Caught this piece from the Forum Group’s Saint Paul bureau; Al Franken is shilling for money for Byron Dorgan:<\/p>\n
Franken today sent an e-mail message to his supporters asking them to donate to Sen. Byron Dorgan’s campaign who last year, he said, “made the long trek from North Dakota to Minnesota and we spent some time talking to folks about helping small businesses and getting our economy moving again. I can’t tell you how grateful I was for his insight and support.”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“Look, we need genuine champions of the middle class in the Senate, and Byron Dorgan is one of the best,” Franken wrote. “Can you donate $5 or more today to help Senator Dorgan gear up for 2010?”<\/p>\n
Federal Elections Commission reports indicate Dorgan’s campaign has $4 million in the bank.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Of course, there’s more to it than a simple repayment of a campaign favor.<\/p>\n
Dorgan – who was a heavyweight in North Dakota politics when I was starting out in radio news in NoDak 30 years ago – is the king of the purple-dog Democrats.\u00a0 He’s a Democrat, and a fiscally-liberal one at that, in a state that’s voted Republican for president almost every possible election since statehood; local politics in North Dakota tends to be also rigorously right-of-center.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But since the eighties, the state has sent Byron Dorgan, and then Kent Conrad, to the Senate.\u00a0 It’s about the money, of course; Dorgan and Conrad are champions of big farm bills; they have enough seniority between them to deflect light artillery fire.\u00a0 NoDak’s voters (like those in South Dakota, Montana and much of the rest of the Midwest, who send plenty of socially-conservative, fiscally-profligate people to Washington) know where the loot is.<\/p>\n
But this election, there’s a real challenge.\u00a0 John Hoeven, North Dakota’s very popular and wildly successful Republican governor (who is, at the moment, the nation’s longest-serving state governor), is rumored to be interested in going to Washington.\u00a0\u00a0 He won his last gubernatorial bid by almost fifty points…<\/p>\n
…and the rumors are causing strange things to happen in North Dakota Republican politics.\u00a0 People are donating money, coming to meetings…<\/p>\n
…and talking about doing to Dorgan what voters in South Dakota did to Tom Daschle not so long ago; “the unthinkable”.<\/p>\n
And so Dorgan would seem to be calling in his markers, dipping into that bottomless pool of Twin Cities liberal money (which, dimes’ll getcha dollars, he’ll softpedal back home) to pad his war chest for what could be the biggest challenge of his long political career.<\/p>\n
We’ll be talking with people from the NDGOP on the Northern Alliance in coming weeks.\u00a0 This could get interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Caught this piece from the Forum Group’s Saint Paul bureau; Al Franken is shilling for money for Byron Dorgan: Franken today sent an e-mail message to his supporters asking them to donate to Sen. Byron Dorgan’s campaign who last year, he said, “made the long trek from North Dakota to Minnesota and we spent some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,21,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democrats","category-midwest","category-republicans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5745","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=5745"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5748,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5745\/revisions\/5748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}