The polls are all over the place – but at the moment, Barack Obama’s re-election bid is not looking nearly as solid as it needs to six months before election day:

The RealClearPolitics poll average puts President Barack Obama at 47 percent and Romney at 44.2 percent – statistically insignificant lead of 2.2 percent.

And that’s after six months of not only the media, but other Republicans, attacking the presumptive nominee without pause.

Drill down into the numbers of the latest CBS poll and there are ominous signs for Obama. Only 33 percent of Americans believe the economy is moving in the right direction. A mere 16 percent feel they are getting ahead financially. Some 38 percent think their situation will get worse if Obama is re-elected, 26 percent think it will get better.

And I suspect if you ask Americans if they’re better off than they were four years ago, the only ones that’d answer “yes” are the insane, Democrat operatives, and…

…well, that’s about it.

Just saying – if you’re pitching a story to the mainstream media about race or gender issues, now would be a good time to make your move; it’ll be a seller’s market.

I’ve written about it a slew of times; I grew up in a Democrat household.  I became a conservative in college (perhaps the only person in recent western civilization to have been converted to conservatism by an English professor).  I left the GOP in 1995, disgusted by the GOP caving in on the 1994 Cxrime Bill and other Clinton-era fripperies. I became a big-L LIbertarian.

I stayed in the party for four years.  I left because I realized that while the LIbertarian Party believed in an absolutely purest form of what I believed in, I also figured out that if what I believed in fell in a forest and an infinitesmal minority heard it, it’d never matter.

So I went back to the GOP.  I figured I’d sully my pristine principles a little, and have a shot at getting the rest of my principles – as many as possible –  at least a hypotehtical shot of getting passed into law.  I would do my little bit to fight for the conservative, Reaganesque soul of the GOP.   I was one of the little group of libertarian-conservatives, fiscalcons and other conservatives tthat were .

I didn’t get everything I wanted.  But I – we – got a lot; a GOP that fumigated itself of the miasma of Arne Carlson, fought for limiting the size of government and, to an extent that Minnesota had not seen in decades, succeeded; we inviegled Tim Pawlenty to move to the right to stave off a spirited challenge from oour guy, Brian Sullivan; we exacted a No New Taxes pledge from Pawlenty, and largely got him to stick to it, even when he was outnumbered two chambers to zero.

Not a bad decade, all in all.  Perfect?  No – but way better than it would have been otherwise.

The Minnesota GOP is in the middle of…well,l not an “epic battle for its soul”, really.  A tug of war, really – between the people who’ve been running the party since about 2002, whoever they are, and the “Ron Paul crowd”.  It’s a tug of war with some fairly exposed emotions; in 2008, many “establishment” Republicans fought very hard to exclude the Paul contingent from the conventions, from BPOU level all the way up to the state convo.  And on their site, not a few Paul supporters (sometimes called, with varying degrees of affection, “Paulbots” due to the personality cult-like attitude of some Paul supporters, including some pretty notable ones) advanced some ideas that traditional conservatives found anathemic; Libertarians are a lot more “live and let live” on social issues like abortion and gay marriage than traditional conservatives.  There was bound to be some conflict – and there was.

The Paul crowd has bounced back this year and made a huge impact on the MNGOP, taking most of the delegate and many of the executive seats in the Congressional District conventions.  And it’s causing all sorts of people to ask questions.

One of them is “Average Andy”, a guy I met on Twitter, a tweep and blogger with a background not too far different than mine, at least up until 1998ish or so.  Andy, asks:

I have a serious question for my Republican friends… I have been given the riot act from countless Republicans about my views on Presidential candidates. I’ve been told that I MUST vote Republican for a whole host of reasons. I may not like the candidate, but the Democrat will always be worse. I’ve never been much of a pragmatist in elections, and these conversations drive me as crazy as my vote drives these Republicans crazy, if not more.

On the one hand – by all means vote your conscience.

On the other hand, that’s one of the problems that many of the Republilcan activists are genuinely, and legitimately, upset about; the idea the that party many of us worked very, very hard for is being taken over, for now, by people who will – as Andy admits he himself did – vote for a third party candidate if “his” Republican doesn’t get nominated, and who can say “there’s no difference between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama” with a straight face,

It’s just not true.  Romney is a northeastern conservative, which means he’s pro-business, pro-law-and-order, and more comfortable with big governnment than a lot of us Western Conservatives.  And the knock-down drag-primary has helped push him to the right, to surmount the challenges from more conservative candidates, and to try to win over people who really wanted Santorum, Gingrich, Cain, Perry – even Ron Paul.

That’s all to the good.

Now – not a few Paul supporters (and yes, Santorum and Gingrich supporters, all of whom should know better) have claimed they’ll sit out the presidential election (or vote for some fringe-right third-party, which is the same thing), if not the whole race.  They think – wrongly – that a Romney administration will be the same as an Obama one.

More on that later.

But Andy – who avers that he followed up his support for Paul in the 2008 race by voting Constitution Party – does in fact show the flip side of that coin.

Despite the way my fellow Ron Paul supporters were treated in 2008, I repeated the process in 2010 in order to be a part of selecting a candidate for Governor. I didn’t know the candidates well, as I tend not to follow state politics nearly as closely as I follow national politics. However, I had made a lot of connections two years prior in the process and befriended a lot of people who were out in 2008 to support Ron Paul…To a man, they were all behind Tom Emmer, and I threw my support behind Emmer. Despite the fact that he lost, I have no regrets.

And the fact is that for all of the concern about among traditional Republicans that Paul supporters were single-candidate one-trick ponies, many of the mainstays of the Emmer campaign, and many people who have and are invaluable to the GOP today, are people who came to party politics in 2008 via Paul, and 2009 via the Tea Party.

2012 rolled around and I got into the mix again. I was unhappy with my experience four years prior, and was tempted to forget the whole thing, but ultimately decided to give my fellow Republicans another shot. I had made many connections in 2008, and met a lot of people. Most of which were friendly toward me and seemed happy to have me in the process. However, when my support for Ron Paul would come up in conversation, defensive walls would immediately go up. There were, and are, strong stereotypes of Ron Paul supporters, many of which are unfair – based on a very small minority of fellow Paul supporters.

