I’m waiting for the first Saint Paul DFLer to chuckle and say “Hah!\u00a0 We pwn this town!”<\/p>\n
I’m ready.\u00a0 I’ll respond (with a nod to School Board candidate Chris Conner), “Yep.\u00a0 You own <\/em>42% tax increases, sclerotic services, the biggest public school achievement gap in the country, graduation rates south of 50-50, 4,200 vacant houses, rising crime and 30% vacancies downtown.”<\/p>\n “Congratufrigginlations!\u00a0 The bad news is, you have to try to fix your own mess for the next four years.”<\/p>\n Some people see a 30+ point loss for Eva Ng last night.\u00a0 I see something different.<\/p>\n In 2001, the Saint Paul GOP had to grit its teeth, say “Randy Kelly is a DFLer, but he’s as close as we’re gonna get to something who believes what we do”; compared to Jay Benanav, the longtime Eastside DFLer was <\/em>the second coming of Reagan.\u00a0 (Four years later, we had to do the same; the flood of anti-Bush derangement scuppered the campaign; Ng did better than Kelly did four years ago).<\/p>\n The Saint Paul City GOP could have probably fit on the dance floor at Fabulous Fern’s back then.<\/p>\n In 1997, we had a Republican – Norm Coleman.\u00a0 He won – but the Republican Party in Saint Paul had as much to do with that as the “Reform Party” had to do with Jesse Ventura winning the governor’s office the next year; the DFL kicked Coleman out, and the incumbent came to, and pretty much was<\/em>, the GOP in Saint Paul.<\/p>\n And four years before that, in 1993?\u00a0 Norm Coleman was a DFLer.\u00a0 Compared to Bob Long, he wasn’t nuts – quite the conservative, in fact.\u00a0 But no GOP candidate got within a mile of the final election.<\/p>\n 1989?\u00a0 1985?\u00a0 1981?\u00a0 1977?\u00a0 GOP?\u00a0 What GOP?<\/p>\n We didn’t win.\u00a0 But we got an actual Republican on the ballot for the first time that I can remember <\/em>(other than Coleman, who got on through the back door, and thank God for it).\u00a0 It’s the best this party’s done in the run for mayor.<\/p>\n And we didn’t capture any school board positions – but we got three guys on the ballot.\u00a0 It’s a start.<\/p>\n From small things big things one day come!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m waiting for the first Saint Paul DFLer to chuckle and say “Hah!\u00a0 We pwn this town!” I’m ready.\u00a0 I’ll respond (with a nod to School Board candidate Chris Conner), “Yep.\u00a0 You own 42% tax increases, sclerotic services, the biggest public school achievement gap in the country, graduation rates south of 50-50, 4,200 vacant houses, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,13,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mngop","category-republicans","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5924","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=5924"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5934,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5924\/revisions\/5934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}