A little bird sent me a copy of the proposed agenda.  It’s a copy of a meeting agenda for a meeting last night.  I’ve added emphasis to the bit that concerns me:

CARVER COUNTY REPUBLICAN PARTY

AGENDA

Full committee meeting

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Chanhassen American Legion Club

290 Lake Drive East, Chanhassen, MN

Call to order 7:00 p.m.

Pledge of allegiance and invocation

Recognition and welcome to first time attendees

Secretary’s report Vince Beaudette

Treasurer’s report John Kunitz

Annual Convention details and other updates Steve Nielsen

Comments by Rachel Horn, Political Director for Congresswoman Michelle Bachman

Comments by Keith Downey, Candidate for Chair of the Republican Party of Minnesota

Update on early happenings in St Paul by Representative Ernie Leidiger

Consideration of Resolutions

• Abolish the Met Council
• Reject the National Party Rules change that requires delegates be bound by straw vote results on the first ballot for President
• Ask Republican Legislators to rescind their “no new taxes” pledge and enter into a compromise solution in an effort to resolve the national debt crisis

Adjourn and socialize

A couple, of questions, Carver Party People:

1. Did the emphasized resolution pass?
2. Could whomever it is who’s putting this resolution forth kindly tell me if, when you’re buying a car, you start with the price that you’re willing to pay and then move up, normally?

Parts of the MNGOP seem to be stuck on stupid.  It’s dismaying that one of those parts is in bright-red Carver County.

On the one hand, the Minnesota Republican Party has just gone through its worst year since Watergate.  It’s way in debt (although reportedly plugging its way back toward daylight), it’s pretty completely out of power, and its influence outside the conservative Second, Third and Sixth districts is at a low ebb.

Stepping into – or over, really – that mess came Marianne Stebbins and the Minnesota “Ron Paul” campaign.  They played the caucus system like Yo Yo Ma plays the cello; they organized people down to the BPOU caucus level with a level of Operational Security cloaky-daggerism that’d put the Irgun Zvai Leumi to shame.  They won most of the BPOU and CD level offices throughout the state, and…

…accomplished, arguably, their only true mission; they sent delegates to Tampa to vote for Ron Paul; some of ’em were already bagging out on the Non-Paul parts of the party before the confetti was swept up.

To which some “establishment” Republicans replied “We need to eject all the Ron Paulites from the party!” – to which many others responded “well, not so fast”.  While some Ronulans were, indeed, at the party to stump for “Doctor” Paul and nothing else, others – particularly in many 4th CD BPOUs – worked hard with non-Paul Republicans to field good solid campaigns and create GOP activity in areas that hadn’t seen any in recent years.

More on that next week, I think.

Some Republicans – on both sides of the Ron Paul / Non Paul divide – divided the dispute up into “Builders” – people on both sides whose goal is to turn the MNGOP back into a vital force again – and “Destroyers”.

Oddly, a Facebook page called “MNGOP Builders” is, paradoxically, doing a bit of destroying; it’s picked at an awful lot of scabs, especially in the 4th CD (which just removed its chair elected last April on a Ron Paul-movement-approved slate that threw him bodily under the bus as the wheels came off his administration) and CD5 (which elected a slate of Ronulans that have essentially shut the party down in the district).  Oddly, in the battle between “Builders” and “Destroyers”, “MNGOP Builders” is doing plenty of “Destroying” itself.

Now that’s meta.

My friend, Nancy LaRoche – of True North, Freedom Dogs and a longtime CD5 GOP activist – broke the story of the vandalism in CD5.

One of Nancy’s targets, Corey Sax, responded with a blog post attacking “MNGOP Builders” and, oddly and mostly, Nancy.  To which Nancy responded with an acerbic riposte.

So to sum it up:  A party with little money got taken over by a movement with little popular traction, which took over a couple of districts with no GOP tradition (which led the GOP to perform better than expected in a number of districts with little GOP hope – again, more next week), which led to them being attacked by a Facebook Page with no identity and a lady with nothing in her record as an activist to be ashamed of, which led to a counterattack by a District Vice Chair with a long record of activism but representing a slate with little to show for its’ ten months in office, which led to a counterattack by Nancy, who has little patience for this kind of thing.

I think that covers it.

Me?  I’m going to find some Republicans – regardless of who they supported for President – who want to focus on the real enemy.

The Saint Paul City Committee.

No, that’s a joke.  The real enemy is the DFL who, in case you haven’t noticed, are hard at work f****ng up our state.

And in the GOP right now there are a slew of factions:  the Ronulans, the Tea Partiers, Fiscalcons, Socialcons, “Moderates”, pragmatists, Security Republicans and a few others.  And none of them – not even the Ron Paul faction – are strong enough to both change the party and win elections.  None.

One way or another, this party is going to be run – and this state is going to be saved – by a coalition of people from any and all of those factions who are focused on getting stuff done.

Or, y’know, not; it’s entirely possible the GOP will be taken over by people who argue to the death over the inconsequential as the state follows Greece and Portugal and California straight to hell.

One of the reasons the Democrats and media are working so hard to drive a wedge between the “establishment” GOP and the Tea Party is that the Tea Party wins elections and, more importantly, represents the real future of the GOP.

 Haley, a little-known state senator before being elected governor, would never have had a chance at becoming governor against the state’s good ol’ boy network of statewide officeholders. Scott would have been a long shot in his Republican primary against none other than Strom Thurmond’s youngest son. Marco Rubio, now the hyped 2016 presidential favorite, would have stepped aside to see now-Democrat Charlie Crist become the next senator, depriving the party of one of its most talented stars. Ted Cruz, the other Hispanic Republican in the Senate, would have never chanced a seemingly futile bid against Texas’s 67-year-old lieutenant governor, seen as a lock to succeed Kay Bailey Hutchison.