Andy’s right – see my previous graf – and also a bit dismissive of some of the concerns some of the “establishment” have.

An awful lot of Paul supporters don’t thnk there’s a significant difference between “establishment” Republicans and Democrats.

Not a few fairly significant Paul supporters in the MNGOP also advance some views that “regular” Republicans find noxious; I’ve run into Holocaust deniers and some fairly noxious anti-Semites.  Of course they’re not the majority of the movement – but there are enough of them, and they are prominent enough, that it gets people a little standoffish.

A few significant Paul supporters – one in particular – have been carrying out witch hunts attacking Republicans they don’t consider acceptably and unquestioningly adoring enough  of Ron Paul and every single point of his platform.  OK, them I can handle myself – but you might wanna have a word with ’em.  Because there are a lot of you – but not enough to win any offices by yourself.

More commonly?   Many who’ve been involved with the party have tallked with many in the current wave of Paul supporters at the BPOU level, and found many – by no means all – of them to be focused almost exclusively on the Presidential election.  Which is fine – it’s important, and it’s one of the things you do when you’re involved in the party endorsement process.  But we’ve noticed less interest and concern in the activities that are the blocking and tackling of Congressional District politics – getting Republicans elected to Congress – to say nothing of the BPOU level (doing the door-knocking and phone-calling and grunt work that gets State Legislators and Senators elected).  It’s why I wrote my “Open Letter To Ron Paul supporters in CD4” a few weeks back; on the off chance that Ron Paul doesn’t get the nomination, it’d be great to see that wave of enthusiasm turn out to support whomever gets nominated to run for Senate, for Congress, and for the State Legislature – by doing what a political party does, even if one doesn’t have absolute control over it.  By supporting people that you don’t agree with 1000%, based on the ideal that someone you agree with 70% of the time is not your 30% enemy, but your 70% ally.

The reaction to that post, by the way, was just about the most interesting of any post I’ve ever written.  I got a lot of compliments – from traditional Republicans and not a few Paul supporters – and a little bit of hate mail as well.

Some Paul supporters objected to my use of the word “Paulbot”.  Enh.  I didn’t invent the term.  There was no offense intended, but life’s tough, and politics ain’t beanbag, and wear a freaking helmet.  The Dems will call you much, much worse (once they stop seeing you as wedges to undercut the GOP, like their revenge for that whole “Green Party” thing, anyway).

Others took offense that I’d presume they won’t turn out to help downticket races.  Well, good.  The whole article was a challenge.  I’d be more than happy to have the entire inference disproved in spades.  I’ll apologize, in public and on the air, at Tony Hernandez’ victory party.  Or Carlos Conway’s.  Hell, both.

To put it more bluntly; I’ll look forward to seeing the “establishment’s” conventional wisdom about the Paul contingent proven wrong.  Indeed, I’ll do my level best to help them do it.

If you, GOPer, want me to go back to staying out of your way, and voting Constitution Party for President, I will be happy to do so. If you want me to stay involved in the process, and put in the work to make my voice heard in 2014 when we’re looking for a candidate to unseat Mark Dayton, I will be happy to do so. What I am not happy to do is to get involved, but echo your voice. If my role in the GOP is to be a yes-man, check in with you on which candidates to support and what work to do for your precious party, count me out!

Excellent!  And given that Paul supporters have taken wide control of much of the BPOU and CD apparatus around the state, you’re probably in a good position to call some of those shots.  But be that as it may, I’m more than willing to hash out the differences face to face, rather than through parliamentary skullduggery (which I opposed, then and now).

In return?  Please stop pretending that any candidate that isn’t 100% yours is in no way different from the evil we’re all hypothetically fighting against – at least not without showing how that’s true, and being open to the idea that it’s to some degree or another false.  There are a lot of us in the GOP are small-l libertarians who don’t care for Ron Paul, but have high hopes for his son.  Have some respect for the good work that came before you – because plenty did, in fact, come before you.

And learn to get along with some cognitive dissonance.  When I came back to the GOP as a libertarian conservative, I ran into not a few single-issue pro-life voters who coudln’t understand why I wanted to pass concealed carry reform or stop subsidizing stadiums.  They took convincing.  They, in turn, and to work to convince me on a few things.  Everyone learned.

Deal?

The GOP – especially in the 4th and 5th CDs – needs a ton of help; having the Paul contingent turn some of that energy toward winning that race would bury a lot of hatchets.

On the one hand, Democrats – and their out-house PR flak firms like “Common Cause” – whinge about “the corrosive power of money in politics.”.

On the other hand, they celebrate it when they have lots of it.

The MinnPost has the current money situations for the all the Congressional canddiates.  And the same Democrats who insist that money is a baaaad thing when Tom Emmer has it are doing cartwheels of joy that…:

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Democrat: Raised: $983,000 [in the wuarter just past]. On Hand: $5.2 million.

Pete Hegseth, Republican: Raised: $160,000 (since March 1). On Hand: $130,000.

Dan Severson, Republican: Raised: $54,000. On Hand: $40,300.

Kurt Bills, Republican: Raised: $45,500 (since mid-March). On Hand: $34,000.

And there’ws a nice little bit of Democrat hypocrisy; homegrown corporations like Target and Best Buy is “bad”, while getting millions from Holllywood plutocras and scions of the Rockefeller family.

Klobuchar has raised in the neighborhood of $1 million each quarter since the beginning of last year and has assembled a war chest that dwarfs her opponents. By most counts, Klobuchar is popular among voters and seen as a safe incumbent come November, and the fundraising advantage she has over her would-be challengers is going to be a tough for the eventual Republican candidate to overcome.

As, no doubt, they will continually remind the voter.  Because given Klobuchar’s nonexistent legislative reocrd and her incumbency, the only qualifications Klobuchar actually has is her purported likeability and “inevitability”.

