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.