Tag Archives: Mike McFadden

Put Out a Contract on These Campaigns

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterGood lord. This one can’t end soon enough, and I’m tempted to say “badly enough’. There really should be penalties and pain for political campaigns as time and attention-sucking and uninvolving as the one we’re enduring right now.

I freely confess to jaded-induced boredom. I’ve seen too many campaigns. I really should slink away to the Yukon with a faithful dog, a store of hardtack and jerky and let this ceaseless barrage of boilerplate bluster and by-the-numbers attack advertising run its course, which of course would mean killing off the last critical synapses in the last sentient voter walking the land. When (or if) I re-emerged the world might resemble the aftermath of some zombie plague, with the brain-eaters being political consultants and messaging experts.

We all know it’s bad, as in dull, monotonous, predictable and off-putting. Need a fresh example? How about GOP Senate candidate Mike McFadden devoting one day to announcing his “contract with Minnesota” and then another day to signing it? Inspiring stuff. Imaginative, too. Another “contract”. The latest in a 20-plus year run of “contracts” thrown up by imagination-free political candidates who don’t dare, and/or are advised not to dare ever saying anything that might engage the mental machinery of what I refer to as the “actively informed voter.”

Obviously, if you’re one of those people you fully understand that these campaigns, which thanks to the epic flow of money unleashed by Citizens United never actually end any longer, are targeted on a sliver of the population that rarely exceeds 15%. These would be your “persuadable voters”, the folks who, put another way, mostly ignore political/government function, get a lot of their news from headlines they see walking past the few newspaper racks still remaining, overhear at the plant or see on some cable channel in the dentist’s office. That’s who all the money is being spent on. And who knows, a couple of them might even be persuaded to vote … against the other guy.

Meanwhile, it is worse than a Newton Minow “wasteland” for everyone else. If you care enough to follow these processes daily, instead of just for a couple weeks every other year, you’ve come to accept that there’s nothing here for you. You’ve heard every attack thousands of times, seen every grainy video of lock-stepping “ultra-liberals” and lapse into narcolepsy at the hint of yet another “debate”. Essentially you made your mind up months (if not years) ago and are enduring this siege of unrelenting blandness as you might a stand-up comic suitable for your mother’s nursing home.

Obviously, if this were Kentucky or even Iowa, or as Joe has been following, South Dakota, it might a little different. There’d at least be a pulse. But here in Minnesota there’s never been any serious doubt that either Al Franken or Mark Dayton was going to be reelected. If there was it vanished with the nominations of Mike McFadden and Jeff Johnson, two guys with all the inspirational ability of a couple corporate trainers who forgot their PowerPoint.

So what to do? Well nothing, if like Franken your handlers, advisers and kitchen cabinet have wrung every last ounce of wit and risk out of you. (Dayton will always and only do what Dayton wants to do.)

But in (my) ideal world here’s something I’d like some genuinely “courageous” candidate “fighting” for the middle-class and “hard working” Americans everywhere to give a try.

Screw these ritualized debates, which long ago degenerated into a trench warfare of pre-digested catch phrases and attack slogans hurled back and forth like mustard gas.

I’d like to see a (formerly) witty, daring guy like Franken agree to a serious of “thesis candidate” interviews with bona fide experts on a series of issues. Tell the League of Women Voters to go find three acknowledged experts each on economics, public ethics, communications, whatever and you’ll agree to sit, by yourself, not with your opponent, and be cross-examined by them for 90 minutes. No horse-race obsessed professional journalists allowed. Instead, a conversation rewarding actual brainpower, intellectual resourcefulness and humility.

To be revealed: What you do and don’t know about the reality of what you’re selling to the persuadables on primetime TV, in between episodes of “Honey Boo Boo” and Thursday Night Football.

Suicide for the fool who agrees to such a concept? I’m not so sure. If Franken agreed to do it, what’s the predicament for McFadden?

Bottom line question: Does any politician dare talk to adults like adults? I’ve decided the answer is “no.”

Hmmm … must check Expedia for packages to Whitehorse.

Still Waiting for the State GOP’s “Winning Strategy”

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterJust a crazy, hysterical notion here … .

I’m not sure Minnesota’s Republicans have quite figured out the winning strategy for this November’s elections. The national crowd isn’t much better, but they’ve got games going in places like Kentucky and Mississippi and Georgia, hotbeds of 21st century conservative zealotry and deep-thinking, so they have an advantage.

Minnesota is a little different. The whole Kenyan Muslim Socialist selling the country out to terrorists while destroying our best-in-the-world medical system thing doesn’t play quite as well around here as in South Bogaloosa. Or at least it needs to be dressed up quite a bit to be presentable in public.

In part, that explains the four GOP contenders dialing back on the social issue pandering. But the recent assertion that the miserable state of the local economy, in particular Mark Dayton’s steering of said economy into a sludge-filled ditch will be the focus of the campaign also leaves me a bit skeptical in terms of efficacy.

Now, granted we are in the final weeks of primary season, when the game is all about rallying every registered Republican who listens to six hours a day or more of AM 1280 The Patriot. But still, the economy? That’s what they see as their best shot?

