I’d always suspected this was true.   Now, we have documentary evidence.

(Not remotely safe for work, or kids, or those with delicate senses of language or decorum).

As we mentioned on the show on Saturday, there’ll be a “Meet Tom and Jacquie Emmer” night at Keegans  this Wednesday at 8PM.

Stop on by and, er, meet Tom and Jacquie!

CORRECTION:  It’s at Keegans, of course.  So many events, so many Irish names.

Primaries are today.  If you’re a Republican, find your polling station here.  If you’re a DFLer, Mark Dayton will tell you where to go.

It’s important to go if you’re a Republican today.  Emmer should be safe from the Leslie Davis juggernaut, but our Attorney General candidate Chris Barden faces a familiar challenge – Sharon Anderson.  Back in 1994, she beat the endorsed GOP candidate Tom Neuville.  Part of it was the “Anderson” name; part of it was that there was at the time a TV talk show host in the Cities by the same name.

This year, the worry is Sharon Anderson will get votes intended for endorsed State Auditor candidate Pat Anderson.

So  while this blog never ever endorses anyone – it’s Barden for AG.  Not Anderson.

I’ll be voting after work.

Joel Demos may need more than a great web ad to beat Keith Ellison in the Fifth District. He’ll probably need the National Guard. The Fifth, aka “Berkeley on the Prairie”, is one of those districts where the DFL could endorse a package of pork chops and get 50% of the vote.

Still – if great ads won elections, Demos could start measuring the drapes in Ellison’s office.

There is no more thankless job in the world than running for CD5 (or CD4, across the river, which is just as bad).

But if Republicans in the city couldn’t hope for miracles, we couldn’t hope for much at all.

I’ve been watching the Florida District 22 race, where Allen West is running against Congressman Ron Klein.  It’s a tight race, but a vital one.

I’m hoping this ad helps:

A congressman with this kind of integrity?

I’m dying to see this guy in a debate with Betty McCollum…

Norm Coleman starts the RNC’s game of musical chairs early. 

As 2009 begin, one of the two major political parties in the U.S. handed over its reins of control to an underqualified but charismatic African-American politican who subsequentially torpedoed the party in a series of public gaffes and highly publicized scandals.  Barack Obama was also inaugurated.

For a post that typically attracts little attention outside of the Beltway, Michael Steele’s RNC chairmanship has been disasterously high-profile.  In the last year-and-a-half of his two-year term, Steele has surfed one mistake after another into a building tsunami of political pressure to oust the chairman early.  From his public criticism of Rush Limbaugh, to his speaking fees, and sudden anti-Afghan War comments, Steele has taken the largely managerial role of RNC chair and tried to turn it into a psuedo-legislative office.

If Steele’s effect on the RNC were limited to his apparently incurable foot-in-mouth disease, talk of removing him or even talk of the next election for chair in 2011 would seem incredibly premature.  But the RNC’s mechanics appear to have suffered as well.  The party’s primary role as a fundraising vehicle has been easily usurped by the Republican Governors Association – headed by former RNC chair Haley Barbour.  While the RNC holds only $10 million in cash on hand, with more than $2 million in uncollected debts, the RGA is breaking fundraising records.  At $28 million in the bank, the RGA has already doubled it’s largest yearly take – ever.  And those numbers don’t even take into account charges that Steele is hiding more than $7 million in debt.

But is the solution to replace a politician as chair with another politician? 

Chatter about Norm Coleman assuming the RNC post isn’t exactly new.  While Politico threw some gas on long-dead embers of Coleman’s RNC ambitions, stories of the former St. Paul mayor leading the Grand Old Party first started floating only weeks after his recount battle began in 2008. 

Yet as a politican who only months ago declined a widely expected bid for governor, is Coleman making a similar mistake to Steele in eyeing the job as a national political soapbox?  So far, Coleman and his allies are hitting the right notes:

“He sees tremendous longing for donors who want to invest in an organization that will be critical to the 2012 cycle,” said the Coleman confidante. “And he has a proven track record of being able to raise money from the party’s traditional key constituencies and constituencies the party doesn’t always have.”…

“He understands it’s a fundraising job,” said one senior Republican, who has talked to Coleman about the RNC post.

If anything, Coleman appears to be trying to position himself – as Newsweek puts it – as the “anti-Michael Steele.”  Where Steele viewed his role as making public pronouncements about Republican policy, Coleman at least rhetorically understands that the role of RNC chair has little to do with grand strategy.  It’s a distinction even Newsweek has trouble understanding in suggesting that a Coleman selection might be an attempt to target swing states:

Coleman hails from Minnesota, which is a bluish-purple state, with populist and environmentalist streaks. So, would Coleman, who defeated high-profile Democrat Walter Mondale and came within a few hundred votes of doing the same to Al Franken in a Democratic wave election, unlock the secret to helping Republicans break out of their old/white/Southern cage? Probably not. Steele, after all, was chosen to attempt that, and the Democrats chose then–Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine to chair their party to do the inverse for them. Neither can be said to have accomplished that.

