Connie Doepke filed to challenge Dave Osmek in the primary for the SD33 Senate race.

At the SD33 convention two weeks ago Osmek, a conservative with 11 years’ experience on the Mound city council – beat Doepke,  a GOP representative who left an extremely safe House seat to campaign for Gen Olson’s old Senate seat, after voting for the stadium and the New Generation Energy Act, to say nothing of supporting light rail. Osmek won with over 80% of the delegate vote, after Bonn Clayton committed his delegates to Osmek on the fourth ballot (the battle had been between him and Osmek – Doepke never got out of the twenties).

If you live in SD33, and want the GOP majority to be something other than a lapdog for Lori Sturdevant and Zygi Wilf, you need to turn out to help Dave.

For that matter, if you live in the western subs – usually safe territory for the GOP – you need to find the time to help Dave.  IF you live in:

• SD20 (Wright County)
• SD34 (the Maple Grove/Rogers area)
• Carver County/SD47 (assuming Senator Ortmann doesn’t get a challenge in the primary),
• And even SD44 (Plymouth/Minnetonka)

One of the most difficult jobs in politics is running for office as a Republican in Saint Paul.  You’re in a city that might, in a good cycle, be 30% Republican, and where a fair chunk of the city depends on government for a living, one way or another – university faculty, government workers, teachers, and of course many,. many clients.

It’s an uphill road.

And most years, what that means is districts with no GOP campaign – or, almost worse, “campaigns” that are intended to be warm bodies on the ballot to make it look like there’s some kind of contest going on.  The GOP in Saint Paul has no money, gets not much response.   There is currently not a single elected Republican in office anywhere in Ramsey County, and precious few conservative-ish Democrats (and even they are being purged, bit by bit).

Which leads, over the course of a few decades, to a debilitating ennui.  There are Republicans in Saint Paul; 30% of my Senate district voted for Tom Emmer and John McCain.  If every last one of them had turned out to vote in the SD66 Special Election last year, the GOP candidate would have won, and won big.  But Republicans in Saint Paul don’t turn out for local elections.  It’s my theory that they believe that their vote only really counts when it’s for a statewide or national office.  It’d be an easy thing to believe.

Last year, when I was “the establishment”, I figured it’d be a ten year job not only to make the 4th District GOP – which, after redistricting, covers St. Paul, Ramsey County, and the ‘burbs east of St. Paul all the way to the St. Croix – a functional party unit, but to get some sort of tradition of not losing badly all the time established, barring some sort of upheaval.

It’s too early to tell if the Ron Paul surge in Minnesota is that upheaval – but as I noted around convention time, there is at least the raw material to build some hope.

Six GOP candidates in the Fourth CD are getting together to hold a joint press conference at the Capitol today to push for a repeal of the stadium deal:

Meeting on the steps of the Minnesota State Capitol on the morning of May 31, 2012, a coalition of six GOP candidates from the Twin Cities area announced their candidacy by setting the “Repeal of the Vikings Stadium Funding” initiative as their key legislative objective. Citing the irresponsible decision to use public funds for a private business and imposing new taxes and fees on the citizens of Minnesota without their consent, the legislative candidates expressed their frustration with the Minnesota legislature. If elected they plan on making their first legislative action the immediate Repeal of the Vikings Stadium Funding.

The press release for the event quoted Andrew Ojeda, the candidate from the Mac/Groveland area:

“Although a full repeal of the stadium bill (HF2958) appears politically infeasible at this moment, the 88-page document represents the fiscal irresponsibility that has engulfed much of the legislature. It is not based on honest T-Charts and balance sheets, but rather on ambitions of the here-and-now.”

And, more pithily, Carlos Conway, from 65B:

“This is nothing more than legislation that keeps the rich, rich and the poor, poor!”

Which puts them (and the other four, and yes, I’ll list ’em in a bit) squarely in the wheelhouse with the freshmen in the Legislature that fought so hard to keep this abomination off our tax rolls, and keep it from gutting what had once been due process in taxation in this state.

Quixotic?  Sure.  But as Lincoln said, “The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.”

A little more – OK, a lot more – follow-through like this and maybe this can be an interesting campaign season.

I’ll stick by everything I wrote last spring – if everyone that bum-rushed the caucuses for Ron Paul turns out to support this wave of candidates who are putting their shoe leather today where there mouths were at caucus and convention time?  And by “support” I mean “donate time for lit-dropping, phone-banking, door-knocking, sign-planting and, of course, money”?  And if the “establishment” buries its grudges for next caucus and convention time and turns out (as, I should add, it largely is)?   This could be a lot of fun.

Will we win?  The odds are very, very long.  In this election, barring a Cravaack-like miracle (which, like most “Miracles”, was built from hard work and organization), success will likely be measured by moving the needle.  And in two years, moving it some more.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

And that’s good in and of itself – because the DFL knows that if the GOP gets above 40% in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, they can never win another statewide election.

There are two sides to that knife, by the way; if the GOP is ever to turn this state red, we need to find new voters.  And we’ve pretty much gotten all the GOP voters we can out of Maple Grove and Isanti and Benton counties; the new GOP voters are going to come from the Iron Range, and the West Side of Saint Paul, and the scrappy little businesses along East Lake Street, if they’re going to come from anywhere.

By the way, as we noted last week, campaigns have until July 30 to meet their fundraising thresholds – $1,500 for House races, $3,000 for Senate, and only the first $50 of any donation counts toward the threshold – to qualify for campaign aid from the state.  Yeah, it’s not very libertarian, but you’ve already paid for it – why not help it go to a better cause?

The six candidates out there on the steps today were:

• Ben Blomgren, HD66B
• Andrew Ojeda, HD64A
• Daniel Lipp, HD 65A
• Carlos Conway, HD65B
• Rick Karschnia, SD 65
• Paul Tuschy, HD 52B

If you’ve got a few – even $10 – to spare, it’d go a long way.

As we noted yesterday, House of Representatives candidates that can raise $1,500 in $50 increments can qualify for a sizable bump in financing from the state.

Each Senate district covers double the area,  so it has to raise double the money  – $3,000 – for double the bump.

Here are the MN Senate candidates in CD4.

SD 38 – Roger Chamberlain – I haven’t actually heard if incumbent Chamberlain has hit the hit the threshold yet – I wouldn’t doubt that he has.  But if you’re a Tea Partier, a Ron Paul supporter or a fiscal hawk of any stripe, Chamberlain is one of the brighter spots in what was a dismal year in the Senate.  It’d be a nice sign if he were not merely to win his race, but to crush his opponent.  He hasn’t updated his page for the new race yet – I’m sure that’s coming – but I suspect his “donate” link works just fine.

SD 39 – Ray Vandeveer Another incumbent, Vandeveer is a hawk that voted against the stadium and has been a solid conservative throughout.

SD 41 – Gina Bauman – Bauman, a New Brighton businesswoman and city councilwoman, is in her second campaign for the Senate.  She’s the kind of person we need more of in the Senate.  And SD41 is winnable – but getting the bump from the state would be a huge help. She’ll be up against Barb Goodwin.  Need I say more?.

SD 42 – April King is running in the new 42; the good news is it’s an open seat; the less-good news is that it’s one of those twisty-turny gerrymandered districts that pairs some good right-leaning districts up north with a few bat spittle crazy ones in Vadnais Heights.  But this is winnable; that extra bump from the state would help a lot. (UPDATE: I had an outdated link up there before; if you haven’t been there, go!  If you went to the old one, go back!)

SD 53 – Ted Lillie – Ted’s another fiscal hawk.  I suspect he’s doing fine – but again, the worse he crushes his DFL opponent, the better.  Any help will be appreciated.

SD 65 – Rick Karschnia‘s got a tough race – but I’l be donating, since it’s my district.

I have no idea why I’m posting this.

Honest.

It just jumped at me out of nowhere.

Really.

Last week, I asked – what role should a Congressional District GOP committee and administration have when it comes to assisting its associated Congressional District’s congressional candidate, as well as its various BPOUs’ legislative races?

Yesterday morning, I went over some of the feedback I’d gotten.  And yesterday at noon, we looked at an email by newly-elected 4th CD GOP chairman John Kysylyczyn which seems to mean that he thinks that, as regards the district’s various races, there really is no role – and that, in Kysylyczyn’s own words, “To be frank, it does not matter if we are up to any particular speed for this fall’s elections…I sat down the first week on the job and read the state and CD constitutions and the bylaws. My analysis is strictly based off of those documents”.

In writing this series, I wrote to Kysylyczyn to ask him what he, the chairman, thought the role of the 4th CD in fact was.  His response:  “I read your blog and with all due respect, it didn’t rise to a journalistic standard where I would feel comfortable participating”.   Further:  “Because I own a print newspaper, maybe my standards are unreasonable high, but they are my standards and I would ask for your understanding”.