But all those upset victories–all of which at the time seemed shocking–took place because of the conservative grassroots’ strong sentiment for outsiders who campaigned on their principles, and not over their past political or family connections. Even a decade ago, party officials would have been more successful in pushing these outsider candidates aside, persuading them to wait their turn. (In Rubio’s case, it almost worked.) Now, in an era where grassroots politicking is as easy as ever thanks to the proliferation of social media, more control is in the hands of voters. And contrary to the ugly stereotypes of conservative activists being right-wing to the point of racist, it’s been the tea party movement that’s been behind the political success of most prominent minority Republican officeholders.

That, of course, is not the current left and media (ptr) narrative about the Tea Party.  The media, and its rhetorical camp followers in the Leftyblogosphere Stupid Caucus, have been banging the “Teh Tea Partie is teh ignerent racisst” drum for close to four years now.

And in that time, the GOP overtook the Democrats in the number of elected minorities at the state level.

This is potentially good news, in the long term.

If the GOP deserves to keep it going.

Looking at Boehner’s performance this year, I’m seeing an obstacle or two.

To: Speaker Boehner
From: Mitch Berg, Unruly Peasant
Re: Another Stupid Decision

Speaker Boehner,

You really are hell-bent on pissing away whatever power you and your caucus have, aren’t you?

Hint:  You’re going to need more support than just Hugh Hewitt and Lori Sturdevant in 2014.

That is all.

Let’s take a look at history.

1985 – Ronald Reagan, who (let’s remember this) governed his entire eight years with Congressional minorities, had to finally cut a deal with the Dems.  The deal with Tip O’Neill involved two dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in tax hikes.  It led to the “Reagan Tax Hikes” that liberals blather about (they were much, much smaller than his tax cuts, and occurred after the economy had recovered, which isn’t nearly as stupid as raising taxes during a recession).   Naturally, O’Neill reneged on the deal; we got the tax hikes and the spending, putting a black mark on Reagan’s legacy and giving a generation of giggly lefty chanting-point-bots a cheap tu quoque tittering point.

1990 – George H.W. Bush cuts a deal with Congressional Democrats, who are still in the majority – just one more round of taxes, in exchange for spending cuts, leading to his famous declaration, “Read my lips!  No new taxes!”.  The Dems welched, naturally, leaving Bush looking like the fool that, for believing the Democrats, he truly was.

2012 – Some House Republicans are making noises that sound suspiciously similar to “we’ll be happy to agree to tax hikes today, in exchange for spending cuts someday when you get around to it”.  In other words, they are planning to extend electoral credit to a party that has “our ends justify our means” as an unwritten platform plank.

Dear House Republicans:  you thought the 2010 primary season was brutal for RINOs?  Remember Trent Lott, and don’t be stupid. Compromising with Democrats before you’ve gotten your pound of flesh is the mark of the sucker.  The moron.  The soon-to-be unemployed politician, God and your smarter voters willing.  

I’ve had a few people ask me what I thought about Frederick Melo’s piece in the PiPress the other day about the 4th Congressional District ousting its chairman.

Well, Melo did have one quote – where the ousted chair “…characterized the vote to remove him as a split between “old guard” Republicans and younger supporters of Libertarian figure Ron Paul” that was just plain untrue.

The group that moved to oust the former chair included Ron Paul supporters and “old guard” activists (the scare quotes are intentional; many of the “old guard” were Tea Partiers, some were considered “insurgents” two years ago).

In a body that had been largely taken over by Ron Paul supporters, it is utterly impossible to view the constitutionally-mandated 2/3 vote for removal as a “Paul Versus Establishment” factional issue.  Everybody joined in.

———-

But those are the facts.  The question was my reaction.

My reaction is “who cares?”  It’s a week old, and it’s already ancient history.  And it’s more of the same tail-chasing that has helped make the 4th CD GOP what it is.

And it’s just plain wrong to focus on this sorry little incident, when there is actually reason for hope buried under the headline.

The Fourth CD GOP has been through a rough 65 years or so.  The past seven months  fit into the district’s long-term tradition as the sad sack of Minnesota politics.

And the elections this cycle were pretty uniformly dismal for the 4th CD GOP – although we were far from alone.

And yet there are some signs of hope in this past seven months, in the past election cycle, in the ousting of the chair, and in the cards for the near future.

Fractions Of Factions:  The big story in the GOP statewide this past year, right up there with the state GOP’s financial travails, was the virtual takeover of the state’s BPOUs and Congressional Districts by Ron Paul supporters.  This takeover has manifested itself differently in different districts; it had little visible effect (to an outsider, anyway) in the 3rd or 6th CDs; it led to a fractious primary in the 1st; the 5th initially ceased to exist, and then resurfaced as an intellectually-onanistic vanity project run by a group of autocrats in “liberarian” clothing.

In the 4th?  A sizeable group, maybe a majority, of Ron Paul supporters realized that you have to back your ideology up with some shoe leather.  The “new guard” largely sacked up, buried the hatchet with the “old guard” (har di har) and learned how to write, print and drop lit, pound signs, and the zilllion other non-ideological, non-rhetorical bits of blocking and tackling that you gotta do to run elections and, one day, win the big prize, affect policy.  And while the result were disappointing, it’s worth pondering how the races would have turned out had Ramsey County not been the epicenter of the state’s DFL turnout effort (with ballots cast totaling over 99.5+% of election day registrations, six points above the state average, almost all Democrat).

But that’s for another day.  The big takeaway is – for once, the 4th CD GOP managed to bury hatchets in something other than each other’s foreheads.

At the campaign level, at least.

Buyer’s Remorse: While the various factions in the 4th CD GOP don’t agree on everything, they did manage to agree that the district’s current direction, as of last Tuesday, was not the right one.

And that’s something.

Forward Motion:  Republicans in the Fourth CD have a chance – almost unprecedented in recent history – to have a role in rebuilding the party into a credible, and perhaps one day formidable, force to be reckoned with.  There is talk, for the first time since I’ve been involved in the district, of trying to agree on a long-term plan, on a message that resonates with people in Saint Paul andand , of reaching out to people who may be conservative but don’t yet know they’re Republican, and who may have been told that they were shut out of the GOP…

…all of which are things the 4th CD GOP has badly neglected ever since the last time a GOP candidate was a real contender in the district (1994, when the late Dennis Newinski came within six points of toppling the sainted Bruce Vento).