Again, the targeted primary voter would rip Dayton even if he cut their taxes to Medtronic levels, brought in the reincarnation of Ayn Rand to home school their kids, re-paved their driveway and gassed up the family Yukon — the one with the star-spangled license plate and the waving flag sticker that says, “Fear This.” But what then for the general election, back in the pesky world of the “reality-based”? What does the GOP have for that rather crucial slice of the electorate?

There probably aren’t five people of any persuasion who don’t think “the economy” should be better. Every “corporate inversion”-minded CEO, every hardware store operator and Caribou barista will tell you they’d like more money — i.e, a better economy — in their pockets. But given a choice between the party who many will remember wasted its recent majority at the local legislature on tone deaf notions like Voter ID, opposing gay marriage and multiple votes to suppress or rollback abortion rights and the guy who had to restore some order and discipline after the godawful fiscal mess left from Tim Pawlenty’s careerist reign, the choice is pretty easy.

And it remains fairly easy even when the various candidates try to roll “the horror” of Obamacare, or (gasp!) the MNsure website, into their economic message. Where for example do they get a credible metric that says Obamacare isn’t considered an asset by the majority of Minnesotans? Moreover, when “shrewd” businessmen like Mike McFadden wander off the empirical ranch and start talking about replacing Obamacare with something else … something “market-based” and “patient-oriented” — a Minnesotan who actually intends to vote is by now familiar enough with Mitt Romney-style boardroom gobbledygook and corporate-speak to dismiss him as yet another political variant of Gertrude Stein’s Oakland. You know: “There’s no there there.”

And speaking of tone-deaf out past the barbed wire … . Where do you even begin with a guy like Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson promising to “go all Scott Walker” on Minnesota if he can just, A. Get elected himself, and B. Get that dang majority of anti-abortionists, homophobes and election fraud conspiracists back at work?

Scott [bleeping] Walker !? I have to assume that a self-proclaimed smart guy like Johnson has, again, some credible metric showing how much better Wisconsin’s economy is performing than Minnesota’s, because it sure as hell hasn’t appeared in any study or survey produced anywhere other than low-power talk radio.

As I mentioned after Romney cratered two years ago and the national GOP began its extensive soul-searching, (okay they issued a press release and then roared back to tin foil hat business-as-usual), the GOP has a future if it can talk coherently and credibly about some issue, any issue, presumably economic, that has direct positive effect on the middle-class. Screw all the trickle down blather. At this point the public is hip to how little reducing corporate taxes benefits them.

It’s loony, I admit, but let me repeat my advice. Find something that gives the middle-class something they truly want — better schools, better roads, better/cheaper health care — and apply actual brainpower, not glaze-inducing messaging, to constructing such legislation and demand the DFL cooperate in passing it.

In other words: Try credibility for a change.

 

Which MN Candidates Will Sign The Pull-The-Plug Pledge?

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Pull_the_plugAs a general matter, I despise campaign pledges.  Candidates are continually badgered by interest groups to pledge in writing that they will always do X, or never do Y.

The Problem With Pledges

The problem with most pledges is the “always” or “never” parts of them.  The world changes, and policy positions therefore sometimes need to change with them.

  • Pledging to not increase taxes today may make sense at one point in history, but a few years later the circumstances may have changed dramatically.
  • Pledging to support a policy or project now may make sense, but not after surprising new information surfaces.
  • Pledging to tax millionaires may make sense at a time when they’re not paying their fair share, but not a few years later when circumstances may have changed.

So sometimes making policy shifts isn’t  a sign of weakness or dishonesty, as pledge enforcers often claim.  Sometimes, shifting is a sign of courage, vision and integrity.

That’s why I don’t like most campaign pledges.

Pull-the-Plug Pledge

But I came across a pledge the other day that fits our times, and has an infinite shelf life.  South Dakota congressional candidate Rick Weiland challenged all congressional candidates to sign this simple pledge:

“I hereby pledge that, if elected to represent you, I will never vote to shut down your government, or to place your government in default, in order to force it to act, or to prevent it from acting, on unrelated issues.” 

As a voter, I want to know where every Minnesota congressional candidate stands on this Pull-The-Plug Pledge.

Flat_line-2If there are candidates out there who think it is acceptable from them to pull the plug on the American people’s government and economy, that is their right.  But it’s also the right of the overwhelming 72% percent of Americans who oppose the Republicans’ current plug-pulling scheme to be forewarned of a congressional candidate’s position on that  issue, so that they can vote with their eyes wide open.

Yes, Americans and their policymakers must always be able to make their government a different size and shape as future circumstances dictate.  This pledge doesn’t prevent them from having such flexibility. It simply says it’s not acceptable to completely pull the plug on the American economy and government.

So, Tim Walz, Mike Benson, John Kline, Mike Obermuller, Paula Overby, Betty McCollum, Keith Ellison, Erik Paulsen, Tom Emmer, Rhonda Sivarajah, Phil Krinkie, John Pederson, Judy Adams, Collin Pederson, Rick Nolan, Stewart Mills III, Monti Moreno, Chris Dahlberg, Mike McFadden, Julianne Ortman, Jim Abeler, and Al Franken, will you sign the Pull-The-Plug Pledge?

– Loveland

Note:  This post was also featured in Politics in Minnesota‘s Best of the Blogs.