Party chairman are ideally much like the Victorian view of children – better seen then heard.  They aren’t policy wonks nor are they press secretaries.  As the last year has shown, average activists have far greater impact on the political process than party apparatchiks.   That’s how it should be.

Steele can be endured until his tenure ends and should not be re-elected.  And while Norm Coleman will undoubtably not make the sames mistakes as Steele, he remains a political – not managerial – figure.  The GOP needs a functional, competent manager, not another high-profile politician who will be granted greater attention due in part to his elected past.

Contrast this ad with the scabrous, fact-free, ad-hominem tripe Alliance for a Better Minnesota was foisting on us over the past few weeks:

Who’s the actual governor, here?

Tom Conlin was, for many years, the sole voice of responsibility and sanity in Ramsey County, as the only elected Republican in office anywhere in the county.  Outnumbered, he could only do so much – but at the very least there was someone on the board pointing out the madness of the majority.

Tom ran for State Auditor, but dropped out at the convention; he would have done a great job, but there’s no way to beat the Anderson machine (and she’ll do a great job too).

There’s some bad news…

We had no paid staff, but nonetheless incurred campaign expenses beyond what we raised during the campaign.

…and some good news!:

I am hoping to recover some of that debt with your help. I am also preparing for a 2011 St. Paul School Board race, a seat I held for 17 years and have won successfully in 5 elections as St. Paul’s lone Republican-endorsed elected official. I intend to seek Republican Party endorsement again for this seat in February.

Check out the website.

OK, so it was a rough week.

It’s July.  Four months ’til the election.  The DFL doesn’t have a candidate yet – and when they do, it’ll be Time magazine’s “The Worst Senator In America“, 2005 edition.  Half of Minnesota doesn’t even know who Tom Emmer is – yet.   And the DFL’s “third party” gambit, Tom Horner, has backfired, drawing three DFLers for every two Republicans – and that’ll get worse as the realization sinks in that Mark Freaking Dayton might be governor.

Issues, you say?  We’ve got immigration; we’ve got job creation; we’ve got economic growth and resposible government; we’ve got education reform and school choice and Local Government Aid reform and the DFL’s deep, enthusiastic links to everything that sucks about Barack Obama’s administration.  They’ve got lies and contrived controversies that’ll be forgotten on August 11.

So if you’re one of those lily-livered GOPers who’ve spent the last week wringing their hands over the denouement of “TipCreditGate”, stop.  Sack up, people; the real race doesn’t even start for a month, and media stunts like the faux outrage over the tip credit is the best they’ve got.

Bag the panic, folks.  This is when the fun part begins.

Tom Emmer is having a town hall meeting with restaurant and bar workers today.  It’s at Ol’ Mexico in Roseville, and the doors open at 2:30.  If you’re a restauranteur or publican, it’d be a great idea to be there early with bells on.  I’m trying to find if anyone is live-streaming the event.

Here’s what’s cool about the event; despite the fact that the whole “Tip Credit” kerfuffle is a manufactured controversy as the media tries to help the DFL run out the clock until Mark Dayton wins the primary, and that the whole fracas is a red herring (focusing on a virtual non-issue at a low level to ignore the larger point – that the Mininum Wage is a job killer, especially in hospitality, one of Minnesota’s most important industries), Tom Emmer isn’t shuffling away from the issue; he’s not trying to sweep it under the rug. 

He’s attacking it head on, like a defenseman checking the snot out of a winger. 

And if I know Tom Emmer, 100 people may walk into Ol’ Mexico unconvinced – and 75 will walk out converted, or at least saying “hmm – the guy’s got a point and, by the way, all that stuff Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota has been saying is crap“.

Because that’s Tom Emmer’s big strength; while he speaks in terms of principles – big-picture ideas that are easy for the DFL’s professional deceivers to pervert – he’s also the best politician in the state explaining to people, regular schmucks in the street, why those principles matter to them.  Why they keep jobs in their towns and money in their wallets.

I’m looking for Emmer to stomp the tip credit issue into history today (not that the DFL, media and leftyblogs won’t try to keep flogging it); more important, I’m looking for him to start showing people the truth behind the kerfuffle; cutting taxes, regulations and other bureaucratic overburden creates jobs, makes entrepreneurship viable, and brings more wealth to individual Minnesotans.

The sort of thing Chris Christie is doing in Jersey today.  The kind of thing Norm Coleman did in Paul and Brett Schundler did in Jersey City in the 1990s.  The kind of thing Ronald Reagan did for the whole nation thirty years ago.  The kind of thing that leaders do to make their cities, states and nations great.

Look for the DFL and media to bend over backwards to try to keep the word from getting out.

While I live in District 66B, a district with little more hope for change than Kinshasa or Pyongyang have, there is hope elsewhere.

I spoke at a fund raiser for Diane Anderson last night in Eagan.  That was fun; she’s got some momentum, and with a little help from her friends she might just eject the far-left but otherwise-ineffective Debra Masin from the House this November.

Also – my friend and radio colleague, King Banaian, has his campaign website up and going.

