A while ago, I was back visiting my parents in North Dakota.\u00a0 While I was there, I visited a friend of mine from high school and college, who works as a campaign manager for Democrat-NPL (that’s NoDak talk for “Democrat”) legislative candidates in the central part of the state.\u00a0 She told me to meet her at her office, and we’d go out for a drink.<\/p>\n
I met her at her office, behind a vacant burger joint on the East Business Loop.\u00a0\u00a0 She was wearing sweatpants and an “I’m With Stupid” t-shirt stained with ketchup.\u00a0 It was 11:30AM and she reeked of cheap vodka.<\/p>\n
“Um, hey, Fee”, I said.\u00a0 “How ya doing”.<\/p>\n
It almost looked like tears were going to well up in her eyes.\u00a0 “How the f**k do you think, Mitch?”\u00a0\u00a0 She fished in her desk and picked out a half-empty bottle of Phillips vodka and two much-used styrofoam cups.\u00a0 “I am a Democrat <\/em>in…” she paused, filling both cups to the rim “…North Dako<\/em>ta”.\u00a0\u00a0 She handed me the first cup.\u00a0 “We lose every election by 80-to-30 or even worse…”, she said, stopping to take a swig, “and that was in 2008, when we could get all twenty-teen Demcorats in town to actually come to the polls”. she slurred.<\/p>\n She poured another as I furtively emptied my cup into a long-dead potted plant.\u00a0 “So”, I started, “how’d your campaign go?”<\/p>\n A bit of animation flashed across her worn face as she lurched forward in her chair to grab a folder. “Here’s my big drop piece”, she said, talking about a piece of literature volunteers drop at peoples’ doors.\u00a0 A plain white piece of paper, obviously printed on a cheap printer that needed a new toner cartridge, read ”<\/p>\n “Vote for Steinkampf-Bjornson, so our campaign manager doesn’t take an overdose and choose the sweet release of death over managing turd campaigns that have no chance in hell of winning in North Dakota, you f****ng rubes<\/strong>“.<\/p>\n “Seems a little…”, I started, waving the bottle away as Fee tried to refill my cup “…downbeat, maybe?”<\/p>\n “Hah!”, she blurted as she tried and failed to stifle a fume-rich belch.\u00a0 “It worked, didn’t it?\u00a0 I didn’t f*****g kill <\/em>myself, did I?\u00a0 Huh<\/em>?\u00a0 Anyway – nobody saw it, because we had no volunteers to hand ’em out…”<\/p>\n “It must be hard to be a Democrat in North Dakota”.<\/p>\n “Oh, God, Mitch”, she said, a tear welling up and she slouched on the side of the desk facing me, putting both hands on my arms in that too-familiar way drunks do.\u00a0 “My next campaign slogan may be “Vote Dem-NPL.\u00a0 I mean, F**k it, why not<\/strong>?”\u00a0 I mean, I can at least keep people on message!”.<\/p>\n We went to the Wonder Bar, just off main street – an old railroad bar that hadn’t changed much in the past sixty years or so.\u00a0 I had a beer.\u00a0 She banged through five or six boilermakers.\u00a0 I ended up dropping her off at her mom’s house, where she lives, because being a full-time campaign organizer for the D-NPL in North Dakota pays about as well as being a paper boy.<\/p>\n And as I drove away, I thought “it is totally fitting that she runs hopeless campaigns with an air of hopelessness.\u00a0 Why should <\/em>she act like she’s doing anything that will ever affect politics?<\/p>\n And I smiled.\u00a0 It’s good to be king.\u00a0 Of another place, anyway.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n Twin Cities “progressive” blogger “Phoenix Woman” – who probably isn’t from Phoenix, and I’ve got suspicions about the other bit – tweeted the other day, for not much reason:<\/p>\n @mitchpberg<\/a> So Mitch, how was the @CopelandFor66<\/a> victory party? #ohwaithelostto<\/a> #maryjomcguire<\/a> http:\/\/goo.gl\/M3i3B<\/a> #p2<\/a> #MNGOP<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Which struck me as a bit of a reach.\u00a0 I mean, no kidding – the Senate District 66 Special Election was not <\/em>a victory!\u00a0 Far from it – Mary Jo McGuire held one of the safest DFL seats in the state by an 80-20% margin.\u00a0 Which, if you think about it, isn’t exactlty “man bites dog”.\u00a0 It’s not even “dog bites man”.\u00a0 It’s a “dog licks dog” story.\u00a0 The DFL elected another career apparatchik, <\/em>and the GOP had a lousy result.\u00a0 Not exactly shocking.<\/p>\n Now, I’ve written about this in the past – it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that the GOP in Saint Paul, as in Minneapolis, faces an uphill battle.\u00a0 Not only is the DFL powerful – it really is their only power base in Minnesota – but decades of getting trounced in local, legislative and 4th CD Congressional elections means that Republicans really only turn out at all<\/em> for Senate, Gubernatorial and Presidential elections; there, you can see as much as 30-odd percent of Saint Paul voting GOP; for local elections, where conservative-leaners are used to their vote not really counting for anything, the numbers are lower.\u00a0 In Senate District 66, 8,000 people voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin, and over 7,000 for Tom Emmer; just under 1,000 turned out to vote for Copeland.<\/p>\n Now, I volunteered on Copeland’s campaign.\u00a0 And as someone who did a lot of work for Copeland, I put the best spin I could on the campaign while it was in progress.<\/p>\n For whatever reason, “Phoenix” “Woman” – and the other liberal bloggers and tweeters whose autonomic bleating she’s recycling – apparently believes that, because it’s an uphill fight, ‘Saint Paul Republicans should have moped around like my friend Fee, up above.\u00a0 That we, the urban conservatived, should gliumpf around like Cure fans and wallow in doom.\u00a0 Even more…bizarre, “she” seems to think that the fact I projected optimism about the campaign I was working on<\/em> somehow discredits me.<\/p>\n Well, sorry, logical leprechauns – but the campaign was <\/em>a victory.<\/p>\n Oh, not in the sense that Greg Copeland is in the Senate – we didn’t come close <\/em> to pulling that off.<\/p>\n But a journey of a thousand miles begins with a step. \u00a0The Copeland for Senate campaign was just the first step in a long, long – as in, maybe ten years – effort to make the 4th CD competitive. \u00a0 And it was a decent start, at least behind the scenes; we had more volunteers than we’ve had in the last five campaigns combined<\/em>. \u00a0The campaign raised a lot of money – and more importantly, the campaign raised <\/em>money! \u00a0 \u00a0We knocked on doors that hadn’t been knocked by a Republican since George HW Bush was President.<\/p>\n There’s a long way to go – doy – but hey, what choice is there? \u00a0Mope around like some kind of Oberstar supporter?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A while ago, I was back visiting my parents in North Dakota.\u00a0 While I was there, I visited a friend of mine from high school and college, who works as a campaign manager for Democrat-NPL (that’s NoDak talk for “Democrat”) legislative candidates in the central part of the state.\u00a0 She told me to meet her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-republicans","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19558","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=19558"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19562,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19558\/revisions\/19562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}