Blue Mass Group

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Brown Hires Campaign Manager

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Politico reports:

Thirty-five year old Vermont native Jim Barnett will serve as Brown’s campaign manager, the senator’s campaign announced Monday.

A former adviser to Gov. James Douglas, Barnett also served as chairman of the Vermont Republican Party at age 27. Last year he ran Rob Simmons’ unsuccessful Senate campaign in Connecticut.

Anyone know Barnett?

He ran McCain’s New Hampshire primary campaign in 2008. He advised the phlegmatic former Vermont Governor Jim Douglas. He doesn’t seem to have been associated with the clowns who botched the Charlie Baker or Kerry Healey, which is a good sign for Brown. But his Connecticut candidate Rob Simmons didn’t win in his primary bid against WWE’s Linda McMahon.

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Comments

  3. Thanks to David’s Mad Dog tip:

    Gov. Douglas, as you know, found himself in unexpected hot water when Republican Party State Chairman Jim Barnett, the Gov’s designated hit man, accused Clavelle of having once exhibited pro-communist tendencies.

  4. The article says he has worked on “multiple efforts in the Northeast,” but doesn’t saying anything about any experience in the unique world of MA politics.

    VT and NH are not MA. If Brown, Inc really hired someone with no Mass experience to manage the effort to get elected to a full term, it could be their first big tactical blunder.

    • remember Lenny Alcivar? That didn’t work out too well. The big question is whether, once Brown inevitably fires Mad Dog, he will repeat Baker’s mistake by hiring the team who can lose any race – Rob Gray, Tim O’Brien, and the rest of the Healey/Baker gang.

  5. As already noted, Barnett managed Connecticut Rep. Rob Simmons’ unsuccessful primary campaign for the U.S. Senate during the last election cycle.

    Rep. Simmons received a six-figure campaign donation from the coal industry in the summer of 2009, and two months later, he wrote in his campaign blog that he had been wrong to support cap-and-trade as a way to reduce carbon emissions.

    When Democrats seized on the issue, Simmons’ campaign manager Barnett ably stepped in to clarify his candidate had NOT flip-flopped on cap-and-trade as a result of the campaign contributions. Rather, the change of position had occurred a few years earlier when Rep. Simmons, having lost his House seat temporarily, was between electoral gigs and was filling the time as the “State Business Advocate” for the CEO Roundtable. The cap-and-trade flip-flop therefore had nothing to do with the coal industry’s largesse. Those silly Democrats.

    I think Scott may be able to use somebody like this.

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