He also has a campaign blog (above and beyond his day blog).  He wrote this bit which needs to be on everyone’s mind these days:

Also met a younger man tonight, perhaps 30, who has been told his job running a kitchen is in jeopardy because the restaurant needs to balance its books. I told him that I wanted to balance the state’s books with without* increasing the costs at his restaurant. It turns out his family has other restaurants, one of whom my son cooks at! I asked him to thank his family for me, because I know they treat my son well there.

But it is hard for restaurants to keep treating their workers well when government decides to disallow a young person from working for a restaurant for less than the minimum wage. It is hard for a restaurant to keep treating its workers well when we raise taxes on liquor (already the highest-taxed good in Minnesota and taxed 20-80% higher than in surrounding states.) It is hard to treat your workers well when the government decides your sole proprietorship making $300,000 in net revenue should pay higher taxes out of ‘fairness’.

All that out of a 3-minute meeting with a voter in north St. Cloud. And I get to do that every day between now and November.

If you live in Eagan or Saint Cloud, your mission is clear…

…then please stop by Granite City in Eagan between 5:30 and 7-ish.  I’ll be speaking at a fundraiser for Diane Anderson, the GOP-endorsed candidate running against incumbent Sandra Masin.

I think Ed – who lives in the district – will be there.  Certainly if you live in or near Eagan, you should stop down and help Diane win this very winnable district.

Hope to see you there!

 The lastest KSTP-Survey USA poll shows Michele Bachmann up over Tarryl Clark by nine points with four months ’til the election.

Someone named “Alec”, a “diarist” at Minnesota “Progressive” Project, has a Matthews-y tingle running down his leg:

Someone else can write a nice front page post, but I am very excited by this. Bachmann 48, Clark 39. MOE 4%. Hard to believe the IP candidate only got 6%. With no name recognition, Clark is only down by 9. Bachmann is below 50% and her name rec is universal.

Four months ’til the election, with Clark benefitting from a blitz of advertising and friendly-to-fawning coverage in the Twin Cities media, before Bachmann has even really started seriously campaigning.  Seriously – Bachmann has yet to spend figurative dime one on her campaign.  There is no need to, not yet.

The “name recognition” is a red herring, too; all Bachmann’s negatives are in play, but Clark – a tax-and-spendaholic in a year and a district where that should be poisonous this fall – has only started to turn people off.  As “Alec” notes, she has no name recognition; that may be the best thing going for her so far.

And given the polarization of the numbers in the KSTP poll, I’m going to suspect that independents – who are breaking GOP nationwide – are not really sounding off yet.

Joe “Chloe” Bodell comments:

We’ll dig into the numbers later — but thanks to Alec for getting the news out to the ‘sphere.

This is good-to-great news, folks. – promoted by Joe Bodell)

Well, run this good-to-great news; at this point in 2006 and 2006, if memory serves (and I believe it does, but stop me if I’m wrong) Patty Wetterling was around nine points back in a bad GOP year, and Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenburg was closer than that two years ago in a much, much worse year.

I’ve been predicting an eight-point Bachmann win by November.  I’m seeing no reason not to be optimistic.

 A lot can happen in four months, of course.

Gary Gross also covers the topic.

Principles can be painful.

I, as an occasional independent consultant, would just love to land a gig leading the User Experience design effort for a big world-facing institutional application.  I’d love the opportunity to pitch my skills to one of these institutions, convince them that I’m the right guy for the job, and bask in the eventual glory of a job well designed.  To say nothing of the payoff of 12-24 months’ lucrative work.

But if the big instutional customer were a front for AFSCME, the SEIU and the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, and the job was a website to help “community organizers” track union members who violated “Card Check” rules for future retribution, and to link these objectors to other union “assets” (goons) to service the transaction (throw bricks through their windows and kill their dogs), principle would tell me I would need to bow out of the gig.  No matter how much it paid.

Principle has its price.

Would bowing out of the project be a huge mistake?  Business hari-kiri?  From a bottom-line sense, it might very well be.   If “Mitch Berg Design” were publicly-held, it might even violate my fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders.  But if it’s my call, given that I oppose Card Check to say nothing of union thuggery, it wouldn’t even be a serious question.

One of the better, more thought-provoking conservative blogs I’ve encountered lately is “Minnesota Conservatives”, a duoblog featuring Minneapolis conservative Barbara Malzacher and 4th CD blogger “Shabbosgoy” – who’s a fairly well-known goy/guy in Saint Paul GOP circles, but I don’t know if his real identity is something he’s put on the blog yet, so I’ll hold off on that for now (note to self; find out why they’re not in the MOB).

Last week, Shabbosgoy wrote a post,  “On Saving The Emmer Campaign From Itself”, that caused a bit of a stir among Emmer’s followers.

Shabbosgoy’s (I’m going to save my fingers and call him SG from here on) premise is that Emmer’s “Waiter’s Wage” kerfuffle was a huge hit to the campaign.

Not fatal, of course…:

Not being glass-half-empty liberals, however, MC believes the campaign can right itself and move forward to victory in November. But the change has to be immediate, if not sooner. And the person who came up with the town hall seppuku should be tasered.

Let’s walk through them one by one:

1. Cancel the seppuku. Sure Emmer will be mocked but such pales in comparison to being tagged as the guy who wants servers to make $2.13 an hour. Such tagging has been ongoing all this week.