Are Kysylyczyn’s standards as a print newspaper owner too high (he owns the Anoka County Recorder, a paper that prints public notices, syndicated copy and press releases)?  Are mine too low?

Maybe he’ll answer questions for the mere peasants who live and work and try to support a party in the 4th CD?

UPDATE:  Yesterday, on the CD4 Facebook page and website, it was announced that the district will have its first full committee meeting, on June 11.

What else do you notice about the CD4 website/blog?

Elections take money.

Especially if you’re a Republican in what is, for GOPers, a pretty hardscrabble place, the Fourth Congressional District, where the GOP is in an extended period of rebuilding, even as it faces the smothering miasma of union money keeping the DFL fat and happy and fat once again.

Minnesota does, however, offer a bit of a leveler; campaigns that meet a certain threshold in donations get a nice chunk of matching money from the state.  (Yes, it’s government funding of elections – but I’m paying for it, so I’m going to do my best to help my party use it).

Here’s the deal:  candidates for the House of Representatives need to raise $1,500 – in denominattions of $50 or less – to qualify for this match.  In other words, 30 $50 donations, or 1,500 $1 donations, or 150 $10 gifts, all work.  15 individual $100 donations, however, only count for $750 – only the first $50 of each donation counts.  A single $1,500 donation would only count for $50 (and is, I suspect, illegal anyway).

Anyway – the GOP candidates in the 4th CD need to top that threshold to get that money, which in turn gives them both a reasonable amount of money to work with as well as giving them proof they are viable races for purposes of bigger, better fundraising later in the race.

So I’m going to ask you to help out by ponying up something – anything – to help out these GOP candidates for the Minnesota House in the 4th CD. The list, by the way, includes challengers for seats; I’m not going to include incumbent Republicans (of whom redistricting has brought several to the 4th CD; also, for now I’m only including candidates with websites), along with notes about their current fundraising status.

HD 42A – Russ Bertsch

HD 42B – Ken Rubenzer

HD 43A – Stacey Stout – Stacey may have actually hit the threshold.  While she’ll be happy to get any help she can, she may be set – for purposes of matching the state threshold.

HD 53A – Pam Cunningham:  Pam’s about 2/3 of the way there; she’s got about $500 to go.  She’s doing well, but could use any help she can get.

HD 64A – Andrew Ojeda is about halfway there and climbing.  He’s in a tough district – but he’s a good candidate.  Help if you can.

HD 64B – Brandon Carmack is fairly new to the race, running against eleventy-teen term union tool and stadium stooge Michael Paymar.   He could use a financial leg up.

HD65A – Dan Lipp is running against Rena Moran in my district.

HD 65B – Carlos Conway is in one of the tougher districts – but one where he should be able to make a dent, a heavily Hispanic district for whom Obama’s tenure has been a disaster.  Let’s make this one a fight, shall we?

HD 66A – Mark Fotsch and HD 66B – Ben Blomgren are running against Alice Hausman and John Lesch, two DFLers that will be kept alive in suspended animation by the unions for centuries if that’s what it takes to keep their reliable votes.  They could both use a hand.

Senate tomorrow.  The Hernandez campaign on  Wednesday.

At last month’s 4th Congressional District GOP convention, John Kysylyczyn was elected Fourth CD chairman after a short, acrimonious campaign.  He unseated Jim Carson, the architect of Senator Roger Chamberlain’s successful Senate race in 2010 – which was, before redistricting, one of the Fourth CD’s very, very few successful elections.

In the interest of full disclosure, I was the Secretary for CD4.  I was “the establishment” – for exactly a year.  And I did purely because someone challenged me, once upon a time, to put up or shut up; as a pundit, I freely criticized party officials who I felt were falling down on the job; they asked me if I thought I could do it myself.  They had a point.

And so I got involved,  And I found that some of it, I actually can do!  Anyway – I have no ambition within the party except to help good (i.e., conservative) people get elected.  Which its he same ambition I have outside the party – on this blog, and on my show.

Long explanation short;  No sour grapes.  To blame this article series of articles on “sour grapes” is to dodge the point.

Which is why I’m elaborating on the point so careully.

———-

Beyond that? I’m not one of the “establishment” Republicans who are especially upset that the Ron Paul crowd took over.  Especially in the Fourth CD, the influx of passionate newbies is more than welcome.  I’m a former big-L Libertarian; I disagree with Ron Paul, but I agree with 80% of what his supporters believe.  Oh, I believe the baby got thrown out with the bathwater – the 4th was making some headway – but as a general thing, I think some good people got elected to BPOU and Executive Committee offices.

Now, Twin Cities Republican activist, attorney and blogger John Gilmore is upset.  John – a Saint Paul GOP activist and one of the bloggers at Minnesota Conservatives, has railed against Ron Paul and his movement since the very beginning.

And some of his railing is pretty acerbic…:

The hideous Ron Paul invasion of the Minnesota Republican Party is not quite over–the denouement known as its state convention in St. Cloud this weekend awaits–but enough evidence is in hand to draw some grim conclusions for those who are not enamored of a Jew hating fringe cult political figure who speaks to alienated, fairly ignorant and frequently unwashed lost souls. There are just enough exceptions to this characterization on an individual basis to prove its general truth.

The Paul zombies™ tried their best last cycle and were rebuffed by the party establishment. To these strange persons this was akin to living in North Korea. Their bleating about tyranny is perhaps the easiest example by which to show how they are simply not serious people in a political sense. They have no idea what tyranny is except the infantilized one fed them by friend of David Duke Ron Paul.

…and some of it was counterproductive, in my humble and inbidden opinion; John’s a friend, but let’s be honest; he’s about as subtle as Jesse Ventura on a coke binge; if you know John, you know I’m right.  Right?

Notwithstanding that, I generally support John, because he’s generally right, or at least right enough.

At any rate, at the last convention, CD4 got a new chair – former Roseville Mayor Kysylyczyn (who, combined with deputy and incumbent vice-chair Mike Boguszewski, gives CD4 the least-spellable executive 1-2 team in Minnesota politics).

And while the leadership at different Congressional Districts has many ideas about what the CD committee should do when it comes to helping races for the Legislature and the district’s affiliated US House seat (as we discussed this morning), Kysylyczyn seems to have a different one altogether, if one is to believe an email he apparently sent to CD4 activists. (Gilmore carries the letter in its entirety; I have a copy of the whole message):

…CD’s have nothing to do with legislative races.  It is clearly stated in the constitution.  We also have little to do with the congressional district race.  We are not the candidate’s committee.  In fact, we are not the committee of any candidate running for office this fall.

The email was apparently in response to concerns that, in the month-and-change since the CD4 convention, the 4th CD has not held a committee meeting.

Kysylyczyn (with emphasis added by me):

To be frank, it does not matter if we are up to any particular speed for this fall’s elections.

If you are a Republican in the Fourth CD, you may be wondering if you read that right.  Did the Chair of the 4th CD GOP, in the middle of a hotly-contested election season, coming off a redistricting that gives CD4 Republicans a welcome boost in numbers, really just say the district doesn’t really need to be “up to any particular speed” come election-time?

We’ll come back to that.

I understand that many may not agree with this or maybe things have been done differently in the past.  As someone new to the position, I sat down the first week on the job and read the state and CD constitutions and the bylaws.  My analysis is strictly based off of those documents.

Now, I can’t speak for Kysylyczyn (and as we’ll discuss in tomorrow’s installment, either will Kysylyczyn). but I’ll try to summarize what the thinking appears to be, here:  the constitution doesn’t say we have to do anything, so we won’t.

Read the Minnesota and CD4 GOP Constitutions – I did. The Consitutions spell out relatively few actual duties; elect officers, hold endorsing conventions where delegates elected by BPOUs endorse candidates for Congress, elect State Central Committee members and State and National convention delegates when needed, and a bunch of other little bits of electoral administrivia.

But the two Constitutions are pretty silent on lots of things that Congressional Districts do as a matter of course; fundraising, Voter ID and database maintenance, organizing volunteers, working with candidates, or allowing committee members to go to the bathroom during meetings, for that matter.

And yet Congressional Districts do – and in the 4th CD, did – all those things.  The 4th CD has a few thousand dollars in the bank.  What does the Constitution say to do with it?

Kysylyczyn:

There seems to be this mistaken belief that the CD is some sort of super campaign committee.  It is not.  There also seems to be this mistaken belief that CD’s win elections.  This is not true.

While it’s entirely possible that there are people who believe those things, it’s not nearly as important as the question “then what is a Congressional District Committee there for?”