It’s even worse in the sections on the 4th and 5th Congressional Districts.  The only reasons to vote for Keith Ellison and Betty McCollum, if you leave out pure unthinking party affiliation, are racism and sexism tthe fact they are already there.

It’d be nice to think we could do better…

The media is all abuzz over Ted Nugent’s  rather inflammatory commentary at the NRA convention.

I was struck my Andrea Mitchell’s comments on the Today show this morning – every line of the story included a carefully-enunchated to Nugent being a “Mitt ROMney supporter…”

I guess it’s a good thing that I can still be amazed by anything; after my decades of pointing out the bias and perfidy of the mainstream media, it’s probably a good thing I can still be this outraged.

Dear mainstream media (and idiot leftybloggers); if I say I “support” Mark Dayton, and then go rob a bank, it doesn’t make Mark Dayton complicit in the crime.

Further proof that the Democrats’ main constituency is the stupid.

So if you’re a woman who wants the government to pay for your contraception (even absurdly overpriced contraception, like Sandra Fluke’s), the Republicans are “at war” with you…

…until you have children you decide to try to raise, at which point the Democrats attack you?

Wow.  Being a woman is difficult.

Activist sleeper in the midst of trying to provide this nation with yet another lawyer, who claims to pay at least double the market rate for contraception and wants the government to pay for it? Good.

Woman who marries guy who becomes wildly personally, politically and financially successful, and opts from her own free will to stay home and raise five boys?  While dealnig with illness and starting out without a whoooole lot of money, family wealth notwithstanding?

Apparently bad..

Glad we could get clear on that.

So Santorum is out.

I caucused for Santorum two months ago – mostly, as I noted at the time, to try to use my one little vote to drive the presumptive front-runner, Romney, to the right.  I’ve got nothing against Santorum, but he’s not my ideal candidate.

Neither were any of the other candidates we’ve been through over this past few months – Huntsman, Johnson, Cain, Perry, Pawlenty, Bachmann, Paul, Gingrich, Santorum or Romney.  None of them were perfect, by the litmus tests that drive the all-important “Mitch Berg” vote; every one of them had something that kept me from jumping onto the bandwagon.

But let’s be clear – every single one of them would have been a better President than Barack Obama.  Even if they had a stroke.

My various Newt and Paul supporter friends have been bending my hear with talk of “principle” when it comes to picking the nominee – libertarian princples embodied by Paul, conservative principles re Gingrich, all juxtaposed with Romney’s purported lack of them.

Notwithstanding the idea that a committed Mormon lacks “princples”, I have to say I agree with both of ’em; princples are a good thing and, at some level, if you really have princples, they are non-negotiable.

But the one ultimate non-negotiable principle – at least as re my politics as opposed to my theology, and yes, I draw a wide black line between the two – is “doing what’s right for America”.

And so even though Mitt Romney isn’t the perfect conservative, he’s better than Obama.  Not just a little better, but much much much better.  Go ahead, Ronulans – make my day, argue with me about whether they are or are not the same thing.  They are not.

And so I’m going to pull like hell for the imperfect guy we (apparently) got, and reserve a special circle in rhetorical hell for those who say they’ll sit this election out because “their guy” didn’t get the nod.

Making America worth saving is the real principle here.

…is decided by women who are willing to ignore the horrendous, permanent, inescapable cycle of economic destruction that Obama is pushing…

…because they buy the Administration’s utterly dishonest campaign about contraception and the nonexistant, manufactured and media-built “GOP War on Women”?

Then maybe this nation deserves to collapse.

I’ve held for quite some time now that I think Obama is likely to get re-elected.

Incumbency is a powerful bit of inertia – and America’s media has abandoned all that “speaking truth to power” and “afflicting the powerful and empowering the afflicted” twaddle in favor of becoming a sort of info-Praetorian Guard.  Obama, by another measure, holds all the cards.

And yet he’s been busted his own big fat smug mouth has busted him colluding with a foreign dictator on defense plans, his own idiot Vice President is practically sending out invites for a resurgent Tea Party, the young and ignorant are wising up even as the rich and deluded are wiping the scales from their eyes. and the Constitution may finally be riding to the nation’s rescue, shooting his hallmark legislative “achievement” out of the saddle in the process, causing even the media to notice that all is not well.

The GOP – and the Tea Party – have a lot of work to do.  But this week, for the first time in four years, it almost seems doable.

As some of you know, I’ve been one of the “establishment” (har di har) Republicans who’s been trying to welcome Ron Paul supporters into the MNGOP.  I tried to make this – along with an opportunity for Paul supporters and the GOP to get together and do something useful – clear in a piece I posted yesterday.

Now, when I mentioned this yesterday, one prominent Paulbot responded “LOLOLOL”.  There’s a backstory there; he’d pondered out loud why True North‘s stable of center-right writers didn’t include any Paul supporters.  I asked him to put up or shut up – to send me some Paul-aligned bloggers who’d been blogging any length of time and who didn’t completely suck as writers, and we’d put ’em on.  The problem wasn’t a lack of outreach on True North’s part; it was that outside of the excellent Katie Kieffer, I’m not aware of a single pro-Paul blogger in Minnesota who’s kept a blog going for more than 2-3 posts.

He never sent me anyone.

Anyway, the fact is I do support the Paul crowd’s activity in the GOP – provided that they’re not there simply to blow it up.

Unfortunately, a small flock of little birds tell me their big plan this month is to bum-rush Kurt Zellers’ district and deliver a “no endorsement” vote.

This – trying to undercut the party if you can’t take control of it – is just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.  Vandalizing the one party in the state that has any actual impact on policy that does, however imperfectly, stand for any form of liberty at all, however imperfectly, to “teach it a lesson” about…

…about what?  Not paying sufficient obeisance to a candidate that, whatever his chances of getting the nomination for President, which, important as it is, has nothing to do with the business of the State, Congressional District or Legislative District/BPOU operation of the party?  On behalf of people who will, largely, have little to do with nominating Senate, Congress, Legislative, Mayor, County Commission, City Council and School Board candidates, but less still to do with supporting them once the time for debating resolutions about “Auditing the Fed” is over and the time for raising money, making calls and droppoing lit and trying to get people elected begins?