It’s easy to say “the past is passed”.  When you’re a 4th CD Republican, it’s absolutely vital; there has been, for 18 years, virtually nothing good about the district’s recent history.

And it may sound pollyannaish to say “let’s focus on the future”.

But this is one of those rare moments in life when a group can literally say it has nothing to lose by going forward – that, indeed, tossing the past aside can be purely a liberating thing.

So here you go, 4th CD History:

Onward!

The GOP’s new motto on immigration reform?  Yo quiero pander…to all sides of the debate:

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told Politico that he’s open to giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship in exchange for a temporary moratorium on all legal immigration while they “assimilate.” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a longtime proponent of reform, said legalization should be paired with the repeal of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. And Republican House Speaker John Boehner told reporters on Friday that he would not commit to including a path to citizenship in his immigration reform efforts…

Juan Hernandez, a Texas-based Republican political consultant who served as Sen. John McCain’s director of Hispanic outreach in 2008, said whatever the potential disagreements, congressmen should start hammering out a deal now.

“Should it be with two, three or four steps? That’s fine. Let’s negotiate. But let’s starting taking the first steps immediately,” Hernandez said. “We may not find a political moment again in which at least I see everyone saying it’s time for immigration reform.”

The cries that demographics equal destiny for an eventual GOP shift to the left on all issues pertaining to immigration reform have been shouted for some time.  And in the wake of a narrow popular vote re-election for Barack Obama, carried in part by a 44% margin of victory among Latino voters, the cries have renewed with vigor.  Even some in the conservative intelligentsia have backed a 2007-esque immigration reform stance, including Sean Hannity and Charles Krauthammer.

But would backing amnesty, a path to citizenship, however the GOP wishes to define such legislation, really give the GOP any electoral edge?  Republicans have gained nothing among African-American voters despite the GOP’s critical role in civil rights legislation.  Yet pollsters love to mention Bush’s 44% showing among Latinos in 2004 and equally enjoy pointing out 65% of all voters (including 3 out of 4 Latinos) support some opportunity at citizenship for illegal immigrants.  Of course, Bush’s Latino support was greatly inflated and was more likely around 38%.  And last, but not least, is the data suggesting that immigration from Latin American countries may be actually reversing.

That last part is critical because Latino attitudes towards immigration reform vary depending on whether they were born here or immigrated.  While 42% of all Latino voters called immigration reform their number one issue, only 32% of U.S. born Latinos agreed compared to 54% who were foreign born.  Financially stable ($80k+ incomes) Latinos and those who are second generation are less likely to focus on immigration reform or support carte blanche amnesty.  Those who called Spanish their first language were far more interested in immigration reform than those who said English was their primary language.  The greater integrated recent immigrants had become, the less interested they were in immigration concerns.

Republicans focus on Latinos when speaking about immigration reform ignores a number of other demographic groups who have more at stake in any immigration conversation.  Asians are now the largest block of recent immigrants, surpassing Hispanic migration.  And as a voting block, Asian-Americans voted by similar margins to Latinos for Obama.  Where are the breathless newspaper column inches declaring the GOP must court Asian-Americans?

Republican outreach to minority groups has been a priority mothballed election cycle after election cycle.  If an election where nearly 13 million fewer voters showed up prompts the GOP to finally engage demographics they’ve thus far all but ignored, then great.  But if Republicans try and out liberal liberals on issues like immigration reform, they will continue to find no real opportunities for political gain.

ADDENDUM: Rachel Campos-Duffy at National Review hits the nail on the head of the broader challengers standing between Republicans and Latino voters:

Hispanics come to America for the American Dream. They are “trabajadores,” and you would be hard pressed to find an American farmer, contractor, or restaurant owner who would not testify to their work ethic. Unfortunately, the communities in which they live and work are teeming with liberal activists: farm and service-industry labor unions, well-intentioned community-based social services providers and more radical and racially motivated Latino groups such as La Raza, LULAC, and Mecha. In addition, the curricula their kids encounter in public schools are either hostile or silent on the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and ideas that are the foundation of conservative thinking. All of these activist groups and institutions have a common ideology and an affinity for big and centralized government, and of course, entitlements. They go out of their way to sign folks up and to begin the cycle of government dependency. Once hooked to the IV of government handouts, a steady drip of ideology, and a heavy dose of raunchy pop culture, the once vibrant American Dreams and traditional family values of Hispanics drift into a slow, deep coma.

Joe Doakes of Como Park writes:

I think Republicans should send Paul Ryan around the country talking to Kiwanis and Women Of Today groups, starting tomorrow. He’s been vetted and has no skeletons. He can talk like a human: not too wonky, not too smarmy. He can pick three problems facing the nation and explain why it’s going to be a bitch to fix them but it’s got to be done and here’s how we need to do it. Face-to-face, he can rebut the mainstream media slander.

If Democrats learn of it and have a Clinton moment where they adopt our ideas and save the country – wonderful.

If not, we run Ryan next time and watch him steamroll Hilary.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

I’ve seen worse ideas.

I do politics – mostly amateur punditry, but some campaign and party volunteering as well – for the fun of it.  And, nights like last Tuesday notwithstanding, it is largely fun.  And necessary; someone’s got to beat back the orcs.

But if there’s one group in politics that largely annoys the piss outta me, it’s the mid-level professional operatives.  Usually young, usually poli-sci majors, usually doing a lot of thankless scutwork on campaigns, they remind me of radio people in many ways, most of them bad; like young radio and media people, they spend their formative years in a social vacuum, associating largely with people like them,.putting in grueling hours at jobs that send them all over the place frequently on no notice, never really having time or need to develop into well-rounded people with social skills or perspective out what I’ll euphemistically call “Applied Political Science”.