Marshaling volunteers?

Helping with fundraising?

Transferring expertise?

Collecting and helping to maintain voter lists?

Candidate committees win elections.  There also seems to be a mistaken belief that CD’s sort of bind together BPOU’s that choose to operate as house districts.  This is not true.

So what is true?

If the 4th CD isn’t there to help provide expertise and data and boots on the ground to the BPOUs, and to help drum up help and fundraising and volunteers for the Congressional candidate…

…then what is it there for?  Why does it exist?  To hold conventions, to elect officers, and to kill time until the next election cycle?

Remember – campaigns come and go with electoral seasons. The party?  It’s the part that’s there between the elections.

We’ll come back to the actual “role during campaigns” bit.  Kysylyczyn responds to questions about the dearth of meetings since the CD4 convention (emphasis added):

We are required to hold four full committee meetings per year.  It is my intention to have 4 full committee meetings a year.  It is my intention to have actual agendas for meetings and a real purpose for having a meeting.  Every time we have one of these meetings, there is potentially 100 of our best volunteers who are not spending an evening on the campaign trail.

The emphasized bit is a red herring.

While the 4th CD held monthly meetings over the past year, those were suspended during the thick of campaign season; Carson made it clear that campaigning came first, and excused committee members readily and without question for campaign activities.

Sum total of volunteers taken off the street during committee meetings in 2011:  0.

In the past, there appears to have been a cattle call mentality concerning the calling of meetings.  Just have one every month.

I’m not aware that John Kysylyczyn attended a meeting at CD4 over the past year.  I certainly did – I was the secretary, and except for three meetings where family health issues intervened, I was there for every one.  None of them were held for “the sake of holding meetings”.

It doesn’t matter if we have any agenda.  Don’t bother sending out agendas.  Whoever shows up does.  Fill the time allotted.  To be clear, I do not operate in this fashion.

To be clear and honest, either did Jim Carson.

But all that is administrivia behind the real question:  if the CD4 leadership doesn’t plan on doing something to help candidates – even something as simple as being a clearinghouse for volunteers, training, and the social engagement that helps bring a district together in pursuit of a common electoral cause – then what is it there for?

A launching pad for delegates to Tampa, with quarterly meetings to look at the slide shows?

The big question is this: If you’re a Republican in the 4th CD, do you think your CD should be sitting on the sidelines during the campaign, as the email seems to indicate Chairman Kysylyczyn says it should?

———-

In the interest of fairness, one might ask “is that really what Kysylyczyn meant to say?”

It’s a good question.  More on this tomorrow morning.

In a post in this space last week, I asked what was the role of the eight various Congressional Districts in the various campaigns within the various districts.

Beyond that, I asked the same question of people from seven of the eight Congressional Districts in the Minnesota GOP.

And notwithstanding that the Minnesota GOP Constitution is more or less silent on the issue – it literally says nothing – I got a lot of answers.

Congressional District committees throughout Minnesota…:

• Help provide Congressional and Legislative campaigns with volunteers for phone banks, lit-dropping and other campaign-time activities.   This is especially important in districts where there is wide disparity in the number of Republicans – like, say, the Fifth, where some districts need a lot of help to carry out a credible campaign.
• Assist legislative races with fund-raising expertise and contacts – very important, especially in a party that relies on so many young candidates who are not professional politicians.
• Help Congressional campaigns put extra feet on the street; while campaigns tend to come and go, the Districts tend to have a certain continuity, including bodies of volunteers that have been working campaigns forever.
• Provide training to new campaign teams at the legislative (and lower) level.  For example, say a candidate in District  68 is going for the Minnesota House, and needs a campaign manager, a communications director and a volunteer manager.  The candidate rounds up three motivated volunteers – who between them have never managed campaigns, directed communications or scheduled, trained and directed volunteers.  The Congressional District is, often as not, able to put those three newbies in touch with people in the District who’ve done the jobs before, and who are happy to help spread the knowledge.  If done properly and consistently, the Congressional District can build a hardy corps of “middle managers”, people who’ve got some background at running the blocking and tackling of campaigns – the “unsung hero” stuff well behind the scenes of a successful campaign.

That’s the feedback I got from people in theFirst District GOP.  And the Second, Third, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth.

But in the Fourth CD, there seems to be a different answer, from at least one quarter.

Nothing.

Zip.  Bupkes.  Nada.  Zilch.

More at noon today.

Join Mitch Berg, Brad Carlson and Ed Morrissey live on the Northern Alliance Radio Network at the Minnesota State GOP Convention in St. Cloud.

We’ll be talking with…:

• Chris Fields, MNGOP candidate against Keith Ellison in CD5
• Marianna Stebbins, architect of the Ron Paul surge that’s had such an impact on the MNGOP lately,
• Michael Warren of the Weekly Standard
• Former State Rep Laura Brod
• Brandon Carnack, candidate for HD64A
• Much much more as the day goes on.

Join us from 1-3PMO on AM1280, or on the webstream!

If you are a MNGOP activist, and you live in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 7th or 8th Congressional Districts, I have  a question for you.

What involvement does your district have with your district’s congressional andn legislative races?    How does your Congressional district assist your various campaigns at all levels?

Just looking for info, here.

Just leave me an answer in the comment section.

Thanks in advance!

UPDATE AND CLARIFICATION:  And while I do love hearing from all my friends here in the comment section, this post is not intended as a clearinghouse for reasons one is not an activist anymore.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been listing a few reasons conservatives should take some limited encouragement from the outcome of the stadium vote.  The “Tea Party” freshman class largely did the job they were sent to Saint Paul to do.

But there’s an (heh heh) elephant in the room.  Every Republican in MInnesota knows it.

While Republicans coming off of epic Tea Party-driven victories elsewhere in the country are fighting the battles that come from being ahead of the bad guys – Walker apparently beating back the recall, Republicans in Indiana,  dispensing with the past-his-shelf-date Dick Lugar and the ones in Utah perhaps on the edge of doing the same with Hatch, thinking about taking the House and the Senate, making some serious headway against the Democrat/Union machine in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania – the sorts of things you can do when you’re focused on expanding on the gains like we got in 2010.

But here in Minnesota?

I remember in the early days of this blog describing Minnesota Republicans as “battered spouses” – people who are used to being dominated, controlled and abused, but think if they just give a little moreˆ, work a little harder to be a better partner, maybe it’ll all be OK.

I, like all Minnesota conservatives, had hoped that that had changed.  But this session was a trip back to the future.

I’m not going to say that the  GOP leadership  in the House and Senate spent tthe session pining for the approval of Lori  Sturdevant, or blithely hoping that iif they just gave enough, the DFL would come along and act like responsiblee adults,, or believing that acting in good faith with the Governor Dayton would cause him to act as anything but an office temp for Alita  Messinnger and Elliot Seid…

…but if I try to answer the question “if they were doing all of that, how would  they have acted any differently?”, I don’t have much of an answer.

The DFL is calling the past session a “Do-nothing” legislature.  And it’s a sad fact that the  best we can say about it is that it really wasn’t; as I noted yesterday, they weren’t.

But they dropped the ball on “Right to Work” and “LIFO” – as if giving in to the unions’ threats would keep the unions from working tirelessly against them?

And they bobbled the tax bill, letting the governor veto it twice while caving in on the stadium, giving the Governor a trifecta of cheap victories almost, it seems to the outside viewer, without having to break a sweat.

I’ve heard a few conservatives – angry business people – say they may not support the GOP this cycle, hoping to “teach the party a lesson”.  I think that’s a huge mistake – this state can not deal with two years of absolute DFL hegemony.   And I think most businesspeople know that.

But I think the takeaways from this past few weeks are::

1. The Tea Party class of freshmen – obstreporous and savvy, with no real desire to win the Lori Sturdevant/Keri Miller “Good Bipartisan Schnook” seal of approval – are what we need more of.  They are genuine conservatives, and provide a genuine alternative to the DFL.  Collegiality with the DFL comes in well behind doing what they were sent to Saint Paul to do.
2. The leadership has to change.  If it doesn’t, there is no reason to give the GOP any credibility as conservatives if they can’t work like they have a majority – which, after this session, we will have to work like hell to  hold.

Just as the MNGOP administrative operation needs to overhaul its financial opperation, the GOP caucus in both chambers needs to change its approach, and act like a majority caucus.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve analyzed the votes of the Legislative GOP caucuses on the stadium votes over the past few weeks, and found that if you’re a conservative voter, you have some reason to take consolation; the legislators we sent to the Legislature in 2010 on a conservative platform largely – not perfectly, but largely – stuck with their principles.

How about the DFL?

