(Editor’s note: VTDigger has profiled the four other leading candidates for governor in recent weeks.)
BURLINGTON — Between bites of a cheeseburger at Handy’s Lunch counter on a recent Thursday, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Lisman said the image of him as an out-of-state, out-of-touch Wall Street man is as false as claiming Velveeta is the same as Cabot Cheddar.
“I did demolition over there,” Lisman said, pointing vaguely toward Lake Champlain. “And I did roofing up on Pearl Street for some guy. I’ve painted stuff, been a dishwasher, busboy, waiter, bartender, cabbie.”
“I don’t need to work 30 jobs — is that what he’s done? — to understand how things are,” Lisman said in a jab at the “Everyday Jobs Tour” undertaken by his primary opponent, Lt. Gov. Phil Scott.
Lisman’s platform of economic revitalization was created, in part, by brainstorming with small business owners, and the lunch at Handy’s allowed him to showcase the spot as the quintessential small business success.
The quaint joint on Maple Street has been around since 1945, in the third generation of ownership by the Handy family. The seats around the U-shaped counter swivel, hot coffee is always ready to pour, and besides the daily specials, politics is always on the menu. The food is good and cheap — two eggs, toast and coffee for $5.25 — and the Handys say they are training their kids to run the place for the next 60 years.
Lisman, 69, grew up a mile or so from the popular lunch spot, in the city’s Old North End, where he lived with his brother and their parents on North Willard Street. He attended Burlington public schools and graduated from the University of Vermont. He said he was able to afford the tuition only because of the discount his mother received doing clerical work at the school.
“I wasn’t born wearing this shirt or these pants,” Lisman said, sporting jeans and a buttoned-down dress shirt. “My father was a school teacher, and my mother was a secretary at UVM. It wasn’t something she wanted to do.”
While Lisman now lives in the affluent suburb of Shelburne and boasts a net worth of more than $50 million after a long career on Wall Street, he harkens back to his modest Vermont roots.
In an effort to expand opportunities at UVM, Lisman set up a scholarship fund in 1991 named after his father, which has supported more than 400 working-class students. However, unlike the Democratic candidates, who have all presented plans to help students afford college, Lisman’s focus has been more on the public school system and what he sees as a need to make cuts as the student population has declined.
Lisman said his parents prioritized education. They never complained about their financial situation, though he described a household with meager savings and few amenities. He said he loved growing up in Vermont, sledding in the winter and swimming in Lake Champlain in the summer.
As a child, Lisman said, his father imparted the lesson that “there is dignity in work — it doesn’t matter the kind.”
Bruce who?
Lisman is running for governor in a primary against Scott, an archetypal Vermonter. The Thunder Road race car driver owns a construction business and talks about making Vermont more affordable with an up-north accent plucked straight from the Groton State Forest.
In the few polls available, Scott holds a big lead over Lisman.
Lisman has never run for public office. He got his political start with the largely self-funded political advocacy group Campaign For Vermont.
While Lisman is widely viewed as the underdog, his campaign staff is confident and says the candidate has traveled more than 26,000 miles and talked to more than 6,000 residents.
Lisman said he’s putting in 100-hour weeks on the trail. He told supporters, “I’m working like a dog for you.”
His campaign manager, Shawn Shouldice, said the effort is data-driven, with nightly phone banks and intense get-out-the-vote efforts.
In addition, Lisman has bombarded the television airwaves and bought newspaper and radio ads as part of an aggressive media strategy. He has largely self-funded his primary campaign, and has put more than $1.5 million of his own fortune on the line.
To boost name recognition, he typically wears a “Lisman for Vermont” sticker on his jacket. The silver Honda Pilot he is shuttled around in also features a number of large campaign stickers.
Lisman said he is confident he will win the Republican primary Aug. 9, although he acknowledged that often voters don’t recognize who he is or know what office he is running for.
He reflected on comments from people he met during July Fourth parades who would say, “‘I love you, man, but I’m voting for Sen. Leahy’ or, ‘I think you have got the right message to be lieutenant governor,’” Lisman said and laughed.
Mary Jane Krebser, who ate alone at the white Handy’s counter, recognized Lisman as he entered and told him he had her vote.
Krebser, who is retired, said she was sick of the longtime leadership of Gov. Peter Shumlin and House Speaker Shap Smith, both Democrats.
“My biggest thing right now is just a change from the way our pattern’s been going for the last few years,” she said. “The other people I’ve listened to so far, I don’t see much of a change.”
Lisman is pitching himself as the change agent. His slogans include “A new direction” and “I’m not the usual guy, and I don’t do the usual things.”