Let’s define our terms.

“Seppuku” (the political version, not the Japanese ritual self-disembowelment) is saying “I have no idea what E85 is” while in the middle of Minnesota’s Corn belt; it’s betraying a crucial tone-deaf ignorance.

Favoring a return to the tip credit – the exact system Minnesota used for tipped workers until 1990, and that is used in 43 other states to allow for the fact that tipped waistaff don’t rely on hourly wages for the bulk of their income – is a stance for principle; in this case, the principle that mandated minimum wages kill jobs.

Is it going to cost Emmer votes – especially given the way the agenda-driven media has reproted the story?  Perhaps among food servers; I’m sure waitrons at places in outstate Minnesota where the locals still consider a buck a lavish tip for a $30 tab will be un-thrilled by the prospect.  And understanding how tip credits work is important (and most people don’t); it only counts for time when the worker can get tips; not for time spent folding napkins or cleaning out the ice machine in back (which is paid at at least the regular minimum wage, and which is time that most decent food service workers like to avoid, the better to be out working tables and raking in tips).

Among people who run businesses?  Especially among bars and restaurants, whose profit margins have always been razor-thin?  Who’ve seen their bottom lines squeezed by $5/hour for every single waitress or bartender they have out in the house for the past couple of decades?  Or among parents of teenagers (ahem) who have a harder time than ever finding entry-level minimum wage jobs as the minimum wage has risen?

I’m not so sure.

2. If the death wish can’t be scrubbed, then Emmer should come out for making tips and gratuities tax-free. Who cares what it does to revenue? Just get on the right side of this issue politically.

That in particular is a good, princpled, conservative approach to the issue.  It’s also a federal issue controlled by the IRS, and most likely not something a governor can carry off.

3. Stop running for the endorsement. Emmer won. He can’t win with the narrow base that propelled him to victory. He’s in a general election race now and any campaign staff that can’t grasp the obvious ought to be waiting tables. We jest! Don’t shoot!

But as I’ve seen it all along, Emmer’s campaign has been about running on conservative principles all along – and selling those principles to the middle to convince them to move to meet him on the right, rather than scuttling toward the center.

The principle in this case is “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs” – or, more directly, “Get government out of the way of business creating more jobs”.  The loss of the tip credit has effectively tripled the cost of every waiter on a restauranteur’s or barkeep’s floor, giving them the option of slashing either profits or the number of waitstaff.  Emmer is proposing rectifying this.  The DFL and Media’s predictable response is “look at the money waiters might lose!” (when it’s not “where are the $100,000 waitstaff jobs?”); Emmer’s response, and that of his supporters, should be “but look at the jobs, averaging $8-15 an hour with tips, we’ll be creating!”.

4. Run on winning themes and speak of nothing else: lower taxes for all, less nanny-state interference in our lives, reduced state spending and the legitimate fear of the intellectually lazy DFL in control of the executive and legislative branches.

But I think that was Emmer’s point, if phrased inartfully and exploited deceptively.

5. Don’t take the post August 10th bait from Mark “Renoir-Toulouse Lautrec” Dayton. He’ll run a class warfare campaign and the tip-credit snafu only plays directly into that. Like most Democrats, he hasn’t had a new idea in decades. Point out he’s to the left of our wholly incompetent affirmative action President.

And here, SG is absolutely correct.

Finally, one friend of MC suggested something brilliant: bring in New Jersery Governor Chris Christie and campaign for real reform and not just tinkering around the edges. New ideas scare Democrats; so scare them!

I agree; Governor Christie is like the long-lost child of my own political idol, former Jersey City mayor Brett Schundler, who did for his city half a generation ago what Governor Christie is trying to do for the whole state today.

But here’s a question;  when it comes to tip credits, and the media and DFL’s (ptr) class-baiting response to the “story”, What Would Christie Do?

(Besides say “tip credits work in New Jersey”; the state is one of the 43 that allows ’em).

Voters will reward you. Look at what he’s doing in his state and think about what could be applied here to good effect. If Christie can have such success in New Jersey, MC holds out hope for this state of government workers.

Hope is good.

And to achieve hope, you need to start with a princple, and then move to achieve it.

And DFL/media caterwauling aside, I don’t think this past week has been a bad step on the way.

As much as I’ve bagged on the press for their hatchet-jobbery as re the Emmer campaign, I’ll give well-deserved kudos to the PiPress’ Bill Salisbury for doing a fair, balanced piece that shows the reasons that a lot of us gravitated to Emmer in the first place.

Anecdote alert:

Tom Emmer’s father was struggling to keep his Edina lumberyard afloat during a deep recession in the early ’80s.

One day, his dad ordered his sons to put on their suits and ties and his wife and daughter to don dresses and climb into the family’s backyard swimming pool.

“We sat in the pool, water up to here,” Emmer recently recalled, holding his hand to his chest, “and he took a picture.”

At Christmastime, his father mailed the photo to friends and family with this message scrawled across the bottom: “The Emmers almost went under last year, but we’re coming out with a splash this year.”