Don’t get me wrong; many of them are fantastic people.  I’m talking about the stereotype – which, like most stereotypes, does in fact exist.

And I’m going to guess a room full of those people are behind one of the Romney campaign’s most-complete meltdowns, one that may have cost him the election, or at least a much closer finish; the complete meltdown of “ORCA”, the campaign’s online get-out-the-vote system for the swing states.

ORCA was designed to centralize a job that is traditionally done by volunteers standing at check-in stands at polling stations with paper lists of reliable party voters.  As they check in, they are removed; as the day wears on, voters who haven’t showed up are contacted, cajoled, even driven to the polls.  ORCA intended to centralize the list, putting the “strike lists” online.

It crashed completely, utterly gutting Romney’s election-day GOTV effort:

In fact, Orca diverted scarce resources that would have been better used physically moving voters to polling places. By a rough calculation, Romney lost the election by falling 500,000 to 700,000 votes short in key swing states. If each of the 37,000 volunteers that had been devoted to Orca had instead brought 20 voters to the polls in those states over the course of the day, Romney would have won the election.

Now, did anyone in Romney’s inner circle have any experience with software engineering?  If they did, were they listened to?  The system’s beta test was election night!  This is a recipe – can I get an Amen, geeks? – for technological seppuku.

Before the election, there was much fear-mongering on the Democratic side about the Republicans’ supposed plans to suppress turnout among Obama voters. After the election, GOP strategist Karl Rove accused the Obama campaign of “suppressing the vote” by running a negative campaign against Romney that kept voters at home.

The truth is much worse. There was, in fact, massive suppression of the Republican vote–by the Romney campaign, through the diversion of nearly 40,000 volunteers to a failing computer program.

There was no Plan B; there was only confusion, and silence.

There’s an old adage in software development:  you can have your product cheap, fast, or with impeccable quality; pick two.  To be fair, we don’t know that ORCA was cheap, either.

To: The GOP Leadership In The Legislature, Whoever You End Up Being
From: Mitch Berg, Schnook Peasant
Re:  Upcoming Session

All,

It’s two months ’til what is going to be a couple of very grueling sessions.

Now, Governor Dayton is an addled bobblehead who is nothing but a marionette for Alida Messinger and the unions that bought the office for him.  Tom Bakk and Paul Thissen are not much but capos for two bodies that are, let’s be honest, more of the same.  Our entire legislature will be owned and operated by Messinger, the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, the unions, the non-profits, and the media that serves as their PR wing.

The calls will go out; “time to be “bi-partisan””.

Don’t do it.

The DFL will be trying their best to give an air of “bipartisan” legitimacy to what is going to be an orgy of tax-hiking and spending.

Resist the temptation to try to go for the Lori Sturdevant seal of approval.

They are going to plunge this state into an orgy of spending, an taxation to support it.  Major Minnesota business are going to ship jobs outstate or overseas as fast as FedEx can jam them onto the plane.  Minnesota’s medical device industry is already evacuating; there will be more to follow.

You need to keep your fingerprints away from the scene of the crime.

If the Minnesota GOP has proven one thing, it sucks at messaging.  You’ll need to learn it, and pronto – because the media will try to portray the upcoming disaster as “a result of GOP intransigence”, notwithstanding their complete control over government for the next (sigh) two years.

Paul Ryan is coming to Minneapolis on Sunday afternoon.

Tickets are free; sign up here.

See you there.

They don’t call it a horse-race for nothing.

As a rule in polling, outliers tend to get ignored.  Or you can choose to believe that Bush won Hawaii in 2004, Alf Landon won a 1936 landslide, or that Clinton v. Dole was a nail-biter.

But it becomes harder to ignore an outlier when it’s A) close to the election and B) one of the oldest and most respected polling outfits in the nation.  Thus as the media enters Campaign 2012’s home stretch, the narrative of a nip-and-tuck contest looks decidedly jeopardized by Gallup showing Mitt Romney with a 7% lead – and such an outcome apparently has to be challenged:

With a record of correctly predicting all but three of the 19 presidential races stretching back to 1936, Gallup is one of the most prestigious names in the business and its outlier status has other polling experts scratching their heads.

“They’re just so out of kilter at the moment,” said Simon Jackman, a Stanford University political science professor and author of a book on polling. “Either they’re doing something really wacky or the other 18 pollsters out there are colluding, or something.”

The caveats to Gallup’s polling (as with any pollster) are well-versed.  But to find an answer as to why Gallup posts a major Romney lead while the Real Clear Politics average of pollsters shows essentially a tie has nothing to do with credibility or collusion.  It has everything to do with turnout.

Take the recent IBD/TIPP poll as Gallup’s doppleganger with Obama leading by 5.7%.  Democrats are outsample Republicans by 7%.  The UConn Courant showing Obama up 3%?  The sample shows Democrats with an 8-point advantage.  Gallup plays their cards close to the vest, not showing the partisan affiliation of their likely voter model.  But their registered voter breakdown still shows a Romney lead, albeit of a modest 3% and is likely based on their party affiliation polls showing Democrats up 4 points.

Gallup says it determines its “likely voters” by asking whether they have voted in the past, if they know where their polling place is located, and other similar questions. The formula has been tweaked this year to take into account the increasing prevalence of early voting.

Gallup’s Newport pointed out that the firm’s likely-voter formula has more accurately predicted the election results than its wider poll of all registered voters going back to the 1990s and, in fact, the likely voter prediction tended to slightly favor Democratic candidates.

The idea of a single pollster being simply a part of a larger trendline is accurate, even if most media outlets tend to overlook that fact to trumpet their own poll to the exclusion of competitors and thus create news rather than report it.  Yet even if we exclude Gallup’s results, the trendlines have to be concerning for Obama’s camp.  Despite wielding turnout margins better than what propelled him into office four years ago, many polls show Barack Obama at best narrowly ahead – and more commonly tied or behind.