And for what?  To undercut the GOP Speaker of the House?

Paul supporters – curb your colleagues’ urge to commit political vandalism.  Given that there is only one party in the state whose establishment pays even imperfect service to “liberty”, what are you trying to accomplish?  “Teach the GOP a lesson?

Parties don’t learn lessons.  They reflect the will of those who show up.

And by “show up”, I mean to meetings in January, and for House District special elections in March.

I”ve heard from more than a few Paul supporters who’ve complained that the “establishment” of the GOP – meaning the people who were elected two years ago, whatever their beliefs – aren’t welcoming them with open arms.

How much more explaining to we need to do, here?

A few years back, I intereviewed Staff Sergeant David Bellavia.

At that time, he’d just published his book, House to House, which was one of the very best books about tip-of–the-knife infantry combat I’ve ever read.  Up there with Band of Brothers or The Forgotten Soldier. It is that good.  If you haven’t read it, you need to.

And I’m utterly thrilled to see that SSG Bellavia is running for Congress in the NY27, the greater Batavia area.

He also has a Twitter feed.

If you’re an upstate NY reader, or have a few bucks to spare whereever you are, New York could do an awful lot worse – and usually does – than send Mr. Bellavia to Congress.

Sandra Fluke got laid off from her position as “Obama Administration Stage Prop”.

Trayvon Martin has the gig now.

I’ve been pondering why the Administration has been going so long on the Martin case.

Certainly the Obama administration has hated guns all along; the President tried use the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to pin responsibility for Mexico’s ‘drug wars on the law-abiding American gun owner.  The fact that the media has been so utterly hands-off with “Fast and Furious” should show you just what an explosive scandal it should be; the Government trying to set up the majority of its own population?

Can you imagine what they’d have said if George W. Bush had used the FBI to set up a sting to try to blame 9/11 on Democrats, purely for political gain on a wedge issue?

So of course, Obama would like to find some way to take a chunk out of firearm rights, a movement that has spit in the eye of the left and (are you listening, MNGOP Legislative caucus) won, and won consistently for the past thirty years, by setting its bar high and not compromising on core principle

But gun control is only part of the story.

Here’s the real story: Afro-Americans are losing their enthusiasm for Obama.   Oh, not in a way that’ll lose him the black vote – but Obama’s initial election depended entirely on a whipped up base.  Obama is going to face an uphill fight getting his based whipped up, though; whatever “recovery” we’re in has largely skipped the black community; the black unemployment rate of 14% (actually up in the past month) only tells part of the story; while 59.6% of the general population is actually working, only 53% of the black working-age population has a job.

That’s catastrophic.  Not only has the black community not gotten any of the hopey-changey yet, it’s inescapable that if you’re black in America, you are worse off than you were four years ago.

Of course, a black kid getting killed is hardly news.  It’s sad but true; it happens all the time.  And the white liberal media could hardly care less; confronting the horrendous death and incarceration rate among black youth – to say nothing of black unemployment – would force them to confront liberalism’s failures, which means confronting its institutional racism.   So while the possibly unjust death of a young black man may be good for enthusiasm points, if it doesn’t get media coverage, it’s the proverbial tree falling alone in a forest.

But when you combine a dead black kid with an issue that does get the white liberal media exercised – their fear of citizens with guns?  You’ve got political gold.  Suddenly, you’ve got media coverage!

And that’s why Trayvon Martin is in the news, and Sandra Fluke is out.  Every dim-bulb that can be fooled into thinking “Republicans will ban contraception” has already been fooled.  Now it’s time to hoodwink the ones that think Republicans want to arm white people to kill black people.

And the media – wittingly or not – is totally on board with that.

I was going to respond to Bill Maher’s “I’m Sorry You Overreacted To What I Said” op-ed, dutifully re-run by pretty much every left-of-center paper in America yesterday…

…until I asked myself “why?”

It’s what he wants. Maher is like a trained zoo monkey, paid well to throw poop at people and then sit on top of his cage and giggle at all the rubes who are angry at having poop on them.

And if I were in his position, I might do it too. Let’s take a walk back in history.

In the mid-nineties, Maher had a show on Comedy Central. I forget the name. Who cares.

It got picked up by ABC for the late-night line-up, one of many attempts to put something, anything, up against the Tonight Show and Letterman.

It bombed.

No, bigger than that.  Seriously.

And it became clear to Bill Maher that it was neither his personality nor his comedic chops that was going to keep him in hookers and blow.  (Cue outrage that I’d so insult a public figure.  Go ahead.  Be outraged.  It’s the Maher way).

He’d have to supplement that with periodic bouts of publicity-mongering “controversy”.  He, like that monkey, will have to throw just a little more poop next time, and giggle just a little harder at those poo-coated rubes.

And he’ll get away with it, until most of us realize that Bill Maher is nothing but a monkey with a hand full of poop.

I hope I’ve settled that for everyone.

Esther Cepeda, from the WaPo (reprinted in the Strib) thinks she sees the problem:

Folks, I hate to break it to you, but even though it seems to have been grinding on for years already, this presidential election is on pace to drag on forever.

Why? One word: enthusiasm — a serious lack of it.

On the one hand, it might appear that way – especially in the mainstream media (who, let’s be honest, will do what they can to tamp down Republican and Conservative enthusiasm).

On the other hand?  “Enthusiasm” is perhaps the biggest problem in politics today.

I’m not talking about genuine tidal waves of grass roots responses to real problems – like the Tea Party.  I’m talking about the big, astroturf personality-cult orgies like the one that got Barack Obama elected.

The media – and I’m going to use Ms. Cepeda as a surrogate for the entire institution – seem to think that Americans need to view their politicians like kids view baskets of puppies, to keep them interested.

So for all you Obama supporters, here you go:

There you go.  Divert your “enthusiasm” to baskets of puppies.  Let’s keep government nice and boring.

Dan Severson for Senate website right here.

