To: Tarryl Clark, DFL Candidate for MNCD6 nomination
From: Mitch Berg, un-American dissenter.
Re: Public Image? Limited!
Dear Ms. Clark,
You’re running for Congress in the Sixth Congressional District. It’s a fairly conservative district with some fairly liberal enclaves. It’s obviously a district in major contention – but Michele Bachmann, the most unrepentant conservative in Minnesota politics, squeedged out a three point margin against not only Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenberg, but against a full court press from the mainstream media, the liberal cableocracy, and the nutroots.
Which says to me – though I am, I’ll grant, merely a simple peasant – that the Sixth is probably not a mother lode for nutroots campaigning.
So please, Ms. Clark; please please please keep campaigning away on Daily Kos. I sincerely beg of you.
They think DK is mainstream, how cute. Thats like if a conservative candidate started posting on WND, the rights equivalent of DK
She’s fund raising, not campaigning.
I love “Minnesotans need someone who can deliver more than a soundbite.” This from the people who couldn’t deliver a budget, and from the person they put out as the mouthpiece because they’re afraid to let Bogeymiller in front of a microphone for fear of spontaneous combustion.
I think Master of None makes a good point about fundraising. After the millions Tinklenberg raked in, thanks to Rep. Bachmann’s Oct. 17, 2009, “anti-American” remarks on MSNBC “Hardball,” the “Netroots” were firmly established as a cash cow for campaign funding against Bachmann.
I started a diary on Daily Kos to explain the 6th District political landscape to activists on the left and was taken aback by some of the knee-jerk hostility directed at me after one of the commenters revealed that I was a Republican. It didn’t seem to make a difference that I ran against Bachmann; a Republican is a Republican and the letter R behind your name no less scarlet.
The point is that the Netroots can be a double-edged sword in a 6th District campaign. On the credit side for Sen. Clark, she could amass a huge war chest with which to go on the offensive against Rep. Bachmann; on the debit side, the average “Kossack” is substantially to the left of the typical 6th District voter, and to the extent that a candidate feels constrained to pander to that constituency, it could hamstring the candidate in terms of broad political appeal in the 6th Congressional District.
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