Heres’ the interesting part:  Look at the DFLers in the House and Senate who voted “no” on the Stadium deal.  Don’t worry, it won’t take long; not many DFLers could bear the thought of not giving Wilfare to a billionaire:

• Allen
• Carlson (Lyndon)
• Clark
• Davnie
• Dibble
• Dziedzic
• Eaton
• Falk
• Greene
• Greiling
• Hansen (Rick)
• Hausman
• Hayden
• Hornstein
• Kahn
• Laine
• Lenczewski
• Liebling
• Loeffler
• Lourey
• Marty
• McGuire
• Mullery
• Murphy (Erin)
• Pappas
• Paymar
• Scalze
• Torres Ray
• Wagenius

With the exceptions of Rep. Falk and Senator Lourey, every last one of them is from the metro area.  They represent (or, for some of us, “represent”) the people who will actually be stuck with the lion’s share of the tax burden for all of those purple-clad horn-blowing tail-gating Bud-chugging freeloaders’ “family traditions”.

The rest of them?  From 18-term dinosaur Mary Murphy to first-term carpetbagger Carly Melin, from Eastsider Jon Lesch to suburban grandée Nora Slawik, from Iron Range glad-hander Tom Rukavina to smirky suburban snark-bot and Eddie Haskell impersonator Ryan Winkler, they’re the ones who figured billionaire Zygi Wilf deserves your money more than you and your family do.

Here they are:  Anzelc,Atkins, Bakk, Benson (John), Bonoff, Brynaert, Champion, Cohen, Dill, Dittrich, Eken, Fritz, Gauthier, Goodwin , Harrigton, Higgins , Hilstrom, Hilty, Hortmann, Hosch, Huntley, Johnson (Sheldon), Kath, Kelash, Knuth, Koenen, Langseth, Latz, Lesch, Lillie (Leon), Mahoney, Mariani, Marquart, Melin, Metzen, Moran, Morrow, Murphy (Mary), Nelson (Michael), Norton, Pelowski, Persell, Poppe, Reinert, Rest, Rukavina, Saxhaug, Sheran, Sieben, Simon (Steve), Skoe, Slawik, Slocum, Sparks, Stumpf, Thissen, Tillberry, Tomassoni, Ward, Winkler and Wiger.

They’re the ones that practice Cy Thao’s classic if inadvertent dictum of “progressive” politics – “when we win, we take your money; when you win, you get to keep your money”. And Larry Pogemiller’s even better “it’s silly to think that the people can spend their own money better than the government can”.

Does the GOP need to get more conservative?  Do its less conservative members need to shape up or get out?  Absolutely.  And hopefully we’re not done with that process this election season.

But let’s not forget who invented “overtaxation” and “subsidizing the 1%” in this state.

Tomorrow – what the MNGOP needs to do.  Says me.

I’ve heard not a few conservative voters groan in frustration over the stadium vote this past few weeks: “why did we even bother voting for the GOP in 2010?”

And watching the way some “conservative” legislators caved in at the first sign of beer-gutted yahoos and their husbands flouncing about the halls of the capitol with their faces painted purple and the bratwurst-grease stains on their sweatpants concealed by the crocodile tears they were squirting at the thought that the taxpayers would let Zygi Wilf take all their precious family memories to California, it was easy to feel discouraged.

One might feel justified in asking – do any of these people have any cojones at all?

But a look at the numbers from the vote shows there’s a little more than that to be hopeful for.

———-

As I noted this morning, the Legislature voted by a  thin majority to support the stadium.  That majority included a sizable minority of the GOP caucuses.

Most of the GOP caucus did, in fact, vote against the stadium.

But it’s when you break down the caucus by class that you see the real distinction.

Let’s look at the House first.

Of the 71 House GOP caucus members, 33 voted Yes and 38 voted No.   Ten of the votes came from Freshmen Republicans (Fabian, Kiel, Kriesel, LeMieur, Murray (Rich), O’Driscoll, Schomaker, Swedzinski, Vogel and Woodard ) voted “Yes” – all of them but the retiring John Kriesel from outstate.  The other nine certainly owe us some answers.

But 18 of the “No” votes came from first-term Representatives (Anderson (Diane), Banaian, Barrett, Benson (Mike), Bills, Crawford, Daudt, Franson, Gruenhagen, Kieffer, Mazorol, McDonald (Joe), McElfatrick, Myhra, Petersen (Brandon), Quam, Stensrud and Wardlow).   They’re from all over the place; they were a majority of the GOP “No” votes, while the Freshmen were about a third of the “Yes” total.

Put another way?  The “No” voters had served an average of less than 2.5 terms; the “Yes” votes, an average of four terms.

In other words, the average “No”-voting Republican in the House came to office after the debacles of 2006 and 2008, and most of them in 2010; they remember the price of moderate hamsterism, and they rejected it when the chips were down.   The average GOP “Yes” voter has been there a while – in the cases of some of the old-timers, maybe too long.

In the Senate, the pattern holds: of 37 Republicans in the Senate, 15 voted “Yes” and 22 “No”.  That’s 60% of the Senate GOP caucus holding the line (it was 54% in the House).

And if you look at shelf life?

Of the “Yes’ votes in the Senate, only five (Carlson, Magnus, Miller, Nelson and Pederson) were freshmen.

But on the “No” side, of 22 votes, 15 were freshmen (Benson, Brown, Chamberlain, Dahms, Daley, DeKruif, Gazelka, Hall, Hoffman, Howe, Kruse, Lillie (Ted), Newman, Thompson and Wolf).

Put another way, the average “Yes” voter has spent just shy of three terms – almost 12 years, on average – in Saint Paul (and if you leave out the freshmen, it’s closer to four terms on average).

On the other hand, the average “No” voting Republican has been there a little over a term and a half (the seven long-timers voting “No” included indefatigable conservatives like Gerlach, Hann, six-termer Warren Limmer, Nienow, Ortman, Parry and Vandeveer, people who survived the debacles of 2006 and 2008 for good reason).

———-

So what’s the conclusion?

Conservatives can console themselves ever so slightly in the wake the stadium debacle in the fact that legislators elected after conservatives took real control of the GOP did, in fact, vote overwhelmingly conservative during the stadium debacle.

And fortify themselves with the absolute knowledge that we have to get more of the same in Saint Paul.

So what do we do about it?

More tomorrow.

It’s been a lousy six months in the life of the Minnesota GOP.

Like an awful lot of Minnesota Republicans, I participate to try to work toward government policy that is fiscally sound and respects individual liberty – not because I personally feel I can bring any insights into the efficient operation of the party apparatus itself.  For the record, I offer no such insights; I stay on top of my household budget via the grace of God, a decent job and YNAB.  A business?  Never tried it.  Doubt it’d work.

That’s why we – and by “we”, I mean “the party at large”, as opposed to “Mitch Berg and others”, since as a precinct convener in 2009 I had as much impact on the election of the party chair then as I do now with no party office whatsoever – elect someone to run the party.  But to the extent I supported anyone, I did it in large part based on the things that a state party chair is supposed to do:  Raise money and run a business.

Tony Sutton is quite a fund-raiser.  And he has run a business or two.  Beyond that, it was all greek to me.

Anyway, the MNGOP is a mess, and a bunch of very motivated people have spent the last six months trying to un-bumfuzzle the whole thing.  Henco Commissioner Jeff Johnson led a group of people – all of whom were by no means huge fans of Tony Sutton – and have released their initial report.

A report from the Minnesota Republican Party on its troubled finances delivered a frank admission of “misreporting… questionable decision-making… and lack of accountability.”

The good news, according Jeff Johnson, chair of party’s financial oversight committee, is “for me the fact that we didn’t find any evidence that people were stealing money was reassuring.”

Which doesn’t mean there aren’t big questions to be answered:

Among the revelations were payments of $18,000 to an investigator for research on the legalization of marijuana. According to the report, the investigator, Tim Goar, also helped with media relations, but “Goar claims to have very few written reports and did not think he had saved any of his work. He says he had… only a verbal agreement with [Ryan] Griffin,” the party’s executive director. The report adds: “We were unable to successfully contact Griffin.”

Griffin’s name, and his apparent disappearing act, comes up several times. “Some of Ryan Griffin’s expense reports lacked documentation…. We were unable to successfully contact Griffin,” according to the report.

Griffin was paid $14,000 over his regular party salary for “legal services” and “legal advice.” But, the report noted again, “We were unable to locate any documentation detailing the services provided and were unable to successfully contact Griffin for more information regarding this issue.”

While there are those who will say “Oh, yeah?  I thought you said there was no stealing?  Huh? Huh? Huh?” I think the responsible response is that Johnson’s group are not criminal investigators; they are accountants.  They accounted for what they could, and raised the rest as questions to be answered in the next step.

