It’s been a hard year for a lot of conservative activists – including bloggers.<\/p>\n
Remember, especially in Minnesota, the GOP relies on volunteers to do most of its grunt-level organizing, sign-posting, call-banking and door-knocking – the stuff for which the DFL pays a small army of “activists”.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And each and every campaign in recent memory – 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006 – has been a “Make Or Break” campaign for the Minnesota GOP; in each election, Minnesota flirted with purplehood; Minnesota’s legacy as a big-L “liberal” state hung in the balance, and held on by a thread.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For Minnesota’s conservative volunteers, for four straight election cycles, it was “just one more big push”.\u00a0 And they delivered; they turned out in droves; they worked countless hours; like the patriots that won this country’s independence, they devoted hours and weeks of their lived for the pure love of the cause; the Democrats’ paid help, like a horde of Hessians, showed up because that’s where the money was.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And they worked wonders.\u00a0 They got the word out.\u00a0 But for the Ventura fluke, they’d have gotten Norm Coleman into the governor’s mansion in 1998; they contributed mightily to his performance against Wellstone, before the late Senator’s death; they almost pulled off what a generation ago would have been unthinkable – putting Minnesota in the Red column, twice.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And they’re tired.\u00a0 Some of them are very, very burned out.\u00a0 I’ve talked with some of them, men and women with families and day jobs and lives, who’ve put all of them to some degree aside every two years for going on a decade now.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And some of them don’t know that they can do it again.<\/p>\n
It’s similar among bloggers.\u00a0 The “Class of ’04<\/a>” – the surge of center-right blogs and writers that kicked off during the ’04 campaign – was, and remains, the most dynamic group of political bloggers in the US.\u00a0 But you could feel a collective fatigue, in some ways, after the ’06 elections.\u00a0 Many of the ’04 blogs went dormant; some of the bloggers flamed out (although the MOB’s attrition is lower, I suspect, than for just about any other group of 100-odd blogs you can find); others, tired of having to churn stuff out every day, dropped their own blogs to join one the big superblogs (Freedom Dogs<\/a>, Anti-Strib<\/a>, TvM<\/a>) that are positioned to be so very important in this next go-round.\u00a0 I know I took a step back from politics for a while after the election, and I’m still not entirely<\/em> back into it.<\/p>\n Yet.<\/p>\n But that’s going to have to change.\u00a0 There’s a new election season coming up, and it’s going to be huge – even without<\/em>\u00a0 the Republican National Convention and the hordes of mischievous pranksters <\/a>following it to Saint Paul next September.\u00a0 It’s going to be a donnybrook, on the state and <\/em>federal levels, here in Minnesota.\u00a0 The Presidential context will once again have Minnesota teetering on the brink of Red and Blue, and our ten electoral votes are mighty tempting to both parties.\u00a0 The Senate race will be the dirtiest in Minnesota history, and the ACORN volunteers will be floating down our streets on waves of George Soros’ money.\u00a0 In Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty stood athwart the flood of DFL tax-‘n-spend proposals like the Finns at Suomussalmi<\/a>, outfoxing and outmaneuvering his bovine, lumpen enemies and their “All Your Money Is Ours<\/a>!” platform.\u00a0 The Dems’ majority in the House\u00a0is built on sand, with a bunch of seats held by DFLers who won by paper-thin margins in traditionally-GOP-leaning districts; expect them to pour on the money, the dirt, and the media play to keep it that way.\u00a0<\/p>\n So the GOP is going to have to call on the things that really make it a contender in this next election; its’ strength in the parts of this state that actually pay the way; its volunteers that make it competitive everywhere; and finally, the alternative media, blogs and talk radio.<\/p>\n Who’s going to pull that all together?<\/p>\n Well, stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s been a hard year for a lot of conservative activists – including bloggers. Remember, especially in Minnesota, the GOP relies on volunteers to do most of its grunt-level organizing, sign-posting, call-banking and door-knocking – the stuff for which the DFL pays a small army of “activists”.\u00a0 And each and every campaign in recent memory […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,2,13,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","category-minnesota-politics","category-republicans","category-true-north"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}