Emmer, the Republican-endorsed candidate for Minnesota governor, said his father’s declaration symbolized how he learned to face adversity and obstacles.

“You need to take responsibility for those situations, stand up tall and make the best of it,” the three-term state representative said during a late-June campaign bus ride across southern Minnesota.

The whole thing is worth a read.

And so we get to the peak of the peak; the top ten Minnesota Conservatives that Minnesota liberals and Democrats hate!  These, for the most part, are the people who drive Minnesota liberals into paroxysms of rage because…they disagree with them.

Drum roll please!

10. Ed Morrissey: Yeah, I’m surprised the mild-mannered Morrisey made the top ten, too.  Maybe it’s the effortlessness of it all that they hate so much; Ed, my radio colleague, mows through national lefties like a riding mower through a cabbage patch, and doesn’t break a sweat, and makes it back to the Morrissey Mansion in time for reruns of The Wire with the First Mate; he may have more influence on national opinion than Media Matters, and until recently he did it for the love of the game.  If you were George Soros, you’d hate that.

9. Norm Coleman: There is nothing the left hates worst than apostates; we’ve seen how they detest female conservatives throughout this poll; Democrats who flip parties are one circle of Lib Hell removed from them.  Norm flipped when he was mayor of Saint Paul, and went on to be the best Senator this state has had in years, and the best we’re likely to have until at least 2014.

8. Mitch Berg:  Huh?  Me?  A guy with a blog that gets a respectable but strictly-C-list 2,000 visits a day?  OK, I claim home field advantage; I got a lot of votes, but my passion index was the lowest on the Top Ten.  Still, it’s fun to see!  Thanks!

7. Jason Lewis:  Let’s not mince words; Lewis is to Minnesota conservatism what the Wright Brothers were to aviation; before them, conservatism and heavier-than-air flight were both theories; it took them to make it all happen.  Jason Lewis brought the Reagan Revolution at long last to Minnesota.  His impact on politics in this state is easy, and wrong, to understate. Before Jason Lewis, Arne Carlson was the face of the GOP in Minnesota.  Without Lewis, he still very well might be.  And that makes the DFL and media’s (pardon the redundancy) jobs harder.  And we know how liberals hate to work.

6. David Strom: If Jason Lewis brought the Reagan Revolution to Minnesota, David Strom taught that revolution how to invoke Hayek and spell Friedman and, by the way, how to make their representatives do it, too.  If the DFL sold dartboards, his picture would be on them.

5. Michael Brodkorb:  Michael – my former NARN co-host – cut his public-image teeth as the owner of Minnesota Democrats Exposed, and became the Matt Drudge of the Minnesota alt-media almost overnight.  He didn’t just eat the Dems’ lunches every day; he ran laps around them, and never broke a sweat, ever.  If anyone has ever let the air out of the Minnesota political media establishment’s tires, it was Brodkorb.  He’s earned the hate!

4. Katherine Kersten:  The Twin Cities’ leftymedia hated Kersten partly because she didn’t know the secret handshake; she didn’t get her late, lamented column after years of covering city council meetings and dog shows and one-car crashes; she actually had a productive career – but there are few things journos hate worse than people who get printed in newspapers without bothering to join the Order of Most High Priests of Information. And if journos hate her, then the DFL will hate her too (even without considering that she’s a female and a conservative, which puts her beyond the pale); and Democrats hate whomever their superiors tell them to hate.  So Kersten became a reviled figure, even though most of those doing the reviling, the Twin Cities leftyblogs and their followers, had put no more thought into it than dog puts into fetching a stick.   Although she’s #4, she had the second-highest “Passion Index” – average ranking – of anyone in the poll.

3. Rep. Tom Emmer: Of course, there’s almost nobody the Democratics hate more than any conservative who can beat them.  Emmer finished third; I suspect it’ll move up after the Dems have to figure out how to make Mark Dayton beat him this fall.   I suspect Tom’ll make a run for #2.  But not #1.  You’ll see why.

2. Governor Tim Pawlenty:  The DFL hates him for the same reason the Persians hated King Leonidas of Sparta; because he almost singlehandedly stymied them on pure personal and conservative principal for four years, fighting against two DFL-controlled chambers and a media that would have to develop a whole lot of integrity to be called merely “in the bag for the DFL”.   TPaw is only reason all income above the “living wage” hasn’t been confiscated from  you by the State of Minnesota and given to AFSCME.  In a just world, he’d be in the top three contenders for the White House.  He knows how to beat back the DFL like perhaps nobody in history; he’s more than earned the hatred.

And finally, the most-hated conservative in Minnsota…

[trumpet fanfare]

1.  Rep. Michele Bachmann:  It wasn’t even close.  She not only got more votes overall, but never finished lower than #2 in anyone’s rankings, and even then only two or three times.  Her “Passion Index” is just south of a perfect “10”, over two points higher than the next highest contender, Kersten.  Bachmann is everything the left hates rolled up into five feet three inches of explosive charisma; she’s a pro-lifer who’s spent a life putting her money where her mouth is (five biokids and a couple dozen foster kids), she’s been sounding the most articulate jeremiads about the federal spending orgy of anyone on Capitol Hill; she is one of the faces of the Tea Party (which, to the horror of the left, is led and largely peopled by women);  she endures the most scabrous assaults of anyone in Washington, slips them all and bobs back up smiling and shooting from the hip (with an AR15 – oh, yeah, she’s a perfect 100 on Second Amendment issues, too).  Bachmann is unabashedly Christian and Reaganite and Pro-shining-city-on-the-hill – all things that give Minnesota liberals seizures.  And not only is she a woman, but she’s among the leaders of this year’s conservative female revolution, which threatens to undercut the Democratics’ traditional monopoly on the female vote.