Gallup might be overstating Romney’s support, although the pollster’s worst estimations of support were in the 5-6 point range and happened in 1936 and 1948.  In the modern era, if anything Gallup has consistently overestimated Democratic support at the polls, giving Obama 2% more, Kerry 0.7% more and Clinton 2.8% and 5.7% more in his campaigns.  Which may mean that despite a 7% lead causing headaches among the media, Mitt Romney may…hold for dramatic effect…lead by more.

This morning, we addressed Aaron Brown’s look at HD6B, up on the Iron Range, where political newcomer Jesse Colangelo is running a helluvva race against DFL/union kommissar Jason Metsa.

Today – some older but equally intrigueing news that I just haven’t had time to get to; there is one precinct in Saint Paul that is ever-so-close to voting Republican.

The Pioneer Press’ Frederick Melo reported on this a few weeks back:

The intersection of Cretin and Selby avenues is the heart of Ward 4, Precinct 6, a precinct that, like the other 96, mostly has long favored Democrats in local, state and national elections.

But in this precinct, Republicans have managed to trim the Democrats’ lead by larger and larger numbers in the past 10 years and even chose Republican Sen. Norm Coleman over Democratic challenger Al Franken in 2008.

Looking at the results at the SOS site, it’s one precinct where Tony Hernandez’ 2010 campaign came within eighit votes of Senator Dick Cohen.

Read the whole fascinating thing, assuming you didn’t a few weeks ago

And then ask yourself – if a precinct in a moldy blue one-party city like Saint Paul – aka Pyongyang on the Mississipi – turns red, what does that mean?

I mean, the fall of the Soviet Union started with protests in Gdansk – the Thunder Bay of the Baltic.

From small things, big things one day come.

(Optimistic?  If you’re not fundamentally an optimist, then there’s no point in being a Republican in St. Paul).

I spent most of Monday night – as in, from 9PM to 1AM – at a 4th CD GOP meeting.

As I probably foreshadowed the other day, I figured it’d be an ugly, contentious meeting.

It certainly was.

I haven’t had time to write an actual recap of the evening – I certainly will – but until then, check out Joe Schultz’ take on the event.

Here’s the capsule summary:

I do want to commend the chair for bringing the potential FEC violations to the attention of the Full Committee. It is certainly his duty to bring such issues to light. The problem I see is the circumstances under which the audit was conducted. First, to the best of my knowledge John is not a qualified auditor. There were several people at the meeting who have more experience in FEC matters than John that were questioning his legal interpretations and fine conclusions. Second this issue seems to be being used as a way to withhold funds from CD4’s endorsed candidate Tony Hernandez. Remember John didn’t want to call a meeting to discuss disbursement of funds before he had any inkling of FEC violations. FEC fines are uncertain. It certainly seems like an excuse. Finally a big issue is what was not discussed. What were John’s plans for usage of the $5k before he knew about any potential FEC fines? Why was there no associated fundraising plan to waylay such funding concerns so that CD4 could continue to support its candidates? Where is John’s plan for victory in CD4?

Perhaps the most obvious problem stemming from the meeting last night was the combative atmosphere between John Kysylyczyn and what looked like 95% of the CD4 Full Committee. Several members of the Full Committee shouted – or typed – profanities during the meeting. John, for his part, showed a healthy dose of condescension and egotism bordering on contempt. One thing was amply clear: CD4’s Republicans will not move forward with John Kysylyczyn as Chair. There is too much animosity. Regardless of the merits of the issues John brought to the CD4 Full Committee meeting (and there were merits), the way in which John went about it destroyed any chance for progress.

More, most likely, tomorrow.

Funny you should ask!

I was at the 4th CD meeting we discussed the other day.

I’m going to need at least a day to write about it.  And I’d rather not profane 9/11 with it.

Tomorrow.  Maybe.

As we’ve noted a time or two in this space, the new leadership as of this past April in the Fourth District MNGOP has taken what appear, to a rank outsider, to be some odd stances on what it takes to lead a major party unit in an election year – at one point saying it wasn’t, in his opinion, the job of the Congressional District to take a role in any elections at the BPOU or Congressional District level.

The chairman, of course, is John Kysylyczyn, former mayor of Roseville.  I don’t know Kysylyczyn from Adam, and have no ambitions whatsoever in the party; I chose to serve on the District executive committee previous to Kysylyczyn’s purely as a matter of putting my actions where my mouth was.  I have no personal reason to attack him at all.

There is, of course, quite a bit of video of Kysylyczyn’s term as mayor of Roseville; according to the video (which, it’s fair to point out, was clipped from hundreds of hours of City Council meetings by his detractors), the then-mayor seemed to be prone to subjecting his City Council to bladder-busting gales of Roberts’ procedural pedantism.  On the other hand, the Twin Cities press – largely but not exclusively the sophomoric howler monkeys at the City Pages – savaged him during his regime, in a manner that even the media sometimes called unfair (which is ironic, given the way he wrapped himself in the “Society of Professional Journalists “Code of Ethics”  when I sought clarification from him, like journalists do, on rumors from within his own committee that he was considering spending the district’s money to send pro-Ron-Paul delegates to Tampa rather than support candidates.  He used the CD4 official website to take his potshot back at me, in fact – which is an odd use of a district party resource.  Of course, the irony springs from the fact that I, being a conservative pundit, bend over backwards to support, or at least be fair to, libertarians and conservatives, while the SPJ COE is nothing but a framework that “journalists” can use to whitewash their own abuses – it’s a whitewash they apply to their biases as needed.  Lori Effing Sturdevant waves the SPJ COE around like Ignatius Reilly’s bedspread).

At any rate, as we noted a few weeks ago, Kysylyczyn  had a meeting scheduled for the fall – only the third since his election, and the only one before the General Elections.  He then cancelled it because it fell on the same night as the Vice Presidential Debate.