This next bit will no doubt set the conspiracy-mongers to “puree”:

The report revealed that spinning off corporate entities was a common practice for the party. The party’s Midwest Leadership Conference in October was run under the auspices of MLC, Inc., which owes more than $26,000, primarily to the DoubleTree Hotel.

This is a fairly common practice in business; spin off separate entities to isolate the accounting (and, in a pinch, the debt).  Is it ethical when the money’s not there to pay for it?  That’s a valid question.

Johnson claims the expenses that led to the party’s $1.3 million debt offered “no big surprises because all the items we had known about” before the review. Still, some of the numbers are eye-popping — like $180,000 paid to a communications firm for a re-branding project, with more than $50,000 yet unpaid.

But the party’s review was designed to deliver “just the facts, not the judgment whether something was wise or not wise,” said Johnson.

At any rate, the party seems to have managed to trim (according to one account ) half a million off its debt; with the rest, it’s heading in the right direction.  It’s bad, but probably salvageable:

While the report was less than comforting in assessing the party’s shortcomings, Johnson voiced some optimism. “The simple fact is that most of these issues can be addressed by changes in our structure,” he said.

As we’ve noted in this space, not everyone is convinced.  Hell, I don’t have the knowledge, in and of myself, to be authoritatively convinced or not.  Just like three years ago.

Still, it’s my hunch we’re getting to the bottom of it.  My hunch and $2 will get you a cup of coffee, of course, but there you go.

Still…:

The report will not satisfy everyone, Johnson acknowledged. “There’s a small group of folks that want a full forensic audit,” he said, but the party can’t afford that.

I don’t know what a “full forensic audit” costs – but a cursory examination shows it’s a lot of money.  And “Forensic Audits” focus on finding fraud (sort of – indeed, the definition of the term itself seems to be under some debate), it might – might, maybe – be overkill for what the MNGOP needs, even if it could afford another 5-6 figure professional consulting bill right now.

And the GOP’s State Central Committee – the “Board of Directors”, as it were – made that call at its meeting last December, in a majority vote of its elected members.  And it’s their decision, right or wrong.  Not yours.  Not mine.

But here’s an idea (and it’s not mine, not by a long shot): All of you who want a forensic audit?  Raise the money, and pay for it!  Come up with the money it’d take to forensically audit 3-5 years worth of books for an organization the size of the MNGOP (and from what I read, you’d do well to get that for less than $50,000) and commit it to the job!

Actions speak louder than words!

That, or get in there and find actual evidence that Johnson’s investigation falls short in some key way.

I’m interested – very – in getting the GOP’s shop cleaned up.  Complete conservative dominance in Minnesota is the only thing that will prevent this state from turning into a cold Greece with boring food.  I’m not interested in paying  a lot of money donated by a lot of ma and pa donors in order to put a pelt on someone’s wall unless there’s at least a whiff of smoke.  Six months ago, it seemed pretty plausible. Today?  I’ll take some convincing.

Bring the smoke, the money, or the State Central votes.

I just haven’t seen it yet.

Question:  What’s the best way for a Republican to get an op-ed printed in the Strib?

Answer: Throw a rhetorical urine-soaked balloon on the GOP.

I can’t say anything about Joe Repya that others haven’t said better; notwithstanding the fact that he’s spent the last three years telling anyone whose ear he could bend but mine that “every time Mitch Berg opens his mouth, someone leaves the GOP” after a falling-out with the editorial staff at True North (proving that he has me confused with someone with actual power), Repya’s a great living American who’s served in three wars and contributed immensely to his country and his political worldview.

Would any of that get him a plum spot on the op-ed page in the Strib?

Perhaps.  But he is reading out the GOP.  And that gets anyone kicked to the front of the queue:

For the Republican Party of Minnesota (MNGOP), 2011 may have ended with a thud, but 2012 is shaping up to be a very bad year indeed. Will the MNGOP survive the one-two-three punch it has taken since the beginning of the year? Some within the party leadership are unsure.

“Some…” people should form a fifth literary perspective; like First Person Omnisicent, only using unnamed-yet-omniscient Third Persons as the actual agents of the perspective.  ‘Some People”, listed without any other context, can support just about any stance imaginable.

Within the party leadership?  I’m sure “some” are feeling pretty pessimistic now.  “Some” are also feeling hopeful.  “Some” more still are no doubt just hoping to carry on.

And it’s irrelevant.  We’ll come back to that.

First, the party of fiscal responsibility found out that its trusted and twice-elected party chairman, Tony Sutton, resigned after over-spending nearly $2 million the party did not have.

We talked about this last week; the “Tu Quoque Ad Hominem”; “Oh, look!  You claim you stand for fiscal responsibility, but you’re behind on your rent!”.  It’s the shortest of all short-bus insults.  Leaving aside that institutions, like people, learn more from their mistakes than from their successes, it’s also a fact that no institution’s principles ever live up to the transgressions of its individual members.  As if Dave Thompson and King Banaian and Mary Franson’s work in the Legislature is undercut by bookkeeping problems in a body whose only connection with them is an endorsement from a district committee.

No matter.

We’ll come back to that.

The party, it appears, had no checks or balances on its leader. Since MNGOP is flat broke it has not been able to conduct a forensic audit to see if any inappropriate spending took place.

That news is in fact six months old. As watchdog (or as DFL lackey Jon Tevlin calls him, “watchdog”) Jeff Johnson’s put it, the forensic audit would have cost a ton of money, and led to the same results they have now.

On Dec. 31, 2011, the party faithful elected a new chairman, Pat Shortridge, hoping, it seems, that he could work some of his Enron lobbyist magic and bail the party out of its financial mess.

I’m wondering – what’s Repya’s point, here?  Shortridge lobbied for Enron.  Is he saying that any association with Enron, at any level, in any capacity, makes one dishonest?  Everyone?

That seems a little stretchy.

The party had been under Federal Election Commission (FEC) scrutiny since 2006, when Sutton was the party treasurer from 2005 to 2009. The FEC finally leveled a heavy fine of $170,000 for the period of 2006-2008. The party now faces even more FEC review and possible fines.

Now, for whatever reason, Repya likes to tie me to the former management at the GOP.  It’s a bit of an overreach; in 2008-2009, the highest office I’d ever held in the GOP was precinct convener.  I didn’t know a whole lot about the inner workings of the Minnesota GOP.  I didn’t even know where the office (three miles from my house) was, to be honest.  I did know that I’d gotten to know Michael Brodkorb as a blogger, and got him on the air as a NARN co-host, and counted him as a friend, at least in a vocational sense.  And I don’t cave on my friend.  I’ve never run a business that employed more people than me, I do well to keep my own budget in line (thank God for Quicken and YNAB); I was almost as unsophisticated at how politics is done (and still am).  So I wasn’t especially equipped to criticize Sutton’s management as Treasurer, or Chair.

Truth be told, I’ve never wanted to care much about the inner workings of the MNGOP.  All I really care about is getting conservatives elected to office and affecting policy.   Parties are the vehicle to doing that – hence, I try to get and stay involved – but energy spent fighting inside the party is energy not available to destroy the DFL at the polls.

I’ve taken some flak for that.

And just this week, the landlord of the party’s St. Paul headquarters filed court papers to have the GOP evicted for failure to pay rent.

Which is true.

Or was.  It’s old news now.  The new management at the MNGOP is doing what hundreds of thousands of other people have had to do when circumstances or their own irresponsibility have left them behind on their bills; worked out a deal.

As if all this were not bad enough, with a second punch the party of personal responsibility and family values was rocked by a sex scandal involving former party deputy chairman Michael Brodkorb and his state Senate employer, then-Majority Leader Amy Koch.

Repya seems to be borrowing his lines from Two Putt Tommy.

Are the party’s principles diminished because there are some who don’t live up to them?

It was a sordid little episode (not least due to the media’s 24/7 attention – which they’d never have paid to Democrats in similar, or worse, positions (I’m talking about you, Barney Frank, John Edwards, Tony Weiner and Bill Clinton. Move on!  Just mooooooooooove on!

Yet it’s the third punch that has many within the strong national defense party wondering if there is any chance for MNGOP to survive the upcoming election in November. In a stealthy, below-the-radar maneuver, most of MNGOP has been taken over by the Ron Paul movement…When asked whether they would support Mitt Romney if he wins the nomination, many Paul supporters said no, unless he selects U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ron Paul’s son, as his vice presidential running mate.

It’s true. And lots of Gingrich and Santorum supporters said the same thing.  And it remains to the rest of us to convince them, if we can, since the Paul crowd is all full of whiz and vinegar and doing their end-zone happy dance these days.

