Being a wanna-be wonk who writes a political blog and does a show at a talk radio station whose audience is frighteningly well-informed and follows politics pretty obsessively.<\/p>\n
And while they didn’t obsess on the subject, I certainly grew up in household where politics was an occasional subject of discussion. \u00a0I have been more or less aware of politics and how they work for a long, long time (albeit I didn’t become aware enough to be a conservative until I was 20 or so).<\/p>\n
So it’s always a mild culture shock to realize not everyone is the same. \u00a0In an intellectual sense, I know this, because probably 90% of the people who actually bother to vote at all make up their minds about their decision in the weeks, if not hours, before they go to the polls.<\/p>\n
Still, it astounds me how out-of-touch some people are.<\/p>\n
No, not the people who don’t follow politics. \u00a0I’m talking about those of us who do<\/em>.<\/p>\n I was talking with a business associate the other day. \u00a0 He’s a small businessman – one of the people at whom the Dayton tax hikers are directly aimed. \u00a0 He’s successful at what he does. He makes over $150K a him and his spouse\u00a0\u00a0for a couple of thousand dollars a year.<\/p>\n And he asked me what I thought about the campaign. \u00a0And who the GOP candidate was.<\/p>\n Now, some wonks would roll their eyes – but I know business people \u00a0who work 70-80 hours a week, and raise families, and try to save a little some mental headspace for themselves; politics doesn’t make the final cut on their schedules, any more than following the NBA or the PGA does on mine.<\/p>\n And so I told him all about Tom Emmer – especially what’s in it for small business people if Emmer wins.<\/p>\n Now, there was little danger the guy was going to vote for Dayton. \u00a0He remembers Dayton’s disastrous run in the Senate. \u00a0And he’s gonna vote for Emmer in two weeks, and I suspect his wife will too.<\/p>\n But I walked out of there thinking that it’s a travesty that there is so much as a single small businessperson in this state that has been left in any doubt which candidate is going to help them, and which one is going to screw them blue.<\/p>\n The MNGOP and the Emmer Campaign have some work to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Being a wanna-be wonk who writes a political blog and does a show at a talk radio station whose audience is frighteningly well-informed and follows politics pretty obsessively. And while they didn’t obsess on the subject, I certainly grew up in household where politics was an occasional subject of discussion. \u00a0I have been more or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-10","category-mngop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14489","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=14489"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14495,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14489\/revisions\/14495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}