{"id":2913,"date":"2008-07-22T06:20:31","date_gmt":"2008-07-22T11:20:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2913"},"modified":"2014-12-12T14:51:35","modified_gmt":"2014-12-12T20:51:35","slug":"grow-campaign-pulmonary-resuscitation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2913","title":{"rendered":"Grow: Campaign-Pulmonary Resuscitation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Doug Grow – long known as the DFL’s number two shill in the mainstream media (second only to Lori Sturdevant) – is trying to blow some wind into the sails<\/a> of the Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenberg campaign.<\/p>\n

E-Tink is trying to unseat Michele Bachmann in the Sixth Congressional District. He’s most “famous” in Minnesota for having been Jesse Ventura’s do-nothing Tranportation Commissioner. He should <\/em>be even more famous for his ghoulish performance after the collapse of the I35W bridge, almost a year ago. As the fires still blazed and before the last girders had fallen into the water, Tinklenberg joined State Rep. Alice “The Phantom” Hausman on TV and radio coverage of the tragedy, claiming<\/a> – before the National Transportation Safety Board investigators had shut off their pagers summoning them to Minneapolis – that the collapse was the result of Tim Pawlenty’s refusal to raise the gas tax. The performance was a ghoulish embarassment that would have ended the career of a politician…<\/p>\n

…that was not a DFLer in a city where having paid lefty PR flaks like the MNPost <\/em>and the Minnesoros “Independent<\/em>” are almost redundant.<\/p>\n

Anyway – Doug Grow writes in re the race<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n
A month ago, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann<\/a> said she’s on board with a campaign plan to get gasoline prices back to $2 a gallon…Do people in the 6th Congressional District buy this sort of campaign talk?<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Well, if “they” don’t understand the laws of supply and demand, they can certainly get jobs as economics reporters for the <\/strike>Minnesoros “Indepdendent”<\/strike> <\/em>perhaps they deserve <\/em>to be getting their news from Doug Grow<\/strike> we can trade them all to Massachussetts?<\/p>\n

I digress. Grow is doing what he’s done his whole career; spin, whilst carrying water for the DFL:<\/p>\n

At this point, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has NOT put the 6th District in its “red to blue” category. Instead, it calls the district an “emerging” race for Democrats. The difference in categories is substantial: Democrats in “red to blue” districts receive financial and other resource help. Those in “emerging” districts receive pats on the back and encouraging words from the DCCC: “Go get ’em, buddy!”<\/p>\n

But even if the DCCC isn’t convinced that Bachmann can be defeated after one term in Washington, Tinklenberg says he’s optimistic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’d actually pay money to hear some DFLer say “Oh, I’m going to get my donkey kicked. It’s hopeless. Smoke ’em if you got ’em”.<\/p>\n

Of course, being a DFLer in Minnesota means never needing to come up with your own facile explanations:<\/p>\n

Recall, Bachmann defeated Patty Wetterling by 8 percentage points, 50 to 42. BUT there was a third candidate in the race, John Binkowski, of the Independence Party, who picked up 7.8 percent of the vote. This time around, the IPs endorsed Tinklenberg.<\/p>\n

When you add Wetterling’s 127,144 votes and Binkowski’s 23,557 votes, Bachmann won the district by just 548 votes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fascinating.<\/p>\n

Except that Bachmann and Wetterling were running for an open seat – which is always much more up in the air.<\/p>\n

And the national Democrat establishment did a lot more than pat Patty on the back; they poured truckloads of money into the race. The media, even more in the bag than usual for the DFLer, called in all its markers, assisted by a large, sometimes deranged pack of alternative media adjuncts. And for all that, Bachmann still <\/em>not only won, but won by the biggest margin of victory of any Republican in the state, in a year where Republicans got trounced nationwide, with <\/em>the most conservative message of any Republican in Minnesota.<\/p>\n

This time around? She’s the incumbent. That’s worth a few points all by itself. The media has moved on to other races, doing its damnedest to get Al Franken elected. The DCCC knows a dead horse when it sees one. Her alt-media stalkers – having provided her (I am convinced) with at least one point of her margin of victory – have marginalized themselves into near-irrelevance; even some of the media figures that used to regard them with breathless credulity have gotten the message.<\/p>\n

E-Tink; Dead Bid Walking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Doug Grow – long known as the DFL’s number two shill in the mainstream media (second only to Lori Sturdevant) – is trying to blow some wind into the sails of the Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenberg campaign. E-Tink is trying to unseat Michele Bachmann in the Sixth Congressional District. He’s most “famous” in Minnesota for having […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[326,31,12,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-alt-media","category-blogs","category-campaign-08","category-democrats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2913","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=2913"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2913\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49829,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2913\/revisions\/49829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}