But they did, in fact, out-organize “the rest of us” – including an awful lot of us who agree with 80% of what they say, albeit not about Ron Paul – just like we said they’d have to do when they were bellyaching about not being carried to the podium on the establishment’s shoulders in 2008.  They learned something.

That more than anything has the establishment MNGOP in a dither. Rightly or wrongly, they see many of the young, undisciplined and politically naïve Ron Paul movement members as anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-national defense and pro-legalization of drugs.

Just as Repya (and the Democrat pundits, and not a few others) mix up the party’s larger principles with the actions of its agents and administrators, they also confuse the party’s operations with the party’s messages.  The MNGOP – the people who work in the office at 525 Park, until they can find someplace cheaper, anyway – don’t really do policy.  That’s the job of the candidates.  Oh, in theory the party is supposed to make sure its candidates can follow its platform – but that document is as large as the Talmud, and contradicts itself in so many ways that few have even read it (and I’m going to be pushing this next two years to adopt the ten-point statement of principles from a few years back).

Which is a niggling little point that addresses a larger issue; I don’t suspect that the Paul crowd’s policy initiatives are the issue (barring the odd anti-semitic whacko that might slip through – and we know there are a few of them) that’d tar the party’s image and electability.  No, it’s the idea that that the entire leadership at the GOP could get tossed hither and yon and everyone would have to start over with the rebuilding process.

Repya:

If, as in 2008, Ron Paul fails to endorse the party’s nominee and his minions go home, the national GOP will be hard pressed to beat President Obama.

Well, there’s the good news.  Paul is probably not going to do that.  He’s retiring – but he wants to leave his movement to his son, Rand.  And Rand is working within the party, and is working to bring his dad’s views into the mainstream, an effort many of us appreciate.  Paul’s not going to mess that up; he’s most likely going to be a team player, this year.

Fingers crossed, naturally.

I don’t have a crystal ball to see how all this will end.

Nor, it seems, does he have any news to offer that dozens of other bloggers haven’t been pounding on for months and months.

But that’s not why the Strib printed this op ed.

But from where I’m sitting it does not look good for MNGOP, which won the state House and Senate in 2010 and whose lawmakers are all up for re-election.

And whose legislative caucuses – who actually won the 2010 elections (the MNGOP’s slate got swept), and which is feeling fairly confident outstate – have nothing to do (Koch notwithstanding) with any of the MNGOP’s flailing.

The DFL smells blood in the water and sees an opportunity to regain both legislative chambers. We are very possibly witnessing the death of MNGOP as we know it. If so, it will have died from within, not from outside causes.

And on one level – so what?  The MNGOP runs conventions, prints stuff, raises funds and occasionally does some messaging.  It’s only really heavily involved elections for governor, Senate and the constitutional offices, and only Senate is up this year, and I don’t think any of the Senate campaigns has ever counted on much help from the MNGOP.   The MNGOP has to rebuild.  It’s a fact.  They’ve got two years to do it (Senate race aside).  They’re working on it.

And on another level?  Who cares, even more.  The principles by which Republicans try to run and win elections – limited government, lower taxes, national and local security, upholding the family, individual liberty – live on no matter what happens to the party, and even no matter how those principles might get betrayed by its managers or legislators.  There should be accountability – and there has been.

Most of us know that.

And I’m going to guess that the Strib would never carry an op-ed saying anything of the sort.

Is the MNGOP in a sorry state?  Of course it is!  While I believe the new management is well on the way to bringing the GOP back to the right path, the party is on a fiscal diet that conservatism in Minnesota doesn’t need, facing the fiscal wealth of the unions and Alita Messinger, and with the Strib working as an unpaid PR flak for the DFL.  It’s a bad situation.

Let’s not pretend that any of this is news, though.  The only thing that’s newsworthy is that a Republican is telling it to the Strib.

They loooove that.

UPDATE: Although, mirabile dictu, they carried a letter to the editor that did!

The Fourth CD is one of the more challenging districts in which to be a Republican.

And this is a challenging year to be a Republican, at least if you’re expecting financial support from the state party (hint: there’s not going to be any).   The districts – congressional, state senate/house and county – are bracing for a year of no money from the state.

So the Fourth CD GOP, at its convention on the 21st, did the sensible thing; jacked up the admission price for delegates, and started charging for guests.  They also canvassed aggressively for additional donations.

One upside of this?  Usually the party raise $5,000 or so at its convention (part of which – $2K or so, if I recall correctly – has to go to cover the cost of rending the hall).

This year?  More like $11,000.

That’s good news!  The district’s coffers can get replenished!  The district’s candidates can look forward to some help!

What could possibly go wrong with that theory?

More later today (or, let’s be honest, maybe tomorrow…).

One of the most unsettling things you hear from Ron Paul supporters – some of them, anyway – is that if you don’t vote for Paul, you’re basically voting for someone just the same as Barack Obama.

As if Mitt Romney will carry on exactly as Obama has.

In the world of the purist – and many of the Paul supporters are exactly the same purists I shook my head at as I left the Libertarian Party – incrementalism, no matter how far and how fast it moves, is never enough.  It’s all, or it’s nothing; nothing less matters to way too many of them.   The fact that Tim Pawlenty was way way way more conservative than Arne Carlson or Dave Durenberger counts for nothing, since he wasn’t as conservative as the one we should have had.  The fact that Norm Coleman was a moderate is all that counts; not that he was the most conservative mayor Saint Paul had had in decades, and that he replaced a Senator who was much worse, and but for a wave of fraud or incompetence, could still be much better than who he replaced, rather than better than the one who replaced him.  

Mr. D, like me, notes that he agrees with Ron Paul probably 80% of the time – but is also a little concerned about their sense of absolutism as well as their rather incomplete sense of history:

Perhaps it’s just me, but my sense is that while the takeover now underway may be a tactical triumph, it holds the seeds of an epic failure. The GOP of the recent past was not the province of Arne Carlson or David Durenberger; those gentlemen of a different era have long been free to be the operational Democrats they always were. For all the problems of the party organization, it’s worth remembering that the GOP of the recent past is as much John Kline and Michele Bachmann as it is Tim Pawlenty and Norm Coleman and Ron Carey.

And there’s the rub; I’ve seen more than a few prominent Paul supporters say, with straight faces, that Bachmann and Kline aren’t sufficiently pure for a Paul supporter.

It will be very important that the Paul supporters understand that it will take everyone, even those they might ordinarily disdain, for there to be electoral success in the fall. Right now, there’s a lot of anger out there. That needs to change. Leadership of a political party means more than taking control and dictating terms. Leadership means building. And the first step will be to make sure those who were defeated are not disdained.

It also means you’ve done something no Big-L Libertarian has ever done; you have to learn “Politics”, which means, more or less, the art of compromise.

And to a purist, that’s a four-letter word.

I spent most of Saturday at the Fourth CD GOP convention.

The Ron Paul crowd swept into almost all of the leadership and delegate positions in the Fourth CD on Saturday; only Mike Boguszewski remains from the old executive committee.

The Paul crowd replaced everyone else, myself included, with their slate of candidates – for whom they voted with almost vapor-lock-tight discipline (and no, no sour grapes; I am not “District Secretary” material, and wanted to move over to Vice Chair for Media and Commiunications; I finished closer to the money than anyone who wasn’t on the “slate”, which I took as a mild compliment).

Now, I’ve met a lot of the district’s Ron Paul supporters.  They are, in a lot of ways, the type of people everyone’s been trying to attract to 4th CD GOP politics for years; young, idealistic, motivated.   Unlike 2008, most of delegates that had been forwarded from the House/Senate district conventions showed up for their third straight session of sitting in their delegate chairs until their butts went numb.

And that’s all to the good.

Less good?  Some of their leadership was motivated by fairly palpable anger over the “way they were treated in 2008”, when quite a few GOP activists gamed the system to keep the first wave of Paul supporters out of power.  To their political credit, they spent their four years organizing, and did a good job of it.

Less to their credit?  While anger is a good motivator, “anger at the inner workings of a political party” has, I’m going to guess, a short shelf life.   And at least in the Fourth CD, the anger was manifested by ballot.  The twitter stream during the convention indicated that at other districts, Paul supporters booed Dan Severson and Pete Hegseth, whose main transgression was “not being Kurt Bills”, the Paul crowd’s candidate for Senate, or refusing to stand to support John Kline at the 2nd District convention when he was re-endorsed.

Still, it made for an interesting day.  Rumors on the floor had it that there’d been negotiations going on to keep Jim Carson – who did an excellent job leading what was bound to be a long rebuilding effort, after having led Roger Chamberlain’s upset victory for the Senate two years ago – in place as district chair.  For one reason or another – rumors on the floor varied, but most of them seemed to come back to “we’re still pissed off about 2008” – the negotiations broke down and the Paul crowd voted their straight slate and replaced Carson with former one-term Roseville mayor John Kyslyczyn.