At Handy’s, Lisman seemed at ease, exhibiting “the usual guy” characteristics.
He told a few jokes and stories from his childhood that were well-received by the patrons, before talking about baseball with owner Earl Handy.
While Lisman has taken pains not to be painted as a New York or Wall Street caricature, he’s a Yankees fan.
“That could cost him the election,” Handy joked. (He’s a Yankees fan, too.)
Lisman shot a look of feigned concern, then laughed.
“In the cars I used to be in as a little kid, everybody rooted for the Red Sox and listened to Red Sox games on the radio,” Lisman said. “So I said, ‘Everybody is doing that, I want to do something else.’”
Lisman often pitches himself as a governor who would know how to find the best people to hire. After discussing his favorite Yankees announcer, Paul O’Neill, Lisman inquired about the best way to watch Yankees games in Vermont, since the team’s YES network is unavailable in local cable packages.
After hearing about various apps and video streaming boxes, Lisman settled on the online Major League Baseball television app as the best idea.
“I believe in the power of ideas,” he said. “I never thought of myself as the guy who came up with great ideas, but I’d sit around a table and listen until I heard the great idea, and I could turn it into something.”
Asked about his transition from business to politics, Lisman was candid, saying, “I’m still improving.”
“Certainly, in the early stages of the campaign I didn’t feel like I could speak to somebody like you, or that gal down here, with passion about something I didn’t completely understand,” Lisman said, pointing to Krebser, his fan at the end of the counter. “I’ll never know 100 percent of anything.”
Lisman often shows the awkwardness on the trail of a newcomer. While he has a glistening white smile that would be the envy of any elected official, he seems not to have figured out how to use his hands. In speeches, they move awkwardly, and he often clutches the microphone during debates as tightly as O’Neill held onto his bat as a player.
Lisman has slipped into the role of politician more easily in other ways. He’s charming and a good listener. And while he often decries sloganeering, he has developed a number of effective catch phrases to contrast his candidacy with Scott’s.
His most recent ad campaign portrays Scott and Shumlin as joined at the hip, politicians who were “elected together, served together, failed together.”
While Lisman has blue-collar shades, his campaign has also displayed his affluence. His only fundraiser was held at the Burlington Country Club, a $75-a-person affair featuring wine, salmon and talk of golf.
Asked why he held the fundraiser at the posh club, Lisman matter-of-factly offered this response: “We organized it in the best place for easy parking, so it just happened to be here.”
Financial magazine titan Steve Forbes spoke in support of Lisman at the fundraiser, saying he would rein in spending and take a free-market approach to health care that “can provide a model for other states.”
Lisman’s policies include many stump points of a typical Vermont Republican. Chief among them is his promise to limit budget growth to 2 percent over the next few years to bring spending in line with revenue.
Lisman said that, as governor, he could find efficiencies by dumping the state health care exchange, auditing state contracts and the Medicaid rolls, and streamlining government.
In asserting that he could find real savings in Medicaid, Lisman points to states like North Carolina, where auditors found the potential for $180 million in savings over a biennium.
He’s been one of the most vocal critics of Shumlin’s tenure and thinks Republicans in the Legislature have been too cozy with the overwhelming Democratic majorities in both chambers.
He labeled the school district consolidation law, Act 46, “a package of misery” and called for a two-year moratorium on renewable energy projects as well as a strong ethics package.
Lisman’s full platform can be viewed here.
CAMPAIGN FOR VERMONT
A number of Lisman’s ideas were developed at Campaign for Vermont, an organization he consistently claimed was not a springboard to a statewide run for political office. Many observers assumed that it was.
The entity, which is billed as nonpartisan, was routinely criticized for having a conservative slant. Past board members said Lisman worked to incorporate a wide array of voices.
“What people don’t get about Bruce is he doesn’t strictly follow an ideology,” said Cyrus Patten, the former executive director of Campaign for Vermont, who now works for a super PAC aimed at getting big money out of politics. “He tries to make the best decision he can with the information he has.”
In meetings, board members were encouraged to present creative ideas. In his role at the head of the table, Lisman would help steer the conversation but often sat silent and absorbed information.
“He did an awful lot of listening,” said Stefanie Pigeon, a founding board member. “He would often pause and listen, then interject with a few ideas. I enjoyed his leadership skills. He wasn’t overbearing. He was trying to process all the different ideas.”
Ed Morrow, a former board member and founder of the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, said he felt that most discussions were politically neutral and focused on promoting objectively good ideas. He said he took issue with some of the news releases that were critical of Shumlin, saying, “They were a little too snarky.”
“The critique of steps being taken in the Shumlin administration seemed to have some partisanship,” said Morrow, a Democrat. “But actual policies that were developed and printed out seemed to be reasonably nonpartisan.”