A groundswell of district activists overrode him, and met the district’s constitutional requirement to call a new meeting.   The meeting is taking place tonight.  The main subject – at least, according to the activists involved in demanding the meeting – is the topic of the donation of the other $5,000 to the Hernandez for Congress campaign – which is, let us not forget, the campaign endorsed by 97% of the convention’s delegates, and a solid majority of CD4’s primary voters.

Kysylyczyn posted the meeting on the CD4 website – as well as a “notice” with a whoooole lot of questions and Kysylyczyn’s answers.  85 of them, to be exact – which, with all due respect to Chairman Kyslyczyn, tells you a bit about his communication style.

While I’m not a member of the committee, I’ll endeavor to respond, from the perspective one one activist anyway, to Kysylyczyn’s statements – many of them, anyway – below the jump.

UPDATE:  I just looked at the meeting call.  Kysylyczyn has pivoted from “We have no need to take people off the streets before an election” to a bladder-bursting, buttock-numbing budget question along with the issue of the donation.  A meeting which starts at 9PM will likely be dragging on into the wee hours.

Amazing what a week’s worth of focus will do, isn’t it?

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Romney/Ryan, running to peel the “Midwest” away from the Democrats?

A rout of the Democrats along the Great Lakes would be huge not only electorally, but also culturally.

It would marginalize the party as a group of arugula-munching, latte-sipping elites who enjoy their ocean views and heedlessly live off the fat of the land (many on the taxpayers’ dime) as lawyers, journalists, college professors, government employees and entitlement recipients — while the rest of the interior labors to pay the bill and suffers the “regulation” of distant, unaccountable bureaucrats.

In other words, the Heartland Campaign is not simply about Electoral College votes. It’s also a way to frame the Democrats as the out-of-touch party of the status quo — i.e., Big Government — at a time when Big Government has so signally failed the average American.

If it works — and if a Romney administration can successfully grapple with the debt bomb, the entitlement crisis and growing government dependency — it could set back the Democrats’ prospects for years to come.

Which brings us back to Eastwood. In such films as “The Outlaw Josey Wales” and “High Plains Drifter,” he’s the embodiment of rugged, rebellious heartland values.

And those cranky, cantankerous, all-American voters are just who Romney & Ryan need to defeat the coastal elites and return America to its heartland roots.

If it works, and R&R crush in the heardland, leaving the left clinging to the coasts and their suppurating outposts in Chicago, the Twin Cities and Madison/Milwaukee?  Expect to see a lot of mid-November prate and gabble from lefties about coastal secession.

There has been much sturm und drang within, and especially outside of, the Minnesota GOP over last spring’s coup de main by the Ron Paul campaign in Minnesota.  Paul activists, organized as tightly as a Marine basic training company, swarmed the precinct caucuses, the BPOU conventions, the CD conventions, and finally the state convention.  They completely took over some districts (including the Metro 4th and 5th CDs) and took the lopsided majority of the state’s delegates to the national convention.

Now, unlike my friend and longtime activist John Gilmore, I’m doing my best to see a silver lining to the takeover, especially in the 4th CD in which we both live.  Gilmore is the lightning rod of the anti-Paul faction in the 4th and the state, of course, and pulls no punches on the subject, and makes it clear he’s not in the business of finding silver linings.

Being a mere foot soldier, all I can do is note that whatever the problems the Paul takeover has brought at the leadership level (and, as I’ve noted, there are most definitely problems), the takeover has had a few benefits, at least at the grassroots level.  There are fewer “warm body on the ballot” candidacies this year in the Fourth CD than any year I can remember.  More of those races hit their number to get the state funding match than in any recent year.

That’s all to the good.

On the other hand?  I’ve documented some of the problems that we’ve had in the 4th CD from the top down rather than the bottom up.

And compared to the 5th CD, we’ve got it good.  Nancy LaRoche – a longtime activist in CD5 – chronicles the disintegration of the leadership in the CD5 GOP under the “watch” of some especially cynical Ron Paul personality cultists.

Nancy’s been trying to find if there’s even a faint sign of life among the elected “leadership”.  Money quote:

None of the executive leadership have responded to the web site bill as of today. Then I wondered, was the 5th District organization as a whole part of their kill plan? There has been no fundraising, no full committee meetings, and no sign of leadership since their election. Mitch Berg wrote about similar issues of idle hands in CD4.

Jason Lewis talked about the misled direction of some Paul supporters who can’t see the forest for the liberty trees. They refuse to elect a better President now to buy the country time for more liberty-minded candidates later. 5th district leaders appear to have no intention of shaping the party, only destroying it. I tend to agree that these Libertarian “tributes” are happily exploiting the Republican party only to advance their sponsor, Ron Paul — then trashing the vehicle they commandeered.

This, of course, was the big concern many in the “establishment” – including this former “establishment” member who in 2010 was one of those pesky Tea Party insurgents – had with the direction of so many of the Ron Paul crowd.  While many – including the vast majority in my own SD65, including its leader, Joe Schultz (who writes an excellent blog, by the way) came to stay and make a difference within the party, there are not a few that quite clearly did not, and have no intention of it.   And plenty of people are not amused.  And in a year when the Fifth CD fields one of its strongest candidates ever – Chris Fields – it would have been spectacular to have had him backed with a functional district.  (Likewise with Tony Hernandez in the Fourth).

On MPR this morning, I heard a bit by Mark Zdechlik comparing the reactions of the “mainstream” Republicans in the party and the Tampa delegation with those of the “Ron Paul”-faction, who were the majority of the delegates.   Zdechlik quoted a Mark Zasadny of Roseville.  I’ll add emphasis:

Minnesota Ron Paul delegate Mark Zasadny of Roseville said if the election were held right now he would vote for former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for president.

Mr. Zasadny: thanks for hammering home every stereotype the “establishment” had of the Paul movement; that you had not the faintest interest in the GOP, but hijacked it to serve as a vehicle for the Ron Paul Personality Cult.