So now, with the exception of Boguszewski, we have an entirely new Fourth CD; in much of the district, the leadership is new from the “BPOU” (MNGOP talk for the lowest level of the organization, which might be a House district, a Senate district or a County) level on up.

So what do we have, other than the hardest-to-spell leadership team in all of Minnesota politics (Kyslyczyn / Boguszweski)?  It’d tempting to say “a big slate of leaders who’ve never won a political race outside the party”, but then outside of Kyslyczyn’s term as mayor and Carson’s management of Chamberlain, the old and new teams are both tied at zero, so we can call that a wash so far.

My big concern, now as then?  While the crowd of Paul supporters at the convention Saturday carefully replaced their “Ron Paul” posters and stickers with “Kurt Bills” goodies, and voted to endorse Tony Hernandez by a 190-5-5 margin (after running a skillful campaign to win support from most of the establishment and Paul crowds), I have yet to hear a lot of support for, or even especially much awareness of, races farther down ticket or, more importantly, for candidates who get endorsed even if they’re not on the Paul slate.

Now, I know that there are a lot of good, committed people among the Paul crowd who are committed to using their positions in the GOP to work for the party, not just a candidate or two.

But I get a different impression from some of their leadership.  Ronald Reagan once said that if someone agrees with you 70% of the time, it doesn’t make them 30% your enemy.

And from some of the Paul crowd’s leadership, I do get the impression that, whether motivated by single-candidate zeal or roiling anger over 2008 or one of the mind-boggling number of byzantine interpersonal pissing matches that seems to motivate so much of CD4 GOP politics no matter who the nominee or the cause celebre or what the defining issue is, the Paul crowd’s leadership, in the district and beyond, sees “70% friends” as “30% enemies”.

About a month ago, I issued a challenge to the Paul supporters in the 4th CD.  Some Paul supporters complimented me on the piece.  Some took umbrage.  At least one of the Paul crowd’s “leadership” took out after me pretty aggressively over the article, denouncing me as Not A Libertarian At All in that Maoist-y way people adopt when they’re higher on political zeal than common sense.

But now he, and all of you in the Paul crowd, are the establishment, and I don’t have to mince words like some sort of party officer anymore.

Ron Paul’s not going to get nominated.  There is not a chance in hell he’s going to even get past the first ballot.  You fought the fight – successfully, here in Minnesota – but in August your national delegates will announce their votes, and the whole effort will wash down history’s drainpipe, and Paul will retire from Congress, and life’ll move on.

But there’s an opportunity to make a statement that’d be even bigger, at least here in Minnesota.

I’ll restate my challenge; exert some of that newfound power and influence down ticket from Paul and Bills; you have a golden opportunity to use your numbers and energy and organization to push Tony Hernandez to an upset victory over Betty McCollum.  There hasn’t been a better  opportunity to do that since the late Dennis Newinski got within six points back in 2000; between redistricting, anger in Stillwater over McCollum’s opposition to the new Stillwater Bridge, Obama’s anti-coattails, and the fact that most of Saint Paul is much worse off now than it was four years ago, this will be as good a chance as we get until 2020.

The chance, in short, is to do the unthinkable; to flip the unflippable Fourth.

Of course, for all your district-flipping numbers, you can’t do it alone.  Obviously, either could the former leadership.

It’ll be a brutally tough job to do even if we do all pull together.

And I know most of your hearts are in the right place.  But, Paul supporters, I’d like you to honestly ask yourself; does your leadership see the rest of the GOP as a bunch of 30% enemies?

Because if they do…I was going to say, “that road leads to Palookaville”. But 4th CD Republican politics has only rarely been anything but Palookaville for as long as anyone can remember.

Now there would be some change we could believe in.

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.

To: Ron Paul Supporters, especially in the 4th Congresisonal District
From: Mitch Berg
Re: Your Shot At Making A Real Difference

All,

Some of you know me.  I’m Mitch Berg.  And long before I had a blog, and even longer before I hosted a talk show, and longer-still before I got heavily involved in “establishment” party politics, I was a Libertarian, with a big “L”:.  I even ran for office as a big-“L” Libertarian  – and won a moral, if not literal, victory.

I support liberty.  I also support being in a position to actually affect policy, rather than being an eternal protest-voter.  All of your chanting and zeal witthin the GOP are of no value – zero, nada, zilch – if you don’t have the ability to actually affect policy in the world outside the party.  And while having your guy win the presidency would do that, you also need to push candidates with your worldview into the US House and Senate, Governors and state constitutional offices, state Legislators and Senators, the county commission, city hall, the school board – the stuff you actually have to win if you want the government to, y’know, audit the Fed and stuff.

Which is why I endorsed Paul – Rand Paul, that is – last winter.  Libertarian purism, like any kind of purism, is a fun self-indulgence – and like any self-indulgence, it will have no affect on society around you.

So I have no beef with libertarianism.  I don’t even have so much a beef with Ron Paul, either.  I approve of many of the issues he runs on.  The stuff he wrote 30 years ago is a big problem – don’t kid yourself.  But I want to support him, or at least what he stands for.

The problem, I’m sorry to say, is many of you, his supporters.  Part of it is that so many of you do in fact propose using the power of the executive branch in a way not a lot different than liberals propose using the judicial branch – as a cudgel.

But the bigger part is that, for too many of you, Ron Paul is a personality cult.  I’ve run into too many Paul supporters who support Paul, but can barely articulate what he stands for; indeed, I do a better job of speaking for what Paul believes than they do.

Worse?  Just like four years ago, you flooded GOP precinct caucuses, and are in the process of flooding the BPOU Conventions, and trying to push your delegates on to the CD, State and (you hope) National conventions.  And that’s fine; that’s how the process works.

What’s “worse” is that, like four years ago, so very very very very very many of you will never be seen again after your next round of conventions.  You’ll show up, do your bit for Ron Paul – but not the GOP – and disappear, likely not to be seen again.  There are some exceptions – but they are rare.  Your commitment is to Ron Paul, not to the GOP, even in the context of “Changing the party into a more-libertarian institution in the long term” – with which I’d be completely on board.

And so those of us who have committed to the party – some of you call us “the establishment”, which makes me laugh, since I’ve been a libertarian insurgent in the party for 12 years now, and being “the establishment” means “campaign after campaign of door-knocking, phone-calling and lit-dropping – do feel a bit of resentment, like when you cook a big dinner and some stranger eats the whole thing and doesn’t even say thanks.

Anyway, I’m not here to bag on all you Ronulans.  I’m here, actually, to propose a win-win solution; you get to push liberty, the GOP gets to make inroads in the arena of actually changing policy in a meaningful way.

We have a big opportunity in the Fourth Congressional District.  I’ll take a moment to remind you what the Fourth CD is, since a disturbing number of you Paul supporters have little concept of politics down-ticket from the Presidency.  It’s Betty McCollum’s Congressional District:

It’s been controlled by big-government stooges from the DFL for over sixty years now.

But the latest round of redistricting made it a lot more competitive.  It used to be pretty much Saint Paul – a 70-30 statist-DFL district.  But redistricting added in a bunch of the more-conservative, more liberty-friendly East Metro, including thousands of people who moved to Lake Elmo, Woodbury, Stillwater and Afton to get away from the DFL and the rot they bring.

Now, Tony Hernandez is currently the candidate running for the GOP nomination in the 4th CD.  I’ve interviewed him a couple of times – and the language he uses is the kind of thing that should make you Paul supporters (and me) happy to support him.  Big on liberty, shrinking government – most of the Ron Paul elevator pitch is in there.   Before redistricting, he might have been looking at a 65-35 campaign, if he was lucky.

Now?  The odds are not nearly so quixotic.  With a little luck and a ton of work, it’s doable.

So here’s the deal, Paul supporters; if all of you turn out between now and the election with as much enthusiasm and whiz and vinegar in support of Tony Hernandez – who likely will get nominated, as opposed to Paul – and work your asses off alongside all us “establishment” Republicans?  We might just pull off a miracle.

No, bigger than that.

And not just a miracle in terms of sending Betty McCollum back to work as a receptionist at Alliance for a Better Minnesota; not just a miracle in upending sixty years of statist big-government representation in the 4th CD.

It’ll be a miracle in terms that matter much more, both to you Paul supporters and to the GOP; you’ll have done some real, palpable good in bringing your beliefs to bear in a way that can actually affect policy.

If you’re interested in helping out?  I’ll see you at the conventions.  We’ll have a great time. We’ve got a lot of work to do, and we’ll have fun doing it.

