If you live in the Fourth Congressional District and are anything but a teachers union member, a transit zealot, a peace creep, a radical supporter of the civil sacrament of abortion or an environmentalist weenie, you get used to not really being represented at all.  Some of us have taken to adopting John Kline and/or Michele Bachmann as our representative in Congress.

Because Betty McCollum is an out-and-out disaster.  If she were representing any district other than Saint Paul (which, up until this past redistricting, really was the Fourth CD), she’d have never gotten endorsed for soil and water commission.

And in normal times, she’d be the punch line for a thousand jokes starting “Everything else in the USA must be fixed, because look what Betty McCollum is babbling about…”;   read her website:  her big mission is cutting off military advertising…with NASCAR, “ultimate fighting” and professional fishing.

Seriously – watch the woman speak.  It’s like she memorizes chanting points from her staff, mentally tosses them up in the air, and randomly re-orders them before speaking, without really understanding any of it.  She is not, as they say, in line for a MacArthur Fellowship.

Redistricting is a potential game-changer.

Not as in a “flip the chessboard over” kind of game-changer; it turned the Fourth CD from a 70-30 district to a 60-40, probably.  But some of those 60 have reason to be upset; McCollum voted with her environweenie string-pullers in Saint Paul to keep her new constituents in Stillwater driving across a bridge built in 1452, or so it seems when you drive across it.  And some of those “60” were people who may have voted DFL most of their lives – but fled Saint Paul and Minneapolis to get away from all the results of having voted for people like Betty McCollum all their lives.

But politics is a little like dating; a lot of money can make a dim Congresswoman just as formidable as a homely guy. And McCollum has the bottomless pockets of the unions backing her up and, seemingly, doing all her thinking for her.

And so CD4 Congressional Candidate Tony Hernandez needs our help.

I’m not sure if he qualifies for the same sort of state match that the legislative candidates we talked about earlier this week do – but that’s even more reason to see if you can dig down and pony up a buck or two for Tony’s campaign.  Tony’s gotta fundraise like a madman to even have a shot at this – but every little bit helps.

So if you can spare a few bucks – well, you know the drill.  Now’s the time.

There hasn’t been a chance like this in the 4th CD in a long, long time.  You gotta try to run with these things.