Morrow and others described Lisman as a sharp thinker, with a true love for Vermont. Morrow said that while he and Lisman sometimes discussed policy ideas over email, the Republican was at only one of the four board meetings he attended.
Tom Pelham, a co-founder of Campaign for Vermont who served under Republican and Democratic governors in various state finance roles, said Lisman is intensely curious, a vacuum for the best information.
“He was out and about, talking to a lot of people about a lot of different things,” said Pelham, who is not endorsing a candidate in the primary. “He has friends in low places and high places. He’s a sponge.”
WALL STREET
Lisman’s friends in high places include some of New York’s leaders of finance.
He spent decades on Wall Street, working up the ladder from a file clerk to co-head of Bear Stearns’ Global Equities Division, which he steered for 21 years. After the company folded into JPMorgan Chase during the 2008 financial crash, Lisman headed equities there for a year before retiring in 2009.
Lisman has said his division played no role in the 2008 financial crash and that other divisions were involved in bundling subprime mortgages. The shaky investments led to the firm’s collapse, and sounded the first pop of the housing bubble and the beginning of the Great Recession.
Lisman said his chief role at Bear Stearns was managing a team of 2,000 employees who researched and recommended the best international stocks for clients’ hedge funds.
In reporting on the economic crisis, Lisman is cast as a peripheral player.
In her book “Street Fighters,” which chronicles the last hectic days at Bear Stearns, reporter Kate Kelly depicts the firm as run by tough, driven executives. Testosterone drove the place, secrecy was coveted, and sexism pervaded the office, she reported.
Lisman’s brief appearance is in the anxiety-ridden hours before the JPMorgan purchase.
In her description of a Saturday meeting on the matter, Kelly writes that most of the men were “wearing khakis and blazers,” an outfit Lisman frequently wears on the campaign trail.
“The last few days have been very difficult for everybody,” Alan Schwartz, the company’s chief executive, told Lisman and his colleagues. Schwartz then informed them that the JPMorgan merger “has to be done this weekend.”
Lisman also shows up in a 2008 Wall Street Journal article by Kelly that describes the immediate fallout at Bear Stearns as the firm’s subprime mortgage funds were crashing in value and major clients were frantically shifting assets elsewhere.
Kelly writes:
“Bruce Lisman, the usually taciturn 61-year-old co-head of Bear Stearns’s stock division, climbed atop a desk near his fourth-floor office and demanded his traders’ attention. ‘Let’s stay focused,’ he bellowed. ‘Keep working hard. Bear Stearns has been here a long time, and we’re staying here. If there’s any news, I’ll let you know, if and when I know it.’”
The top-of-the-desk story has been used by Lisman’s critics as an indication that he was out of touch. Lisman has said the story was overblown and that he was only doing what anyone would have done in a similar situation, to calm the troops.
Lisman said he witnessed greed on Wall Street, describing the 2008 financial crash as the result of “wretched excess.”
“There’s lots of people to blame in there, including, I’m certain, colleagues of mine,” he said.
Lisman also said he learned valuable lessons at Bear Stearns, ones that he said will make him a good governor.
Chief among them: Recruit the best talent and listen to their ideas. Lisman also said a business approach to management of state government can yield efficiency, adding that he can find 1.5 percent in savings through a stringent budgeting process.
“The reason why I speak of what I did in New York is to show that I have skills and experiences that the others might not, in terms of managing sophisticated enterprises,” Lisman said. “Everything can be managed. Talent does matter, technology does matter, and how you service your client — in this case Vermonters — matters a ton.”
While Lisman has largely self-funded his campaign, he has received thousands from former New York colleagues.
He received $2,000 from Edmund Hajim, a former investment banker at Lehman Brothers who is the president of Diker Management. Richard Ader, CEO of the asset management firm U.S. Realty Advisors, and Neal Garonzik, former vice chairman of Chase Manhattan Corp., each gave Lisman $4,000.
Lisman also received $4,000 from New York lawyer E. Miles Prentice, who served as the chairman of the Center for Security Policy’s board of directors for a number of years. The center has been frequently criticized for engaging in anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, including promotion of the notion that a top Hillary Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, is an undercover agent for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Lisman also netted $1,000 from Richard Harriton, the former chairman of the securities clearing subsidiary of Bear Stearns, who, according to The New York Times, was barred from the securities industry in 2000 after defrauding investors of $75 million.
Scott has frequently portrayed Lisman as out-of-touch with Vermont values and points to what he describes as Lisman’s disingenuous and sleazy campaign tactics.