If you’re not? If you’re one of those dolts who believes that by staying home on election day because your candidate didn’t get nominated you actually “send a message” anyone will care about?  It’s not true, by the way – politics, especially at the grassroots level, reflects the will of those who show up.  Not just once, mind you, but every month, every election.  Anyway – yeah, I’ll be working against you.  Totally.

Whaddya say?

That is all.

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.

There apparently are a lot of Republicans out there who aren’t ready to accept Mitt Romney as “inevitable” just yet.  Santorum won Minnesota, and won pretty big.

The PiPress:

Santorum’s victory in Minnesota, combined with a win in the nonbinding Missouri primary and another win in Colorado’s caucuses, is almost certain to prolong the Republican nominating contest and make the former Pennsylvania senator, not Gingrich, the conservative alternative to the more moderate Romney.

Speaking in Missouri, Santorum said the votes there and in Minnesota “were heard loud and louder all across this country.”

The Minnesota results marked a reversal for Gingrich, who had been Romney’s strongest challenger.

Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley told the Pioneer Press his candidate’s strong showing makes him the biggest threat on Romney’s right.

Conservatism’s not rolling over and playing dead.

If Romney wants this nomination – or spare himself and the party quite a few Maalox moments on the way – he’s gotta step up his conservative game.

Chopping Obamacare would be a great start.

I agree with what Mitt Romney (I think – maybe it was Huntsman) said in one of the opening GOP candidate debates; any of the people on the stage, then and now would do a better job of rebuilding this country than Barack Obama.

Including Romney.

I’m not thrilled with Romney; I think the Gingrich camp’s attacks have verged on the hysterical, and swerved way too far into Alinsky for my taste; Romney certainly did the same in return.  And I’ll allow that there’s some context to his very “moderate” record in Massachusetts; a legislature that verged on Maoist, a state that was so far to the left that John Huntsman would have looked like Gengis Khan.  Still, that’s what we have to go by – that, and his impressive business and executive record.

And Ron Paul?  I used to be a Big-L Libertarian.   And Ron Paul certainly has uncovered the wellspring of inner libertarians – big and small “L” – that I always knew was out there.  I’d love it if Ron Paul were both a viable candidate and a credible choice for President.  I sincerely hope Rand Paul becomes both in the next four to eight years.

But tonight I’m going to caucus for Rick Santorum.  Not because I think he’s necessarily the best candidate – his record on spending and economic issues is adequate-to-good; he’s most famous as a social con, and his credentials there are truly impeccable, but it’s not my turf.

But I’m doing it mainly because if Mitt Romney really is “inevitable”, at least he’s going to know at least one GOP activist – and every one I can convince to follow suit – isn’t handing over his support merely because Mitt’s got a “GOP” behind his name.

Promise to repeal Obamacare?  Start listing cabinet departments that’ll be cut?  In addition to the parts of the Romney platform that do make conservative sense (and there are parts)?  We can talk business.

But for now?  Romney’s not inevitable with me.  Not yet.

This particular chanting point has been making the rounds this week – a “Public Policy Polling” (PPP) survey appears to show that Mark Dayton is dreamily popular, and the people just can’t stand the GOP-run legislature.

It’s made the rounds of most of the mainstream media, the leftyblogs, and the lowest of the bunch, the  City Pages.  I figured I’d pick on Dave Mindeman at mnpACTttp and his take on it because unlike way too many Twin Cities leftybloggers, he’s articulate, recites the chanting point pretty much verbatim, and is otherwise not an idiot.

Mark Dayton’s numbers have improved since PPP last polled Minnesota in May and he’s one of the most popular Governors in the country.

Now, the numbers would seem to bear that statement out.  Let’s unpack them before we move on.

In observing PPP polls over the past couple of cycles, their results seem to consistently fall a little to the left of how Minnesota reality eventually shakes out.  Not in an egregions-to-the-point-of-fraud kind of way, like the Humphrey Institute or Strib Minnesota polls, but it’s noticeable.

I also think – and this is a theory, not something I’m stating as fact, but a decade of observation has led a lot of us on the right to wonder if there’s something to it – that liberals are much more prone to answer polls, especially in between election cycles.

Let’s ignore both of those for the moment.  Let’s talk about the surface indicators for this polling:

A little belated birthday present for Mark. Dayton has an approval rating of 53%, while disapproval is at 34% — a 19% spread.

The numbers have led Mindeman – and most other lefties – to a misleading conclusion.  Not wrong – I’m not telling people not to trust their lying eyes – but there’s more in those numbers than meets the eye.  Mindeman and the rest of the lefties are ignoring a key bit of American political behavior.

The poll covers the time between the shutdown and the present – when Dayton really didn’t do anything.  For that matter, he really didn’t do anything during the last session, or the shutdown.  He’s been for the most part a non-entity.  And if you don’t do anything – either positive or negative – then your numbers are going to be juuuuust fine.  Or at least fairly steady.

(Opposite case in point – Tim Pawlenty, who fought a two-court DFL advantage in 2009 and 2010 with aggression and passion.  He did not sit in his office drinking Kombucha or, given his hockey-playing pedigree, PBR, and his poll numbers showed it.  They were “lived-in”.  Who was a better governor?  Depends, now, doesn’t it?)

During the session, and the shutdown, it was the Legislature that did all the heavy lifting.  Dayton sat in his office, released the occasional demand, and until his final, fatal tour around the state, where he realized that getting behind his own plan would be political suicide, really did nothing.  And after that tour, when he folded his cards, he did so quietly, minimizing if not the GOP’s victory at least his own defeat.

In other words, he’s played defense.  He’s sat back and let the other guys take the hit.  The media, naturally, abet this behavior.

And in a state as polarized as Minnesota is, when you actually do things, you will take the hit – especially given our DFL-owned-and-operated media, whose interest in fluffing Dayton is obvious and constant.

And the Legisature has done things – affirmative things during the session and the shutdown, many of which pissed off Democrats and a few of which irritated the more conservative, and also not-so-affirmative things that have been all over the news lately.  Of course, sitting back and being passive-aggressive, like Dayton, was not an option for the Legislative branch; they were sent to Saint Paul on a mission, and the mission wasn’t going to get done without some serious action, and given the number of GOP freshmen who said they didn’t care if they only served a term, some fallout was to be expected.  It was inevitable.

But there’s more.

Dayton may get himself an easier legislature to work with next year. Democrats lead the generic legislative ballot in the state by a 48-39 margin. If that holds through November they should win back a whole lot of the seats they lost in 2010. It’s not that legislative Democrats are popular- only 31% of voters have a favorable opinion of them to 49% with a negative one. But legislative Republicans have horrible numbers. Their favorability rating is 23% with 62% of voters viewing them negatively. That honeymoon wore off real fast.

And here Mindeman and the rest of the metro chattering class fall into the seductive charms of drawing using high-level data to draw high-level conclusions on low-level questions.  Mindeman – and the entire regional left – have scoped the data wrong. I suggest.  The fact is that “generic” never manages to get endorsed to run for the Legislature.

The Legislature will take popularity hits – they, as a body, did all the work.

The Legislature, as a body, will always lag a do-nothing governor under those circumstances.  Just like Congress does.

But aggregate polls of the entire Legislature – those mythical “generic” legislators – are meaningless, just like aggregate polls of Congress.  People may want to vote the bastards in general out, but people tend, generally, to support their own bastard.  There are exceptions – they voted a lot of incumbent “bastards” out in 2006 and 2010 – but as a very general rule, unless you have a wave election, incumbency has its virtues.  This election may be many things – it may return both chambers of Congress to the GOP – but I don’t think anyone’s predicting a wave yet.

Tack on the fact that PPP polls trend left, that poll respondents this early in the cycle trend left, that the PPP poll was of registered voters (who always trend left), and the fact that the poll is meaningless, and the additional fact that redistricting – provided that it reflects actual demographic shifts rather than the DFL’s rhetoric – should favor the GOP, and I’m a lot less worried about this poll than the DFL, media (ptr) and the chattering classes want you to be.

And despite those numbers the GOP legislature continues to play ultra partisan games.

Well, yeah, Dave.  They know the numbers are meaningless.  So does the DFL.

It’s going to be a big show on the Northern Alliance Radio Network tomorrow.

For starters, we’ll have Mound city councilman Dave Osmek on, to talk about the story about light rail that you’re juuuust not hearing from the rah-rah mainstream media.

Then, we’ll be talking with newly-elected MNGOP chair Pat Shortridge about the way forward from the party’s mess, and – more importantly – how the MNGOP is going to capitalize on last year’s epic gains.

And there might be more.  Stay tuned!