Curious Fixation

A while ago, I was back visiting my parents in North Dakota.  While I was there, I visited a friend of mine from high school and college, who works as a campaign manager for Democrat-NPL (that’s NoDak talk for “Democrat”) legislative candidates in the central part of the state.  She told me to meet her at her office, and we’d go out for a drink.

I met her at her office, behind a vacant burger joint on the East Business Loop.   She was wearing sweatpants and an “I’m With Stupid” t-shirt stained with ketchup.  It was 11:30AM and she reeked of cheap vodka.

“Um, hey, Fee”, I said.  “How ya doing”.

It almost looked like tears were going to well up in her eyes.  “How the f**k do you think, Mitch?”   She fished in her desk and picked out a half-empty bottle of Phillips vodka and two much-used styrofoam cups.  “I am a Democrat in…” she paused, filling both cups to the rim “…North Dakota”.   She handed me the first cup.  “We lose every election by 80-to-30 or even worse…”, she said, stopping to take a swig, “and that was in 2008, when we could get all twenty-teen Demcorats in town to actually come to the polls”. she slurred.

She poured another as I furtively emptied my cup into a long-dead potted plant.  “So”, I started, “how’d your campaign go?”

A bit of animation flashed across her worn face as she lurched forward in her chair to grab a folder. “Here’s my big drop piece”, she said, talking about a piece of literature volunteers drop at peoples’ doors.  A plain white piece of paper, obviously printed on a cheap printer that needed a new toner cartridge, read ”

Vote for Steinkampf-Bjornson, so our campaign manager doesn’t take an overdose and choose the sweet release of death over managing turd campaigns that have no chance in hell of winning in North Dakota, you f****ng rubes“.

“Seems a little…”, I started, waving the bottle away as Fee tried to refill my cup “…downbeat, maybe?”

“Hah!”, she blurted as she tried and failed to stifle a fume-rich belch.  “It worked, didn’t it?  I didn’t f*****g kill myself, did I?  Huh?  Anyway – nobody saw it, because we had no volunteers to hand ’em out…”

“It must be hard to be a Democrat in North Dakota”.

“Oh, God, Mitch”, she said, a tear welling up and she slouched on the side of the desk facing me, putting both hands on my arms in that too-familiar way drunks do.  “My next campaign slogan may be “Vote Dem-NPL.  I mean, F**k it, why not?”  I mean, I can at least keep people on message!”.

We went to the Wonder Bar, just off main street – an old railroad bar that hadn’t changed much in the past sixty years or so.  I had a beer.  She banged through five or six boilermakers.  I ended up dropping her off at her mom’s house, where she lives, because being a full-time campaign organizer for the D-NPL in North Dakota pays about as well as being a paper boy.

And as I drove away, I thought “it is totally fitting that she runs hopeless campaigns with an air of hopelessness.  Why should she act like she’s doing anything that will ever affect politics?

And I smiled.  It’s good to be king.  Of another place, anyway.

———-

Twin Cities “progressive” blogger “Phoenix Woman” – who probably isn’t from Phoenix, and I’ve got suspicions about the other bit – tweeted the other day, for not much reason:

@mitchpberg So Mitch, how was the @CopelandFor66 victory party? #ohwaithelostto #maryjomcguire http://goo.gl/M3i3B #p2 #MNGOP

Which struck me as a bit of a reach.  I mean, no kidding – the Senate District 66 Special Election was not a victory!  Far from it – Mary Jo McGuire held one of the safest DFL seats in the state by an 80-20% margin.  Which, if you think about it, isn’t exactlty “man bites dog”.  It’s not even “dog bites man”.  It’s a “dog licks dog” story.  The DFL elected another career apparatchik, and the GOP had a lousy result.  Not exactly shocking.

Now, I’ve written about this in the past – it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that the GOP in Saint Paul, as in Minneapolis, faces an uphill battle.  Not only is the DFL powerful – it really is their only power base in Minnesota – but decades of getting trounced in local, legislative and 4th CD Congressional elections means that Republicans really only turn out at all for Senate, Gubernatorial and Presidential elections; there, you can see as much as 30-odd percent of Saint Paul voting GOP; for local elections, where conservative-leaners are used to their vote not really counting for anything, the numbers are lower.  In Senate District 66, 8,000 people voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin, and over 7,000 for Tom Emmer; just under 1,000 turned out to vote for Copeland.

Now, I volunteered on Copeland’s campaign.  And as someone who did a lot of work for Copeland, I put the best spin I could on the campaign while it was in progress.

For whatever reason, “Phoenix” “Woman” – and the other liberal bloggers and tweeters whose autonomic bleating she’s recycling – apparently believes that, because it’s an uphill fight, ‘Saint Paul Republicans should have moped around like my friend Fee, up above.  That we, the urban conservatived, should gliumpf around like Cure fans and wallow in doom.  Even more…bizarre, “she” seems to think that the fact I projected optimism about the campaign I was working on somehow discredits me.

Well, sorry, logical leprechauns – but the campaign was a victory.

Oh, not in the sense that Greg Copeland is in the Senate – we didn’t come close to pulling that off.

But a journey of a thousand miles begins with a step.  The Copeland for Senate campaign was just the first step in a long, long – as in, maybe ten years – effort to make the 4th CD competitive.   And it was a decent start, at least behind the scenes; we had more volunteers than we’ve had in the last five campaigns combined.  The campaign raised a lot of money – and more importantly, the campaign raised money!    We knocked on doors that hadn’t been knocked by a Republican since George HW Bush was President.

There’s a long way to go – doy – but hey, what choice is there?  Mope around like some kind of Oberstar supporter?

10 thoughts on “Curious Fixation

  1. C’mon Mitch!

    Although it was the gentlemanly thing to do, you didn’t have to use a pseudonym for Dog Gone! We understand. I also didn’t know that she was from North Dakota. 😉

  2. Election Day – the day Mark Dayton comes out of his closet, sees his shadow and we have two more years of a GOP controlled legislature.

  3. You should re-tweet things like that. The world should know how graceless and rude your political opponents are in victory.

  4. Next thing you know some liberal blogger will post a vicious, hate-filled rant about Trig Palin. Oh, wait…

  5. That part about your democratic friend up in ND made me laugh Mitch. And besides were more optimistic than they are anyway…

    You could be right, Mitch. I prefer to think of Phoenix Woman as the real life manifestation of Regina George in “Mean Girls.”

    Golfdoc, in order for that to be true she’d have to be attractive and straight 😉

  6. Oh and I love how liberals/progressive/democrats try to get people to vote for them by saying, “you are all a bunch of fucking morons, please vote for us so we can do what’s best for you since you can’t decide anything for your dumb little selves.”

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