Scott’s first primary ad, unveiled last week, hits Lisman on his media strategy, which often asserts that Scott and Shumlin share a close bond.
“What might pass for business as usual on Wall Street has never been in line with Vermont values,” Scott says in the ad. “While my opponent’s misleading ads are disappointing, Vermonters know the truth.”
Lisman is following a similar political path as Rich Tarrant, a wealthy entrepreneur who also highlighted his rags-to-riches rise and whose ability to pour millions into his own campaign was attacked during his 2006 Senate race against Bernie Sanders.
Tarrant often said, “I will never apologize for success,” a refrain Lisman also uses.
“As a wealthy candidate in Vermont, you are starting with one hand tied behind your back,” said Patten, the former Campaign for Vermont executive director. “We don’t have a strong tolerance for that.”
Pigeon, the former board member, said Lisman isn’t like other Wall Street people she has met throughout her career in the insurance industry.
“I don’t find him to be anything like those people,” Pigeon said. “Many of those people are not very approachable or transparent. Bruce is approachable, low-key.”
Pelham said the liberal Democratic wave that turned Vermont politically blue in the 1960s also brought an anti-establishment disdain that is applied to the affluent.
“Vermont’s culture is not overly impressed with wealthy people,” Pelham said. “In fact, I think the track record, politically, is that if you are wealthy and have done well in life that somehow it is suspect. But there are people who made money and worked hard to make the money.”
Pelham urged voters to look deeper than the simplified Wall Street label.
“I wish people were as curious about Bruce as Bruce is about them,” he said.
In an email to VTDigger, Kelly, who now covers Wall Street and hedge funds for CNBC, said that Bear Stearns was known for hiring people with humble origins, like Lisman, in order to help cultivate a scrappy business culture.
“Ace Greenberg, one of Bear’s biggest culture carriers and its CEO for 15 years, had a hiring philosophy that revolved around so-called PSDs: people who were poor, smart and had a deep desire to be rich,” Kelly said. “He was also known for exhorting employees to recycle paper clips.”
Greenberg’s successor as CEO, a former scrap-iron salesman named James Cayne, was, according to Kelly, “the first Wall Street chieftain to see his company-stock holdings rise to $1 billion in value on paper.”
Every Mother’s Day
When Lisman announced his gubernatorial run in October, dozens of cud-chewing calves sat around him at the Green Mountain Dairy Farm in Sheldon.
At the kickoff event, one of Lisman’s two daughters, Maggie, spoke of losing her mother at a young age and the pressure it put on her father.
He took “on the role of both a mother and a father,” she said. “I can only imagine how difficult and daunting it must have been to him as a single parent to raise two young girls while dealing with his own grief. But he embraced it without question.”
Every Mother’s Day, said Lisman, who is now remarried, he receives a card from his two daughters.
Besides Lisman’s daughter, a number of business leaders and friends spoke of the former Wall Street executive’s endearing qualities.
The setting of the sawdusty barn seemed to be another subtle reminder that Lisman isn’t a flatlander. Like the Handy family who run the lunch counter, the Sheldon farm’s operator, Bill Rowell, comes from a long line of farmers, an ancestral history of working the soil that dates back to 1637.
Rowell didn’t fret about Lisman’s many out-of-state years on Wall Street. “He pulled himself up by his bootstraps and proved he was capable of doing something,” Rowell said.
He had kind words about Scott as well as Lisman and said he hoped a primary could sharpen the candidates for the general election.
“You got to understand something,” Rowell said. “Unless you want to see another Democrat in the Statehouse, you better be supporting a good, healthy primary. That’s a basic root of politics.”
Lisman has succeeded in provoking Scott with negative ads and press statements. A series of direct mailers tying Scott to Shumlin visibly upset the lieutenant governor at the state’s Republican convention in late May, where he castigated Lisman.
“I can’t give him a pass on this,” Scott said at the convention, throwing a Lisman mailer on the floor. “At least he’s showing me his stripes.”
Although Lisman has been supportive of Scott in the past, he’s amped up criticism throughout the primary. He often accuses Scott of sloganeering, and he wouldn’t answer whether he thought Scott was a smart guy.
“I don’t think he’s an issue guy,” Lisman offered.
Finishing his cheeseburger and vitamin water, Lisman took a last swipe at Scott, accusing him of plagiarizing his plan to eliminate the state’s tax on Social Security benefits.
The man who often talks of finding the best ideas seemed uncomfortable sharing his own.
Asked if he would give Scott credit for implementing his ideas if elected governor, Lisman paused.
“No, we don’t give him credit,” Lisman said. “I think, uh, well, I don’t give him credit for borrowing ideas.”
