to prepare a campaign organization and a campaign plan quietly, where he’s less likely to make a fool of himself, and quiet preparation and planning seems to be what Milne has been doing.

“I’m going about this methodically,” he said in an interview Wednesday morning. “I got a late start but I’m putting the pieces together, getting ready for a strong July and August. I will have a team in place and a formal announcement ready for the Fourth of July. The website is coming up fairly soon.”

Milne knows he’s not well-known, and plans to devote the summer to getting better known.

And however inexperienced he may be as a candidate, he showed that he knows how to get in a pretty good political jibe at Shumlin.

“The difference between myself and my opponent is that when my website comes up, it will work, and it’s not going to cost any taxpayer money.”

Neither, of course, does Shumlin’s campaign website. Milne was referring to the Vermont Health Connect website, very expensive and still not working as planned.

Unlike many Republicans, Milne continues to stop well short of totally trashing Shumlin’s ambitious universal health care proposal. Though he no longer calls himself an “agnostic” on the Shumlin plan (he said his mother, a former legislator, quickly convinced him to drop that approach, asking “what exactly does ‘agnostic’ mean?”) but he said he is “clearly for universal (health care) coverage” for all Vermonters, and will look at the details “with an open mind.”

Here and elsewhere, he said, his challenge to Shumlin will be based “not on ideology but on management.” One of Shumlin’s biggest failures, he said, was his decision not to meet the Legislature’s deadline for providing the details on how he would finance his universal health care plan.

Milne’s strategy here is both risky and potentially effective. The risk is that many leaders in Milne’s own party have profound ideological differences with Shumlin, and their enthusiasm (and fundraising) for Milne may wane if he does not express some of their ideological sentiments.

But in a state where ideological conservatives are a distinct minority – and where the botched performance of the health care website has raised doubts about the administration’s competence – arguing that the incumbent simply is not doing his job very well could win support from centrist voters.

Milne said the governor has also failed to deal with the “linkage” between maintaining school quality and holding down property taxes, a problem that would be more easily solved, he said, “if we had an economy that was creating jobs, in the small business sector especially.”

Whether attacking Shumlin’s education and economic policies can restrict itself to “management” and not get involved with ideology is questionable. At some point, Milne would have to demonstrate not only that Shumlin’s approach is not working, but why his would work better. And it won’t be easy to argue that the state with the second-lowest unemployment rate in the country has a weak economy.

But there does seem to be a Milne campaign, silent though it has been since its inception, and one with a strategic plan that is at least intriguing — Milne said he will have a formal announcement on or right after the Fourth of July. It will probably not be at the Statehouse, he said.

He didn’t say anything about a band.