(Yep, I said “Ron Paul Personality Cult”.  Anyone who doesn’t honestly think that a Romney/Ryan presidency won’t be better for the prospects of liberty in this country, especially and even if only economic liberty, but also the rest of the First Amendment, than a second Obama term seriously needs to get a grip.  Incrementalism is not a dirty word, if it’s incremental in the right direction, especially if that’s a springboard to further bigger increments.  Increments are better than excrements).

“It seems like the clear message was like the grassroots movement is not really welcome in the Republican Party. So that’s kind of hard to swallow when they come around and say, you know, ‘OK, are you ready to unite behind the Romney campaign and the RNC,'” Zasadny said. “And it’s like, ‘well you just tried to cut our throats.’ So how are we supposed to respond to that?”

Well, you can respond in any of a number of ways, Mr. Zasadny.

• You can come back for the next round of caucuses and conventions, and try to consolidate your control of the MNGOP.
• You can replicate your Liberty movement organization that suceeded so wildly – at least at conquering the party organization – in other states, and take over more states, to gain more control of the party apparatus so that the next time the rules fight comes up, you’ll fight the battle with more than just a thin rump of delegates from Minnesota and Nevada.
• You can learn the lessons that every spunky class of political newcomers does; that politics is a marathon, not a sprint.  And all of you Ron Paul supporters that got into the game last February at the caucuses?  You’ve just been sprinting.  You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Or you can react to the perceived “throat cutting” (which wasn’t; the party has every right to organize itself to present its winning candidate in as monolithically-positive light as possible, free of the yelping of what is, let’s be honest, a small minority of the delegates) by doing what Mr. Zasadny and the “leadership” of CD5 have done; taking the knife out of their throats and jamming it into their eye sockets, and twisting it 720 degrees.

Mr. Zasadny:  You were sent to Tampa to represent the Republican Party.  Part of being a delegate to a Party convention is supporting The Party.  Whether you agree with it or not.  That’s not to say you can’t be a principled dissenter – I’ve done that myself – but not   while speaking as an elected delegate at the party’s convention.

The MNGOP is, and should be, a big tent.  It should have room for fiscalcons and libertarians, and even the odd “moderate” who doesn’t screw the rest of the party on taxes and regulation.  As a Tea Party libertarian conservative, I’m more than sympathetic to the Libertarian cause; I came back to the MNGOP in 1999 mostly to try to push the libertarian-conservative cause in the GOP.  So not only am I a sympathetic ear – I was pushing the Liberty cause long before most of you were involved in the MNGOP.

But when you betray the party while serving as a party delegate?

The question isn’t “should Mr. Zasadny and those who think like him make themselves absent from future GOP events”.  The question is “how badly have people like Mr. Zasadny and the CD5 “leadership” hurt the cause of the genuine Liberty supporters that have come to the GOP to do some good – and in many cases, have delivered on it?

Because there are a few babies among the bathwater.

…is someone who, given a choice between being killed or living, says “Let’s compromise on massive internal bleeding or some mid-level brain damage”.

Representative Steve Smith, tossed in the primaries, gave his last speech as a legislator the other day.  Go to the Strib, which cries its crocodile tears at the loss of a “moderate”, to see his remarks.

Rep. Smith:  Thanks for the good things you did do during your 22 years in the Legislature, including your solid support for the Minnesota Personal Protection Act.

As a personal aside, as a Republican who’s been a union member? Supporting unions who actually do, as you say, “negotiate for safer working conditions, reasonable benefits, and fair pay in return for their labor”, is a perfectly fine thing.

But government unions “negotiate” with the people that they paid to have elected.  That’s a little different.  And it’s a distinction you seemed pretty unclear about.

And that cost you.

The other day, we mentioned 4th CD GOP chairman John Kysylyczyn’s canceling of the only meeting scheduled for the district’s full committee before the election.  Under district rules, the full committee is the only body that can authorize the district to donate the second half of the district’s customary $10,000 donation to its endorsed candidate, Tony Hernandez.

The committee did, in fact, vote last May to donate the first $5,000 installment to Hernandez.

The vote on the donation passed…:

VC6 Brown : Yea

VC5 Mueller: Yea

VC4 Windsor: Nay

VC3 Taylor: Yea

VC2 Grinols: Yea

VC1 Williams: Yea

State Exec VC Regnier: Yea

Secretary Overlander: Yea

Deputy Chair Boguszewski: Yea

Chair Kysylyczyn: Nay

So back when the district did, in fact, vote on donating money to Hernandez, Kysylyczyn voted no.

He had a reason, of course:

Chair Kysylyczyn: While I supported the donation of $5000 to the Hernandez campaign, I vote NO on the motion before the committee because I support the idea proposed by Mr. Boguszewski of disbursing funds through a matching funds donation process as he has done in his BPOU for their endorsed candidates. A portion of the funds would be provided up front, and the balance provided on a one to one match with private dollars, up to a $5000 cap. Calculations for the matching funds process would start the day the candidate was endorsed. It is my hope that a matching funds policy can be adopted in the future.

The point  of making your district donations a “match” is to provide an incentive for the candidates to work hard at fundraising.  It works just fine when you’re a BPOU trying to get a new, or recalcitrant, candidate to raise funds on a somewhat level playing field.

When fighting for a Congressional seat in a district that hasn’t sent a Republican to Washington in 65 years, with a party unit that can be fairly said to be “rebuilding”, and where Betty McCollum will have a million dollars coming right out of the gate?  While I get the idea, it seems at best to be just a little overelaborate over $5,000.

So what does it say to future candidates?  “We’ve just endorsed you to spend the next seven months of your life working pretty close to full time, putting your job, family and real life on the sideline to take a run at one of the most difficult assignments anywhere in American politics, running as a Republican in CD4 against an incumbent candidate who sleeps on a king-size bed made of union money and will, if you are lucky, only outspend you 20-1.  So here’s a few hoops you gotta jump through.  Oh, you’re welcome!”

Of course, that was then – in May.  Now, there’s the little matter of getting another meeting called to get the second $5K installment voted on.