When I saw that Eric Black – formerly of the Strib, now at the Minnpost – had written a piece entitled “Redistricting maps give DFL advantage in legislative races, but …”, I went “uh oh”.

I mean, Eric Black is no leftyblogging bobblehead.  He’s one of the Deans Of Minnesota Political Journalism (although to be fair Minnesota Political Journalism has more deans than the MNSCU system).

And while I don’t want to frame the redistricting in especially partisan terms, the fact is that the maps didn’t really adequately reflect Minnesota’s most important current demographic trend – people fleeing the failed DFL-controlled Twin Cities and Duluth, and moving to areas that actually work, which are universally and without exception GOP-controlled.   They bent over backwards to maintain the Twin Cities’ control over Minnesota politics, especially at the Congressional level.

Now – before I get into Black’s actual piece, here – let’s go over a tiny little bit of the theory of journalism.

Print journos know that the number of people who actually read any given point in a story drops, almost geometrically, the further into the story you get.  If 1000 eyeballs scan the headline, 100 might read the opening paragraph or two.  Of those 100, 10 might plod through the middle.  If there’s a jump, or if it takes longer than a few minutes to plod through, barring some immediate personal interest, 1 might get to the end of the piece (the numbers are made-up, but they’re neither gratuitously far-off nor conceptually wrong).

So copy editors write headlines that try to lure as many eyeballs as possible into the story – and generations of editors have groused at reporters “don’t bury the lede” – because in print news (and its red-headed stepchild, online journalism), the first impression may be the only impression you get.

And with that headline and its key message- DFL ADVANTAGE!!!! – ringing in my mind, I tucked into the rest of the story:

When the new decennial map of Minnesota’s legislative districts was unveiled in late February, most neutral observers said the DFL had won the battle for a favorable map. But the degree of the DFL victory may have been understated. If the map is destiny (which it isn’t, but it can change the odds), the DFL may have a decent shot at taking back control of both houses of the Minnesota Legislature in the 2012 election.

The degree of DFL victory “may have been understated”.

That’s the lede.  And ledes are important for that portion of Minnesota’s population that reads past the headline – which, as we established in the headline, says the maps were a big win for the DFL (“but…”).

And who – other than those “neutral sources” – is behind this claim (and I’ll add emphasis):

DFL State Chair Ken Martin recently told me that the way his party scores the partisan lean of the new districts, the DFL has at least a slight advantage in 73 House districts and 34 Senate districts. If (a big “if” unless and until it happens) the DFL candidates were to prevail in those districts, it would give the party a substantial (73-61) majority in the House and a bare (34-33) single vote majority in the Senate.

So after a headline and a lede that proclaim that the DFL was the big winner, we get the source – Ken Martin.  The Chair of the DFL, after coming from “Win Minnesoita“, which is part of the DFL money shell-game that pays for all the DFL’s attack ads (and thus, all of its messaging, period).

That’s it.

So to the reader’s perception, the story really says THE DFL HAS A HUGE ADVANTAGE (according to the head of the DFL).

And we know this…

To be precise for the total political wonks in the audience, the DFL has developed a methodology that looks – precinct by precinct – at DFL votes across the last many elections. (As you can imagine, the partisan breakdown of a precinct can vary from year to year and from race to race within a given year.) The DFL method massages the numbers into what it called the DPI (Democratic Performance Index) of each precinct. And now that they know which precincts go with which state House and Senate districts, they can calculate which districts have a DPI of greater than 50 percent, which means that the DFL should have an advantage in winning and hold that seat.

…because the DFL did a bunch of math…

Before you get too excited (or upset, depending on your partisan preference) you should know that:

a) Martin didn’t release the map of the DFL-leaning districts nor the numbers on which the calculation is based, so skeptics cannot check his statement;

b) The Pioneer Press, which published a similar calculation, reached a significantly less favorable DFL number on the Senate map. (The Pi-Press analysis did indicate that the DFL has the map potential to take back control of the House and gain ground – but enough for control – in the Senate); and

c) Everyone that I interviewed for this post assured me that, while the map is important, it is neither the only nor even the most important thing.

…which was likely b*llsh*t, and even the media knows it.

But it’s worth, apparently, putting as an unvarnished headline and lede.

Why?

Because it’s one of the narratives the DFL wants spread far and wide; their success is inevitable.  Don’t ask why – they won’t tell you.  Just keep repeating it, Dems.  Just interenalize it, conservatives!

The DFL’s main hope this election is to drive down conservative enthusiasm – which slaughtered them two years ago – and try to create some sort of bandwagon effect on the left.

Prediction:  An upcoming Minnesota Poll or Humphrey Institute survey will show that A MAJORITY OF MINNESOTANS (from a sample that over-counts DFLers 3:2) APPROVE OF DAYTON’S JOB AS GOVERNOR.

Gotta hand it to the DFL.

They’re playing a pair of “fours” this election.   But they’re playing them for all they’re worth.

Intellectually and politically, the DFL is running on fumes this year.  The closest thing they had to a legislative agenda – “tax the rich!” – stalled and died in the legislature.  The regional economy is slowly (sloooooowly) obsoleting their “We have to tax our way out of deficits!” meme.  They’re looking at Obama’s eroding popularity and hoping that the President’s coat tails are like the ones on a tank top.   And redistricting, for all of the partisan media’s backing and filling, looks to be mostly a wash in the near term, and reflects long-term demographic changes that can not bode well for the DFL (other than the progressives’ great long-term fairy tale, “lots of potential liberals are immigrating to the US”, which is of course true provided that we allow generations of new Americans to stay ignorant about what this country’s about – which is, of course, Democrat policy).

In response, the DFL really has only a few points to run on:

“Aren’t Those Republicans Awful People?”  In 1998, when the Democrats had a skirt-seeking missile in the White House, they responded by teaching a generation of American teens that oral sex wasn’t really sex at all, and demanding that we all just Mooooove On.  The French were laughing at us after all.