You can see steam shoot out of lefties’ ears when her name is mentioned – partly for what she stands for, and partly for how she does it; with the pure glee that comes from always kicking your opponents’ asses in every way.

Congrats, Rep. Bachmann!

So there we go for this year!  Maybe this will be an annual, or at least biennial, tradition…

GREETINGS, HOT AIR HEADLINES READERS:  Thanks for stopping by!  I’ll also direct you to the first two installments – for places 21-30, and 11-20.

Earlier this week, I took a poll – what Minnesota conservatives do Minnesota liberals hate the most? 

I collected responses via the comment section, my facebook page, and email – and got a pretty fair bunch of responses.  There were some surprises and at least a couple of foregone conclusions.

I’m going to publish 11-20 over the noon hour today, and 1 through 10 over noon tomorrow. 

But first, I’m going to give some recognitionto that mass of Minnesota conservatives that give Minnesota’s liberal establishment just a little to hate.  These are the people and institutions that got one vote each:

• The DFL – One wag apparently believes the left believes Minnesota’s dominant party is liberalism’s worst enemy.
• The Cans – No idea.
• All Minnesota Conservatives
• Mitch Pearlstein – Longtime head of the Center of the American Experiment
• Bill Cooper – Former MNGOP chair, CEO of TCF Bank, and pwner of Nick Coleman.
• Cosmo Insolocco – No idea.
• Mary Kiffmeyer – the former MN Secretary of State was a lightning rod for…ACORN.
• Freedom
• Pat Anderson – The former and future State Auditor
• Mac Hammond – The megaminister from Maple Grove
• Brian Sullivan – Tim Pawlenty’s convention opponent in 2002, and arguably the person we can thank for the conservatism of Pawlenty’s administration.
• Denny Hecker
• Conservative Bloggers – should be self-explanatory.
• Tony Sutton – The current chair of the Minnesota GOP
• Randy Kelly – Former Saint Paul DFL mayor who doomed his shot at a second term by endorsing George W. Bush in 2004.
• Regular Coffee
• Alan Quist – the first hardcore social conservative I can remember in Minnesota politics; endorsed for governor in 1990, he lost to Arne Carlson in the primary.
• Learned Foot – former Kool Aid Report blogger.
• Marty Seifert – Tom Emmer’s convention opponent and, now that he’s suddenly not running for office, a “reasonable, common-sense Republican” to all the DFLers that were calling him an extremist two months ago.
• Henry Ford
• Tom Pritchard – longtime chair of the Minnesota Family Council
• Kermit – blogger from Anti-Strib
• Rod Grams – former one-term Senator
• The Suburbs
• Captain America

Congratulations to everyone on the list that’s, er, human.

Now, the people with more than one vote, with their standings in the final poll:

30.  Katie Kieffer: The blogger, former college-press gadfly and up-and-coming pundit got two votes, including from one voter who added every conservative woman she could think of; “that’s who they really hate…”

29. Swiftee:  The of Bruce Springsteen of button-pushing, the Charlie Parker of chain-yanking, perhaps the most banned person among Twin Cities leftyblogs, the only surprise is that he didn’t come in in the top twenty.

28. Twila Brase:  Tireless healthcare crusader and my neighbor.

27. Entrepreneurs: Except when they can serve as ATMs for social spending, of course.

26. Joe Soucheray: Souch’s social curmudgeonism is often called “conservative”, and it was certainly something Minnesota liberals detested.

25. Tracy Eberly: Three years past the “Dirt-Worshipping Heathens” flap, Tracy still gets ’em frothing.

24. The Tea Partier: The “boogeyman” of the Minnesota left.

23. Paul Mirengoff: Not a Minnesotan, but when groupblogs got votes, I spread the votes among their contributors, and Powerline got two group votes.  Which is also why…

22.  Brian “Saint Paul” Ward got on the list as well.  My long-time NARN co-host scored two votes as  a member of the NARN.

21.  Rep. Erik Paulsen: With three votes, Paulsen is the only Republican in Minnestoa’s congressional delegation not to make the top twenty with a bullet.  As it were.

Top Twenty coming up at noon!

Barack Obama is doing so badly at foreign policy, at dealing with the economy and at running an administration that predictions that he may be “the next Carter” are sounding optimistic.

