A few weeks ago, I sat in the auditorium at the MN-03 Congressional District Convention and watched 83 Democrats vote for a fucking health care lobbyist to be their endorsed nominee to run against Erik Paulsen, the Republican who currently represents my district. Jim Meffert beat Maureen Hackett 83 to 72 and will face Mr. Paulsen in the fall election. Dr. Hackett would've had an uphill battle against Paulsen but certainly was quite a contrast to him. Meffert offers no real contrast to Paulsen and will be buried by GOP money and bullshit. He also used to peddle health care to the government for a living so I'm wondering just how far those 83 people had their heads up their asses.
Equally moronic is the Democrat's choice to run for governor in our state: Margaret Anderson Kelliher. Kelliher is the speaker of our state house and has a few ethical issues. She's also pretty far left and, in our state, that's a bad thing if you are running for governor. We like our gubnatorial candidates moderate and independent. Not to mention the fact that she's...well...fat. What kind of an image does that project to people when she talks about health care, specifically preventative medicine? The mayor of Minneapolis, R.T. Rybak, would've made much better choice. He had the youth and energy within and behind him and would've likely beaten either of the GOP choices.
The GOP decided on the "Old White People Paranoia" candidate, Tom Emmer who recently suggested that our state should throw out most federal laws and effectively secede from the union. I'm having a difficult time trying to figure out how moving farther to the right makes you a winnable candidate. The other candidate, Marty Seifert, would've cleaned up and won against Kelliher but alas, he was not pure enough. So, in our governor's race, I'm seeing another independent victory if the candidate has even a quarter of the charisma of former governor Jesse Ventura.
Essentially, I'm pretty pissed off. The Democrats had a golden opportunity to win back a seat in the US Congress and elect a Democratic governor. They will sadly have neither now and it's largely due to group think. They sit around and convince themselves that their candidate is the best in their little bubble but they never think about the general public and its mood. MN-03 is 50 percent independent and votes for moderates who are distinctive. That was Maureen Hackett and she had the best chance of winning. Every four years they put up the absolute worst fucking candidate for governor and scratch their heads after they lose wondering what went wrong. Well, they had a good candidate in Mayor Rybak and they fucked up...AGAIN!
Any protestations by people like myself, who are fairly active in the party, fall on deaf ears which makes the whole thing even more frustrating. One would think that yet another loss would change their minds. It won't.
Because you can add dumb and blind to the triad of idiocy that is the Minnesota Democratic Party.
1 comment:
The Democrats are as fractious as ever. There are still three candidates running in the primary (Kelliher, Dayton and Entenza). So it's not certain what will happen there.
The Independence Party (IP) is having their endorsing convention soon. There are three serious candidates in that race, and all appear to be running in the primary regardless of the endorsement. Two of them sound like Republicans and one just sounds cranky.
The problem with Rybak is that he gets you absolutely nothing from outstate Minnesota. He might seem like a good candidate to a city dweller, but there's not much attractive about him to someone from the Range or southwestern Minnesota.
In the last two elections for governor the Independence Party has been the spoiler for Democrats. Penny and Hutchinson, former Democrats, drew many moderate and Democratic voters who were sick and tired of Hatch. This time around the presumptive nominee, Tom Horner, is a former Republican. He may draw more Republican votes from Emmer than he will from the Democrat.
If that's the case, and the Democrats can keep it together (always a dicey situation), the Democratic candidate may be able to pull off a plurality win the same way Pawlenty did in the last two elections.
The three IP candidates sound much more reasonable than Emmer (they all roundly condemned the Arizona anti-immigrant law), but the IP has a serious problem. Their candidates don't work to build the party. Like Ventura, it's merely a port of convenience for candidates who've lost currency with their own parties. Until they get guys who stay with their party permanently they will be relegated to spoiler status.
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