Scott Brown's campaign manager was so hated in VT that both repubs

[cali]

and dems ended up repudiating him and he had to leave.

Brown is running a really ugly campaign while doing his nice guy shtick. The ugliness is captained by one Jim Barnett, a Karl Rove protege.

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Shortly after arriving in Vermont, the independent Vermont newspaper Seven Days reported: "There's more than a wee bit of Dubya's guru Karl Rove in the spunky 28-year-old Vermonter... And he brings with him a Rovian taste for the venomous politics practiced in Foggy Bottom." The Burlington Free Press noted: "While professing to be a political pragmatist, Barnett is an unabashed believer in all-things-Bush." That apparently includes Bush's reliance on underhanded tactics, as Barnett's work in Vermont quickly drew attention for its nastiness, alienating people on both sides of the aisle.

Bruce Post, a former state director for a Republican U.S. senator from Vermont and policy director for a Republican Vermont governor, sent the Burlington Free Press a scathing letter about Barnett. Post wrote that "that the ill-spoken Barnett is to Vermont politics what a pebble is inside a hiker's boot. For a limited time, you can tolerate it, but after a while, the stone becomes so irritating that you have to remove it before going on." He went on to call Barnett "such a clone of Karl Rove." Post would know -- he noted in the letter that he had "once worked" with Bush's mastermind. One Vermont political reporter asked: "Doesn't Post realize that such comparisons make Barnett's head swell?"

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In an embarrassing episode, Barnett called Clavelle "an angry socialist" and a "left-wing extremist" and gave a reporter a 15-year-old news clip and claimed that Clavelle participated at a rally celebrating the Sandinista rebels. Nobody in Vermont bought the attack. "Vermont is too small. We all know each other and consequently no one really believes Peter Clavelle is a Sandinista in disguise," a University of Vermont professor told the Free Press. Observers at the time described Barnett's tactic as "red-baiting," and Douglas himself told a reporter that Barnett "made a mistake. I've had a frank discussion with Jim and he understands how I feel," Douglas said.

Then there was the time Barnett attempted to plant a false story in the Free Press that "was clearly designed to destroy the integrity of a leading Statehouse environmental lobbyist." Vermont environmentalist Warner Shedd noted that the attack "comes under the category of very dirty political tricks," adding that Barnett was "trying to discredit a person who has an excellent reputation for integrity at the State-house." Barnett again got caught in the crosshairs following actions by two Republican staffers for the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2002 to 2003 to infiltrate Democrats' confidential computer files and shared them with the media. The behavior was widely condemned, and Republican U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch referred to it as "unethical conduct." Yet the website of the Vermont Republican Party, which Barnett was heading, linked directly to a location where visitors could download the stolen e-mails.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-lux/jim-barnett-scott-brown_b_1555730.html?ref=media&ir=Media