Last spring, this blog got into a bit of a flap with the sitting leadership of the MNGOP’s Fourth Congressional District over airing out a report that the district’s chairman, John Kysylysczyn, was pondering not getting involved in the district’s various legislative elections or, for that matter, the CD4 Congressional race.   The evidence?  An email from Kysylyczyn to a BPOU chair which circulated to a much, much wider group.

Along with that came a report – from a source inside the district’s leadership who asked for anonymity to protect themselves from reprisal – that Kysylyczyn was pondering not making the customary donation to the district’s endorsed candidate, Tony Hernandez.

While that idea apparently never got past the pondering stage – the donation did in fact pass the full committee – if current plans remain in effect, the district’s leadership apparently still doesn’t believe there’s a role for the district in the campaign (the flap also earned me a stern tongue-lashing from Kysylyczyn, who in a move unprecedented in CD4 politics, used the district’s website to tell the membership that he wouldn’t talk with bloggers because, apparently, the mainstream media is fairer to Republicans or something).

In a couple of announcements on the CD4 GOP website and the district’s Facebook page, the district’s leadership cancelled the October meeting – the only meeting remaining before the election.

And while under normal circumstances it’s just another meeting, these aren’t normal circumstances.  It’s election season.  CD4 endorsed a candidate for Congress, Hernandez, who is running an aggressive and active campaign.  Campaigns take money.  The Fourth CD reportedly has a decent little chunk of cash, in its “federal” account – $6139.48, as of the August committee meeting – which has to be spent, by law, on matters pertaining to federal races.  It’s a broad category; it can be spent on training, software, computers, consulting…

…or, naturally, the race its endorsed candidate is running.

The district can donate a maximum of $5,000 from this amount (on top of the earlier donation) to the Hernandez campaign – but not without a full committee vote.  Which requires a full committee meeting.

Which has just been cancelled until after the election.

Is this what the 4th CD GOP is supposed to be doing with its mandate?

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They call him The Seeker

After 46 years in politics, will Wisconsin’s electorate ask of Tommy Thompson who are you?

To appropriate Israeli politician Abba Eban’s historic quote about the Palestinians, it can be said that former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

The father of welfare reform and four-time gubernatorial winner in a state whose political environment was more blue than purple at the time, Thompson seemed like he was destined to advance on the national stage.  A presidential run in 1996 or 2000 would not have seemed a far-fetched idea.  Instead, Thompson made a quixotic bid in 2008.  Likewise, Thompson could have easily sought the U.S. Senate back home, with even conservatives hoping he’d run as recently as 2006 or 2010.  Instead, at 70 years of age, Thompson has bet on a political return after a 14 year electoral absence.

And for the moment, it’s a bet that Thompson is winning.  Despite an expensive and bruising primary against three other strong candidates, Thompson narrowly emerged the victor.  But after facing a self-funding primary opponent in Eric Hovde, Thompson enters the general election with a $3 million to $350,000 deficit against Democrat Tammy Baldwin.  Worse for Thompson, the double-digit polling lead he held as recently as May has turned into what Real Clear Politics averages out to basically a tie.  And this against the most liberal member of the House of Representatives according to National Journal‘s Vote Rankings.  Baldwin isn’t merely blue, she’s downright phthalo.

Some of the factors weighing down Thompson’s numbers are easy enough to spot.  Thompson has been attacked from the Right for more than a year – the Club for Growth was airing anti-Thompson ads as far back as August of 2011 and spent $1.7 million on the race.  The result may not have been a Thompson primary loss, but the ads definitely turned Thompson’s approval/disapproval numbers upside down, 43% to 39%.  And Baldwin hasn’t been simply waiting for the Republican primary to end to start her campaign as she’s already spent $4.6 million preparing the November battlefield.

But the largest factor holding back Thompson is himself.  A man who first came into office in 1966 is poorly set to capture the zeitgeist of an electorate that has tired of career politicians.  And while Wisconsin voters are less inclined to vote Democrat, as was the case in 1986 when Thompson was elected governor, they’ve also become less inclined to cross party lines in their voting habits.  Thompson’s blue-collar appeal that helped him win in union strongholds like La Crosse or Green Bay doesn’t mean as much when union households (or any other reliable Democrat constituency) will no longer even consider voting for someone with an ‘R’ next to their name.

None of this is to suggest Thompson can’t win.  In fact, he may already be slightly ahead as a Marquette poll has him up 5%.  That’s a far cry for a former governor whose lowest re-election percentage was 58% and still a distance away from a race that looked in the bag merely months ago.

We have one in Saint Paul and the Fourth CD.  There’s a primary challenge for the Fourth CD Republican endorsement to run for Congress.

Tony Hernandez is the endorsed GOP candidate.

Tony won the endorsement at the April convention by a 195-5 margin over his challenger, to whose name recognition I will not contribute here.  The other candidate agreed – according to a couple of sources  – that he’d not challenge Tony Hernandez in the primary.  And then he promptly turned around and filed to run in the primary.

Anyway, while the other candidate has not had any sort of presence at all in the race so far – after reportedly promising he could raise DFL-sized money for the general election – I don’t expect that he’ll be much of a challenge for Tony Hernandez.  But it is hypothetically possible that the other guy who is not Tony could spend $30,000 between now and Monday night trying to build instant name recognition over Hernandez.  It’s happened – Arne Carlson did it, more or less.

So I’ll just give you a little reminder, for yourself and your Republican friends, family and neighbors in the Fourth CD:

Vote for Tony Hernandez, not the other guy, on Tuesday.

By the way – Tony is fundraising in a tough district; if you can peel off a few bucks to fight Betty McColllum’s juggernaut, that’d be huge.   And if you’ve got an afternoon to spend lit-dropping, or an evening for phoning, please hit Tony’s volunteer page.

Disclosure:  I am a volunteer for the Hernandez campaign.  As if you couldn’t tell.

Well, if only for this piece here.

With which I agree, yesterday’s commentary notwithstanding.