{"id":8813,"date":"2010-02-23T13:00:24","date_gmt":"2010-02-23T18:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=8813"},"modified":"2010-07-07T20:02:51","modified_gmt":"2010-07-08T01:02:51","slug":"homey-dont-play-fences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=8813","title":{"rendered":"No Fences"},"content":{"rendered":"

Derek “Chief” Brigham over at Freedom Dogs has taken an unscientific (!!!) poll of Minnesota conservative bloggers<\/a>\u00a0for the gubernatorial race. \u00a0Unsurprisingly, Tom Emmer won, bigtime.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I’m listed under the “Has a candidate, but isn’t spilling it publicly yet” category, along with David Strom, Margaret Martin and Sue Jeffers. \u00a0 The fact is, with the departure of Dave Hann from the race, I am <\/em>leaning in one direction – but I’m not going to say which one yet.\u00a0 Partly because, hello, I’m a schmuck blogger and nobody cares what I think.\u00a0 Partly because it’s early, and I could still change my mind, depending on how this session goes.\u00a0 And partly because, hello, do I want to get the other candidate’s people cheesed off at me so they’ll never appear on the NARN again?<\/p>\n

And mainly because the fact is, whichever one wins the nomination, I’ll back him 100%, along with pretty much the entire MNGOP slate.\u00a0 While I’ve never considered myself a straight ticket voter, the only DFLers I’ve been able to justify voting for since the mid-nineties have been Norm Coleman and Randy Kelly.\u00a0 As to the Independence Party?\u00a0 Get serious.\u00a0 Jim Gibson’s Senate candidacy was the only IP bid I’ve ever considered voting for (and I didn’t; Rod Grams needed my vote more).\u00a0 The GOP, imperfect as it is, is the only party in Minnesota that covers most of what I believe in and <\/em>has any impact on the way this state is run (shaddap, Constitution Party).<\/p>\n

Over on Facebook, a DFL-leaning lobbyist asked what kind of record conservative bloggers have at predicting general elections.\u00a0 The answer is “none”; we’re not the general public.<\/p>\n

What it does <\/em>predict, I think, is a spirited endorsement process and State Convention, the kind that’s going to lead to a much <\/em>better GOP effort in the fall.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Eight years ago, MNGOP establishment candidate Tim Pawlenty had lukewarm support from a conservative wing that’d been ignored for decades, but which was gaining power.\u00a0 Their candidate, Brian Sullivan, ran a highly successful insurgency, driving the final convention race out to 560 ballots over the course of 467 straight hours of voting at the 2002 MNGOP convention; he only clinched the nomination when he took the Taxpayer’s League’s “No New Taxes” pledge, promising to spend his term(s) as a fiscal hawk – something that’d never have happened without the Sullivan challenge.\u00a0\u00a0 Would Brian Sullivan have won the general election had he gotten the nomination?\u00a0 We’ll never know; conventional wisdom was that he was “too conservative”, but Roger Moe was a bit of a stiff, and probably a lot more vulnerable than the keepers of the “conventional wisdom” want to admit.\u00a0 But in a sense he, and his supporters, did <\/em>win; their insurgency pushed Pawlenty to adopt a key piece of Sullivan’s platform, in a sense perhaps the most <\/em>important one.<\/p>\n

This year?\u00a0 The delegate count is shaping up pretty tight <\/a>so far, although there’s a long, long way to go.\u00a0\u00a0 Emmer’s done a good job of staying in front of the Tea Party, but Seifert’s organization is a formidable one.<\/p>\n

The point being that, from where I sit, either Seifert, the establishment candidate, or Emmer the conservative firebrand, will make a better governor than any <\/em>of the vacuous hamsters the DFL is putting forward.\u00a0 And an imperfect “good enough”, whether it’s an imperfect conservative (who’s been driven to the right by the Tea Party and an Emmer push) or an unrepentant Conservative (who’s got the whole MNGOP working for him) is going to be better than any of the alternatives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Derek “Chief” Brigham over at Freedom Dogs has taken an unscientific (!!!) poll of Minnesota conservative bloggers\u00a0for the gubernatorial race. \u00a0Unsurprisingly, Tom Emmer won, bigtime.\u00a0 I’m listed under the “Has a candidate, but isn’t spilling it publicly yet” category, along with David Strom, Margaret Martin and Sue Jeffers. \u00a0 The fact is, with the departure […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,72,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-10","category-mngop","category-republicans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8813","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=8813"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11875,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8813\/revisions\/11875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}