…had crashed into the green room at Orchestra Hall last night, it could have had a sweeping effect on Minnesota conservatism.<\/p>\n
At one point, I was sitting with Senator Coleman, Governor Pawlenty,\u00a0Representative Bachmann, candidates Erik Paulsen (who will be a guest on the NARN this weekend), Barb Davis-White and Ed Matthews, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Dennis Prager and James Lileks, talking about the campaign locally and nationwide.<\/p>\n
Not sure if anyone from the Strib covered “Talk The Vote” – Salem Radio’s cavalcade of stars touring battleground states nationwide to whip up conservative support – but if they had, they’d have found plenty of conservative support, er, whipped up.\u00a0 Bear in mind, the Patriot’s been pleasantly surprised by turnout at these events before; the “Patriot Picnic” in 2004 drew hundreds more than we’d planned on, and our fabled Final Debate Party in 2004 attracted 700 to the Minneapolis Hilton – not bad, considering we’d had 100 RSVPs and it was a night every bit as cold and miserable as last Sunday was.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bear in mind also that this even was announced perhaps ten days ago, to an audience that largely has businesses and jobs and families and responsibilities.\u00a0 The Patriot’s promotions department had figured maybe we’d fill up the floor level seats.<\/p>\n
We filled every seat in the place; the floor and all three tiers of balconies.\u00a0 There were people standing in the halls and the lobby, the last I checked.\u00a0 And the crowd?<\/p>\n
No lack of energy there.\u00a0 Sorry, Sorosphere; after weeks of declaring the election already won, it’s just not sinking in with all of us plumbers and hockey moms.\u00a0 Suffice to say that even if<\/em>\u00a0Mac loses, 2010 is going to make 1994 look like a Camp Wellstone sing-along.<\/p>\n The speakers?\u00a0 Look – there are not three people anywhere in talk radio that can work a friendly room like Hugh, Michael and Dennis.\u00a0 Especially Prager; you’d never know it from his fairly laid-back radio show, but in front of a room, the guy is like a nuclear reactor with the regulator rods pulled out; he gets the crowd stoked, and as the crowd’s energy picks up, so does his; I’ve never seen him speak from any kind of notes at all, so the whole world is his speech, and eventually he covers the whole world, getting more and more animated as he goes, stopping just short of pounding his shoe on the lectern.\u00a0 An amazing performance, even allowing for the tactical flub of attacking Sweden at a stop in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n Me?\u00a0 I’m feeling a lot better about this next week, and the next two years.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" …had crashed into the green room at Orchestra Hall last night, it could have had a sweeping effect on Minnesota conservatism. At one point, I was sitting with Senator Coleman, Governor Pawlenty,\u00a0Representative Bachmann, candidates Erik Paulsen (who will be a guest on the NARN this weekend), Barb Davis-White and Ed Matthews, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,55,144,5],"tags":[154],"class_list":["post-3557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-08","category-center-right-altmedia","category-governor","category-narn","tag-pawlenty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3557"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22589,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3557\/revisions\/22589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}