Now, after a low-grade “sex scandal”, Mary Fransion’s manufactured gaffe and a few other minor incidents, expect the Party of Infanticide to plead “family values”, making me wonder if all those teenagers from the Clinton era – now pushing thirty – will need years of therapy to sort out the mixed messages.

“Just Look At The Economy!” Minnesota’s economy is doing better than most.  Not North Dakota-good, but not bad.  The DFL and media (ptr) will work overtime to convince Minnesotans that correlation – Mark Dayton is governor and the economy sucks less than the rest of the US – equals causation, scrupulously ignoring that it’s the GOP majority in the Legislature that have done all the positive work this past few years (and, likely as not, eight years of Pawlenty’s leadership and four years of his stymying of the DFL that set the stage for the relative level of health we have).

“We Saved The Vikings!”  And they’ll save snowmobiling and binge-drinking, too, if they have to!

The mainstream media – especially the Strib, which profits from the current Dayton/Bakk plan – spun this as a partisan issue (and part of it was; principled conservatives joined a few principled liberals, like John Marty, in rejecting Wilfare), playing up Dayton and Senate Majority Leader Bakk’s “leadership”, and only incidentally scratching the surface of their plan, which seemed to rely on money borne down from heaven on the backs of unicorns. (You can go to MPR to read what I was reporting on two weeks ago, if you’d like).

Of course, with the Senate tabling the bill, that’s looking a little dodgy.  But no worries – the Dems still have the big daddy of them all:

“It’s Inevitable!”  One of my favorite aphorisms is an old Hungarian saying: “the best way to become wealthy is to appear as if you already are”.

The DFL apparently read it too.

The DFL and the media – and on this, as few other issues, when I say “pardon the redundancy”, it rings truer than usual – are doing their best to portray this next election as an inevitable winner for the DFL, for…well, whatever reason.  Redistricting favored them (more on that probably later today), or people are sick of GOP squabbling and want the government to “get things done”, or demographics make it inevitable, or the economy is racing back so fast that Obama’s coattails are going to lift them up, or Minnesotans just loooooooove keeping their beloved government fat and happy…

…or all of the above.  Because the best way to win an election may not in fact be to appear as if you already have – but it doesn’t hurt to add it in there, either.

So this blog will spend a good chunk of the next seven and a half months covering the DFL Ministry of Truth’s attempts at psychological warfare.  There’ll be no shortage of material.

Or so says the latest CBS/NYTimes poll,which shows The One’s approval ratings taking a hit:.

President Barack Obama’s approval rating went from a positive 50 – 43 split last month to a 41 – 47 negative one in the newest CBS News/New York Times poll. But that only brought his lead against former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney down three points nationally in the poll, 47 – 44, having been up on Romney 48 – 42 in February.

Because if he were a cracker that was destroying the economy and working toward a radical transformation of our national ideals, he’d be a shoe-in already.

Like many conservatives, I watched the video of Obama cuddling up to the usual dog’s breakfast of radicals in college..

…and thought “OK, that’s maddening, but it’s hardly anything to run a campaign on”.

I mean, many of us said, did and wrote things in college and high school we’d not like to have turn up now.  I was a liberal, for crying out loud.  The platform I wrote for 1980 North Dakota Boys’ State would have made Paul Wellstone look like Ron Paul.  I’d rather it nor turn up, if you catch my drift.

But the President’s past isn’t going to defeat him – and only partly because, like Mark Dayton’s mental health and alcoholism, the media will cover it up for all they’re worth.  No, it’s just not the kind of thing most Americans outside the conservative wonk class will ever care about.  

And as Stanley Kurtz notes,  the present is the outrage, and the future should be the real weapon against Obama:

I don’t quite hold with either view. The debate is miscast, both because it treats the past and present as sharply different, and because it assumes we actually know and understand what Obama has been doing these last three-and-a-half years. I disagree. Many aspects of Obama’s present–to say nothing of his plans for the future–are as guarded and mysterious as his radical past. In fact, the poorly-known side of Obama’s world makes the clearest sense only when you combine research into his past and present alike….There are many aspects of Obama’s current policies that the public knows little or nothing about, and seemingly familiar things that are still poorly understood. When you put the total picture together, the links between Obama’s present and past can be drawn much more convincingly than many now imagine.

That’s the slow, steady drip in the background, for those of us who are paying attention; if Obama wins re-election, and has either house of Congress, he’s going to go on a hopey-changey orgy.

I went to my first Fourth Congressional District GOP meeting since the redistricting last night.

We got two bits of news:

1. We’re down to one candidate to replace Betty McCollum.  With the withdrawal of Dan Flood, Tony Hernandez is the guy with the hat in the ring.  There’s about a month for someone to jump in.
2. With the addition of all that new territory between the old Fourth and the Saint Croix – Stillwater, Woodbury, Dellwood, Lake Elmo and Afton – most of which skew at least slightly GOP, the Fourth has gone from a 65-35 DFL district (sometimes more like 70-30) to a 60-40 DFL district.

So there’s two bits of good news there.

The Good Candidate: I’ve known Tony Hernandez for a couple of years.  He ran against Dick Cohen in SD…er, 64, right?  Anyway, in 2010, Hernandez ran against Cohen’s sinecure.  And like all Republicans in the city, he got trounced.  But – he was the only Republican in the whole city to get a precinct inside twenty points, and when you’re a Saint Paul Republican, you look for whatever scrap of good news you can find.  When we heard the announcements last night that it was down to Tony, the committee-person next to me said “Hernandez is going to have to work“.   That, naturally, goes without saying.  It’s going to take a superhuman effort.

Fortunately…

The Numbers Are A Tad Less Superhuman: 60-40 is daunting indeed.  But it’s a lot less daunting than 70-30.  The latter is more than 2:1, which in political terms might as well be 50:1.  Betting on 3:2 odds is a whole different critter.

I mean, it’s still  a long shot.  But the Fourth now has the same numbers as the Eighth had two years ago.

