{"id":6842,"date":"2009-12-02T13:16:16","date_gmt":"2009-12-02T18:16:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=6842"},"modified":"2011-10-20T10:27:33","modified_gmt":"2011-10-20T15:27:33","slug":"erosion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=6842","title":{"rendered":"First Sign Of Hope"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve long felt that the MNGOP&#8217;s best shot at a pickup in 2010 will be in the First Congressional District (CD), where DFLer Tim Walz beat incumbent moderate Gil Gutknecht in 2006.\u00a0 Walz was a middling-to-weak candidate, but a likeable enough guy who ran far enough to the center to eke out a win in the second-worst election for Republicans in recent memory.\u00a0\u00a0 Incumbency has its privileges, of course; Walz solidified his position last year\u00a0against a very weak GOP candidate in the worst year for Republicans in recent memory.<\/p>\n<p>Still, if there&#8217;s a vulnerable DFLer in the state, it&#8217;s Walz; he&#8217;s a mushy center-left Congressman of no real distinction, one who&#8217;s followed whomever&#8217;s ridden the biggest horse in his three exceedingly vanilla years in Washington.\u00a0 A good conservative reflecting the overall realities of the district and, let us not forget, a better year for Republicans, could make 2010 the year Tim Walz goes back to whatever it was he did before he went to Washington.<\/p>\n<p>The Cook Report is showing early signs of agreement, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cookpolitical.com\/node\/992\">demoting the race in the First from &#8220;Solid&#8221; to &#8220;Likely&#8221; Democrat <\/a>&#8211; and this long before the GOP has even begun winnowing its five contenders down to find a candidate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve long felt that the MNGOP&#8217;s best shot at a pickup in 2010 will be in the First Congressional District (CD), where DFLer Tim Walz beat incumbent moderate Gil Gutknecht in 2006.\u00a0 Walz was a middling-to-weak candidate, but a likeable enough guy who ran far enough to the center to eke out a win in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,2,155],"tags":[160],"class_list":["post-6842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-10","category-minnesota-politics","category-mn-congressional","tag-mn-cd1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6842","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=6842"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23742,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6842\/revisions\/23742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}