But when it comes to neutralizing his competition, he shows he’s learned something from all his years in Chicago:

Keep your friends close—and the competition closer. There has been a buzz about Petraeus and the presidency since about the fall of last year, and to many in the Republican Party—a party bereft of ideas and credible leaders—the general has increasingly taken on the aspect of a possible messiah. His impeccable military credentials, his undoubted intelligence, his mastery of personal and professional politics (you wouldn’t catch him talking to Rolling Stone in a million years), plus his undoubted (if carefully tailored) conservatism have led many to see in him a man who can take on Obama in 2012, and beat him. He is even the sort of guy who’d allow the GOP to broaden its tent, drawing in “undecideds” and independents.

This can no longer happen.

Gotta hand it to the President.

Back during the 2008 race, a local leftyblogger called the NARN in a state of high-dudgeon over my statemenat Erik Paulsen was running a conservative campaign for the Third Congressional District.

The caller bellowed “You’re a Liar!!!”, which is leftyblogger-speak for “I disagree with you, but I can’t coherently articulate why”.

My point at the time:  the “Conventional Wisdom” (a fancy term for “the current of thought among the DFL and their friends in academia and the media”) was saying that the Third was “purple”, and that any Republican hoping to win would have to “run to the center” and be a “moderate Republican” (which is again DFL/media/academic code for “willing stooge of the DFL”) a la the departing moderate Jim Ramstad to have any hope of riding out the rising Obama tide – and yet Paulsen was solidly center-right on all the issues that mattered.

So it’s kinda fun to look at the American Conservative Union ratings of our current House delegation.   Betty McCollum, Al Franken, Keith Ellison all get “0” on a 1-100 scale; Oberstar and Walz tie at a nearly-Trotskyite “4”.

On the other hand, Michele Bachmann has a lifetime “100”;  “Extremist” John Kline also dialed up a 100 this past year, better than his lifetime rating of a thoroughly respectible 88…

…which happens to be exactly the same as Paulsen’s rating this past year.

Which is twenty points better than Jim Ramstad’s rating of 67.

Further proof that the only real information comes from the right.

Arne looks to be Revered.

During the 1980s, the growth in state government exceeded the growth in people’s paychecks by 15 percent.  Since then we have frozen the number of state employees, held the growth of government to the growth in personal income, implemented a wage freeze, and cut welfare for able-bodied adults…

In the process, we quickly became the target of nearly every entrenched and powerful spending system in Minnesota.  And as we were being attacked by all the forces that resists change – it was then that I knew we were doing something right.  — Gov. Arne Carlson’s 1994 State of the State Address

As former Governor Arne Carlson begins his much media ballyhooed “Paul Revere Tour” doing largely what he’s done for the past eight years – needle the Pawlenty administration – it’s not hard to look back at his 1994 comments and wonder which “side” the Arne Carlson of the 90’s would view his 2010 doppleganger.

Whether Carlson’s tour caused him to be revered or tarred and feathered, the former governor is indirectly experiencing his largest political relevance since leaving office.  Between the candidaces of self-described “former Republican” Tom Horner and former Carlson finance director Jon Gunyou, Arne’s old “Independent-Republican” brand (which the party called itself from 1974-1995) will be a subject of hot political debate and historical revisionism.

But how much are Carlson and others engaging in euphoric recall?  For most of Carlson’s eight years, the relationship between the chief executive’s office and the legislature looked as cozy as an Israeli/PLO summit.  Despite Carlson’s recent shot that Pawlenty “lacks leadership” due to his vetoes and inability to compromise with the DFL legislature, it’s Carlson who maintains the lead in the veto count.  In fact, it’s not even close as Pawlenty’s 96 vetoes are dwarfed by Carlson’s record 179.

Until at least 1998, when Carlson’s State of the State address read like an heiress’ shopping list amid his bid to buy a legacy, Arne had a far different reputation that his current incarnation as putting the ‘I’ in ‘IR’.  The Beta version of Arne Carlson was known by his liberal opponents as a tax-cutter, a supporter of vouchers, and a proponent of reducing funding to cities and counties.  He publicly rebuked the federalism of HillaryCare, decrying the would-be mandates on the states.  Carlson even tepidly backed the idea of a TABOResque constitutional amendment that would require voter approval before raising taxes.  Combined with his penchent for spending, especially later in his term, Arne’s dig at Pawlenty that “what the governor wants to do is to say no to taxes, yes to spending” seems apt to describe Carlson’s tenure as well.

Arne Carlson and his current supporters can definitely argue that circumstances were different in the 1990s when he professed such conservative positions, although Minnesota (like most of the nation) saw largely languid growth and recession for most of Carlson’s first four or so years in office.  But what may truly gall Carlson is that his Republican predecessors actually believe the rhetoric Carlson and his IR-brand of Republicanism once spouted.

Despite the invective hurled at Carlson during most of his term by the very same political and media institutions that now champion his public criticisms, most of the fiscally conservative positions that Carlson took were politically expedient. Rhetoric towards smaller government, tighter welfare rules and tax cuts were not just en vogue for most of the 1990s, but politically necessary for a governor viewed as boardline illegitimate by activists in both major parties.

Democrats and conservative Republicans groused at Carlson’s last-minute entry into the 1990 governor’s race following Jon Grunseth’s attempt at a Hot Tub Time Machine that would get him under the swimsuits of three teenaged girls. From the-then Republican perspective, Carlson had already lost the endorsement and the primary to Grunseth and had been trying to undermine the party with a write-in candidacy in the general election. 