Back after Cravaack won, I noted the keys to his victory; lots of hard work, sure – the guy logged a jillion miles, and he’s still doing it.  But hard work without focus is just wasted energy.  Cravaack had good staff – and he ran his district campaign like a military operation, with a chain of command breaking up the district and the work to be done into chunks which an individual (with a day job and a family who was also working their ass off to volunteer) could manage.  And they managed it.

I joked at the time that what the GOP needed was eight former Navy Chief Petty Officers (Army master sergeants, Marine gunnies or Air Force technical sergeants, naturally, would work too), one in each CD – not so much to run, but to manage the campaigns.

And so I was excited to see Flood – a retired Navy senior chief – throwing his hat in the ring.  It’s always fun when your quips come to life.

But Flood’s back out (although it’d be great to have a good CPO working on the campaign, if for no other reason than he could no doubt get things ship-shape, as it were), and unless someone else jumps in and exhibits some fund-raising and organizing mojo very fast, Martinez could be the guy.

And he’s gonna have to work.  And so will all the rest of us.

And that work looks a lot less hopeless now than it did two years ago.

Because while a 60:40 margin is a pretty comfortable one for a good politician…

Betty McCollum is not a good politician.  She is a ventriloquist’s dummy for the various Metro special interests.  She isn’t a representative; she a stenographer and lever-puller for the MFT/AFSCME/MAPE/SEIU/Common Cause and the rest of the DFL’s rouge gallery.  She doesn’t have any beliefs she’s not instructed to have.  She’s overmatched in a debate with her own reflection.  Hearing her talk is like listening to someone reading a list of chanting points and ignoring the punctuation (“The central corridor will bring a lot of new jobs and those are infrastructure jobs and we also support the right to choose and we get behind working families and don’t you know working families need help and that’s why President Obama supports targeted tax cuts and healthcare is a right…” isn’t a direct quote, but if you’ve heard McCollum speak, admit it, you’re laughing now, aren’t you?)

So there you go, Fourth District.  The impossible just got a lot more do-able.

The GOP primary becomes a Möbius strip.

Give conventional wisdom its due – sometimes it’s right.  The political meme entering tonight cast the GOP contest with Mitt Romney as the tenuous front-runner, Rick Santorum as the undisciplined and underfunded challenger, Newt Gingrich as the long-shot and Ron Paul as the wacky neighbor next door.  10 states and 400+ delegates later?

It’s exactly the same.

So what can we take away as Super Tuesday becomes Groggy Wednesday Morning?

• The Song Remains the Same:  Nothing seemingly can break the GOP deadlock as Romney remains a front-runner who has to outspend his competition 6-to-1 in order to eek out a victory and loses when “only” outspending his rivals by smaller margins.  Not that Santorum or Gingrich ought to be bragging.  The Icarus primary of the Not-Romneys has seen both candidate’s wings melt under the media spotlight and while Santorum looks to have at least 3 wins and a “draw” in his Ohio loss, he did nothing on Tuesday to claim the mantle of front-runner.  Ohio’s margin might make it harder for Romney to raise money, but his purse strings stretch far further than Santorum or Gingrich despite an uptick post Feb 7th.
• Hare Apparent:  Newt Gingrich might consider himself the “tortoise” of the primary race, but as we pass the 550 mark in delegates, all the candidates need to start running like bunnies.  Say what you will of Romney’s inability to close out the nomination, his delegate accumulation has been far more tortoise-like, making it almost statistically impossible for Santorum to win enough delegates (to say nothing of Newt).  And what exactly is going to change that?
• Southbound & Down:  The primary calender might – might – change things.  From March 10th to the 17th, the race goes into territory that should be less friendly to Romney.  Kansas, Alabama, Mississippi and Missouri all vote in that 7 day timespan and represent perhaps Rick Santorum’s last best gasp to alter the trajectory of the campaign.  The problem is that Gingrich remains in the race and is pursuing a southern strategy while Romney is carpetbombing airwaves and mailboxes.  With a still-divided field, Romney doesn’t need to win most of these states.  Instead, he can focus his resources on one or two and hope that Hawaii, voting during this period as well, will keep him racking up just enough delegates and primary wins to look the part of a front-runner.  That element of the contest looks the most likely.  Why?
• Dear God, Let It End:  The media & the punditry have become bored.  And frankly, more than a few voters too.  After 20 debates (with one more, in theory, on March 19th) and countless hours of navel-gazing political spin, there simply isn’t much left to say about any of the remaining candidates.  Barring a completely undiscovered past comment or present gaffe, there isn’t anything likely to arise to change most voters impressions of the field.  And if nothing changes, Mitt Romney becomes the GOP nominee probably around April 24th as 231 delegates will be up for grabs in winner-take-all East coast states.  Not even Gingrich throwing his pledged delegates behind Santorum now necessarily stops that.  So, at least in the minds of the punditry, why wait another month-and-a-half to declare a winner?
• The Animatronics Need Further Testing:  Romney’s robotic Boston speech tonight represented the former Governor at his awkward, halting worst.  Romney stays on message, like a T-1000 with a target in its sights, but still hasn’t had that “I now know why humans cry” moment in relating to the electorate.  Romney will never be able to fully relate to average voters, but then again his general election opponent isn’t exactly a beer and waffles man himself (despite attempts at photo ops to the contrary).  Romney can’t afford to have many more George Bush Sr. “price of milk” moments (although that moment was strongly overhyped as a sign that Bush was out of touch).  And if the price of a stronger nominee is several more months of media boredom – snooze away.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

The third year law student at Georgetown who wanted to testify to Congress that taxpayers should pay the $100 per month her friend spends on birth control is . . . the victim here?

Not really. Democrats are using a bait-and-switch to justify their “have you no decency, sir” hysterics.

Turns out the friend was prescribed oral contraceptives to treat a cyst condition but the insurance company won’t pay for birth control. It’s really a fight over what medicine is appropriate to treat a medical condition, very common in all health insurance plans. It has nothing to do with forcing the Catholic Church to perform abortions, which what the Democrats wrote into the Obamacare law and now are defending.

“The insurance company won’t pay for my medicine” is completely different from “The Church won’t pay for me to commit a sin.”

