OK. You’ve been sworn in.
Now, let’s get down to business.
You and your supporters – the unions and your family – ran a shameful, slimy campaign. And had you not outspent Tom Emmer and the GOP by about 3:1 – using family money, and money expropriated from union dues-payers – and had the media not (I firmly believe) exploited the “Bandwagon Effect” using polling that was either fatally but conveniently flawed or (part of me believes) rigged, you would have come up well more than 10,000 votes shy of where you ended up.
But OK, politics ain’t beanbag, and that’s truly life in politics. And now you’re governor.
Let me tell you where I, a mere non-plutocrat schlemiel citizen, stand today.
I believe you are a perfectly fine human being – but I don’t like your platform (to the extent you had one; I pretty well eviscerated it during the campaign). I don’t like what your party stands for. I don’t like what your supporters want to expropriate from me, and I don’t like how your willing sycophants in the media are going to try to snow-job Minnesotans into demanding the Legislature allow it.
And while I’m just a single guy, a schlemiel with a blog, I’m going to fight that snow job, and I’m going to fight your platform, and I’m going to fight everything you stand for – your tax policies, your healthcare policies, your regulatory policies, all of it. I will do whatever I can to stymie you. If any member of the GOP majority in both houses flags in his or her drive to beat your agenda back, they will hear from me, and from anyone I can get into joining me – and as we saw last November, I’m hardly alone.
I will do whatever I can to make them stiffen their backbones. We sent them to St. Paul. We can send them home.
Because even though 42% of my neighbors fell for your odious campaign, we – The People – must not flag or fail. I – we – will fight you throughout your entire term, we’ll fight you on Capitol Hill, we’ll fight you in the shop floor and by the water cooler, we’ll fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the alternative media, we shall defend our lives and lifelihoods, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight you on all 10,000 lakes, we shall fight you in the colleges, we shall fight you and your agenda in the City Council meetings and at the caucuses and in the streets and in the op-ed pages; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, you make it to the end of this term without turning power over to Lt. Governor Prettner Solon, then our silent, browbeaten majority, motivated and guided by the groundswell that will drive Obama from office in two years and nauseated by the arrogance of the DFL and its union and bureaucrat and media minions, will carry on the battle until, in God’s good time, the Tea Party and all the other courses of conservative discontent, with all their silent but implacable power and might, step forth and get you voted out of office in 2014. [1]
My goal is not to negotiate or compromise with you, Governor Dayton. My goal is to stop you.
[1] Paragraph nine is in fact lifted, lock stock and barrel, from one of Winston Churchill’s greatest speeches. Some sentiments can never be better expressed, so why bother trying?
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