Democrats hated that Carlson had narrowly beaten incumbent Rudy Perpich despite only being in the campaign for days and tried to steamroll Carlson’s early days, forcing a number of vetoes. Thus for Carlson, while it could be argued whether or not he viewed fiscal conservatism as good policy, it was certainly good politics.

16 years after his political highwater mark, Carlson still knows how to practice good politics – at least for himself.  Gaining nothing by defending Pawlenty or the GOP, which would in essence be defending many of same fiscal practices and positions he said he held while governor, Carlson can hold some media limelight by embracing his former opposition.  Whether that involves doing political gymnastics worthy of Nadia Comaneci – from now backing nationalized health care, to his views on vetoes and budget shifts – perhaps matters little.

Carlson believed he was fighting the status quo in 1994 and still believes it today.  Considering the Minnesota budget has expanded since he left office from $10 billion to $34 billion, Arne might seriously wish to question if he’s fighting for or against the dominant attitudes in St. Paul.

Ssshhhhhh.

Dave Mindemen at mnpACT is about to blow the lid off something – the “facade” of Minnesota Republican unity:

A short time ago, Republicans filled a room at the Secretary of State’s office and Tony Sutton announced this as proof that the Republican party was unified and ready to take back the legislature. It was a nicely staged event to coincide with Tom Emmer’s filing for governor. All together – united in purpose.

Makes a great picture….but like most Republican declarations it’s just not true.

But…why?

Arne Carlson was on MPR this morning…you remember him. Former Governor of Minnesota, Republican? Except when you ask Pawlenty or Tony Sutton or Michael Brodkorb about Arne Carlson, they refuse to identify him as part of the GOP. Pawlenty has dismissed Carlson’s critiques as proof that Carlson has defected to the other side.

Disagreement’s not allowed?

Ask Joe Lieberman and former DFLer Norm Coleman…

….hey, wait!  Arne Carlson is running for office?

(Even after doubling spending, endorsing Obama and bashing the conservative mainstream that, let me emphasize this, controls the party?)

Question #1 for Dave Mindeman:  Does the fact that conservatives won the control of the party, to the point where no “moderates” made it to the convention, mean anything to you (outside the mistaken notion that it’s a weakness)?

Question #2 for Dave Mindeman: Please introduce me to all those endorsed pro-gun, pro-life, limited-government Tenth Amendment supporting Democrats in the Metro area DFL!

The media has been breathlessly trying to set up Tom Horner as a “non-extreme” Republican alternative to Tom Emmer.  For some, it’s a matter of conflating “Republican” and “Conservative”.  For others, it’s a simple desire to spoof the GOP for the DFL’s beneift.

But the more you look at Horner’s political record – which, let’s make sure we’re clear on this, is entirely as a political consultant, as opposed to “an elected official or representative” – the more you realize that Horner’s entire career is built on making government bigger.

This blog, and many other Minnesota conservative bloggers, will be going over the Horner record in coming weeks.

The upshot?  It’s looking pretty likely that Tom Horner will make a good, smallER government alternative to the DFL – but no Republican to the right of Ron Erhardt in his or her right mind should look at Horner as anything but “DFL Lite”.

You’ve no doubt heard; Larry Haws is retiring from the Minnesota House:

Because you’re a friend and supporter, I wanted you to know first about my decision to not seek re-election. Five years ago I offered myself as a candidate for public office in Minnesota out of a deep sense of appreciation of the issues important to the people of District 15B.

Our friend and my radio colleague King Banaian is the GOP endorsed candidate for the House in 15B.  Running for an open seat is easier under any circumstances; with the current anti-incumbent, anti-tax-and-spending tailwind, King’s gotta be feeling pretty good about his chances today.

Which doesn’t mean all you Saint Cloud Republicans shouldn’t be turning out in huge numbers to help; it’d be great to be able to not just win, but obliterate the DFL.

Thank you so very much for wasteing an hour of taxpayer time by convening the House a solid hour late this afternoon.

The taxpayers’ loss was the NARN’s gain.

Poll finds Republicans are getting theor coalition back in order:

Republicans have reassembled their coalition by reconnecting with independents, seniors, blue-collar voters, suburban women and small town and rural voters—all of whom had moved away from the party in the 2006 elections, in which Republicans lost control of the House. Those voter groups now favor GOP control of Congress.

“This data is what it looks like when Republicans assemble what for them is a winning coalition,” said GOP pollster Bill McInturff, who conducts the survey with Democratic pollster Peter Hart.

That’s good news.

The bad news is that, on a national level, I’m not sure it’s because of anything the GOP has actually done. (I’ll except Minnesota – which is a new tack for me.  The MNGOP has, I think, done an uncharacteristically good job of reaching out to people; I’d like to see more, but a journey of a thousand miles does begin with a single step).

Can mass revulsion with the Democrats carry the day?  It’s a fragile strategy at best…

But you have to have people voting for you before they can affect the party – and more people are passionate about the right side of issues today.  The fundamentals, as John McCain might have said, are looking pretty solid.