But Democrats didn’t admit that up front; they played it as if this was about birth control to prevent pregnancies. Rush took their lies at face value and riffed on that. Now that the true story is coming out, Democrats complain he shot his mouth off without admitting they set him up with their lies.

Bait-and-switch.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

To be fair to the Democrats, (falsely) claiming the GOP is coming for their contraceptives and fanning hysteria is the only campaign they have; Americans are not better off than they were four years ago.

Can you feel the Romnentum?  Me neither.

Following his wins in Michigan, Arizona, Maine & Wyoming, Mitt Romney has at least regained the aura of a front-runner and silenced the punditry’s Opium dreams of a contested convention, for now.  But with Tuesday the grandest night of the GOP presidential contest calendar (466 delegates are up for grabs; kinda…let’s not talk about unpledged caucuses for a moment), the chance for the race to be changed awaits voters in 10 states.

• Ohio (primary):  The center stage of this delegate-rich Mardi Gras night, Ohio is seen not just as the fulcrum on which the outcome of the race pivots, but also the competing narratives of the two major candidates.  The meme of Mitt Romney’s aloofness from white working class voters has been certainly been strengthened by the candidate’s repeated gaffes on his wealth, yet Romney and Santorum tied among voters without secondary education.  Santorum’s choosing of Michigan as his challenging ground was due entirely to the supposed demographic resemblance to the blue-collar communities that Santorum successfully rallied to win his congressional and Senate seats.  Fitting neatly into the Rust Belt, Ohio should be attractive Santorum territory.  And by RCP averages, it is as Santorum leads there by 8.3%.  But who needs Ohio more?  Karl Rove argues that Santorum needs the state to even survive politically while Romney can afford at least a narrow loss.  That may be true from a delegate standpoint (all of Santorum’s wins have been from unpledged delegate states), but determining who truly needs the headlines of a Ohio victory is easier to see by looking around at the rest of the March 6th primary states.
• Oklahoma (primary):  The raging wheat must sure smell sweat to Santorum who holds a 43%-22% lead over Gingrich in the state as Romney only manages 18%.  Santorum’s team has identified Oklahoma as one of his “must win” states in addition to Ohio and…
• Tennessee (primary):  Santorum is poised for a crushing victory here, holding an RCP average of 19.5% over Romney.  In both cases, even if Santorum’s numbers drop, he’s still positioned to win comfortably and dent the meme that he can only win caucus states.  Does Santorum run the risk of looking too much like a regional candidate (don’t be surprised for the media to suddenly declare Oklahoma a classic “southern” state)?  Perhaps, if he can’t win another state on Super Tuesday.
• Alaska, North Dakota & Idaho (caucuses):  Well, so much for that Santorum concern.  All three are likely to fall into Santorum’s camp, despite Romney rolling out the lion’s share of party endorsements in North Dakota (because that worked so well in Minnesota).  There isn’t reliable polling on any of these three states, and even if there was, caucus polling is one step short of political alchemy.  The only real concern Santorum should have is whether the media will treat victories in these states as significant.  Santorum’s poised to win the most states on Super Tuesday, but not necessarily the most delegates.  Which becomes the headline Wednesday morning?  Because Romney isn’t going home empty-handed.
• Virginia (primary):  Yes, Virginia, there is a primary on Super Tuesday.  It lives in the hearts of all Republican activists, because frankly, there isn’t much of a contest.  It’s Romney versus Paul, and since Paul has about as much of a chance of winning a state as attacking Romney in a debate, Romney’s winning in a walk.  Unfortunately for Mitt, that’s exactly how the press will treat his win.
• Massachusetts (primary):  A contest in Romney’s actual home state isn’t going to be as close as Michigan.  As of the last poll, Romney holds 63% of the vote.  If his night doesn’t go well, fully except Team Romney to crow about the margin – and that the media won’t care.
• Vermont (primary):  At last, a vote Romney is expected to win that isn’t either A) missing one or more of his opponents or B) a state that he’s declared residency in at some point.  Unfortunately, that state is Vermont and even more unfortunately, Romney only holds a 7% lead.  That was at the height of Santorumania and Rick isn’t making a serious bid here, meaning Romney is likely to win by more.
• Georgia (primary):  Somewhat oddly, the biggest delegate prize of the night (76 in all) has among the least amount of attention of the larger Super Tuesday states.  That’s of course because most pundits have assumed that Newt Gingrich will win despite his RCP average of 9% (created by two polls that show him with double-digit leads against two that show a neck-and-neck race).  The night could very well end with Gingrich holding the second-most pledged delegates while being discussed as an afterthought.  Gingrich has hinged his campaign on a southern strategy, despite his relative lack of southern cultural cues.  Newt won’t driven out of the race if he only wins Georgia, believing that victories in upcoming Alabama and Mississippi are not only possible, but will change the trajectory of the race.  Instead, he’ll likely cost Santorum several states he could have won post Tuesday, muddling the non-Romney waters.

So who needs Ohio more?  The answer would seem to be Romney.  Losing 6 of 10 states on Super Tuesday isn’t the performance of a front-runner.  Losing 7 of 10, including a major November bellweather, isn’t even the campaign of a significant challenger.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Progressives claim this election is Conservatives’ last gasp before demographics render them irrelevant forever.

Sounds as if they agree with that awful right-wing hate-monger, Mark Steyn:

Well then, if Liberals will be in charge from now own, this won’t be a problem:

Source: Chart 5-1, page 58, appendix to President Obama’s 2013 budget proposal.

I can divert spending from whiskey and bullets to . . . well, more whiskey, I suppose. Good to know!

I guess Warren Buffet is in for a huge bill.

Can you imagine a “White People For Romney” group?

No?

Because it’d be roundly condemned on all sides of the aisle, right?

Just remember – “Republicans and conservatives…

…are obsessed with race”.

No, keep saying it!

Remember – the only reason not to vote for a utopian socialist who believes in radically transforming American society and the economy, who has a three year record of failure and is the worst president of your lifetime is…because he’s black.

No other reason could possibly exist!