The Governor’s Race & My Election Summary

First I want to state that I am very pleased with the outstanding victories here in MN and across the nation. This was an Historic Victory, we won the State and National House, we won the State and National Senate, and we all should be proud for the work we did to ensure this very needed course correction.

We still have problems though. If government were an orchard and politicians the farmers, people like Tim Pawlenty and George W. Bush are the types of orchard farmers that do not understand how to prune their trees in a way that yields a healthy crop, they have actually given up on proper conservation and don’t believe we need healthy trees at all, and have embraced the ideology that the only way to prune a tree is by its roots, and if that means the trees die, who cares – they only get in the way of the strip mall that they want to put there anyway. Our infrastructure, our cities, and our health will continue to be under attack from them and their administrations, but now we can fight back and try our best to keep our values front and center so we can continue to fight for the common good, and keep our trees well pruned and bearing a healthy bounty for all the people of Minnesota, and hopefully all the people of the United States.

There is going to be a great deal of talk about the Governor’s race and why exactly Mike Hatch was unable to capitalize on this year’s democratic momentum. We all will have our takes, and it is doubtful we all will agree, but for my own take I want to start with the core of the problem as I see it.

The Final Push!

Taking a note from Joe at MNCR, I started to reach back into the cobwebs of my own memory to two years ago to what I was doing in that election. On election day of 2004 I was helping a GOTV center train doorknockers as they went out to encourage people to go vote. The energy in the room, in the entire state, was exhilarating. We knew we were going to win Minnesota, but only if we kept pushing, kept working hard all day. And we did. From 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. we sent out hundreds, if not thousands of people to knock on doors all over the state, we were on the phones constantly, and in the end, we won MN, but lost the Country.

Minnesota rejected Bush and his policies back in 2004. Minnesota knew then what the Country knows now, that the Republican controlled government was on a destructive path and we had to try to change the coarse. We knew Iraq was a quagmire before the rest of the country, Katrina was not a surprise because we knew that the philosophy of the GOP wants to make government small enough to drown in a bathtub, and Katrina is the real example of that metaphor. We knew that the middle class was being squeezed in favor of the super wealthy and the common good was being lost with all the corruption and greed in Washington.

We knew all this and fought a valiant fight, and we Won what we could win here in MN.

Now we are entering the final few days of the 2006 election cycle. We are on the verge of an historic change in this country. A change to embrace the common good, a change to put some oversight back into Washington, a change to bring integrity back into our government. Our DFL candidates in Minnesota all hold the best interest for us all in their hearts and we must work twice as hard as we did in 2004 to instill this needed change into our state and national government.

We can do this, we can win bigger than we won in 2004, and this win will actually bring the change we desire because this win is more fully in our hands. We can send 1 fantastic US Senator to Washington with Amy Klobuchar, we can send 8 DFL US House Representatives to Washington with Tim Walz, Coleen Rowley, Patty Wetterling, Wendy Wilde, Collin Peterson, Jim Oberstar, Betty McCollum, and Keith Ellison. We can dramatically change our state government with Mike Hatch, Mark Ritchie, Lori Swanson, Rebecca Otto, plus all the state legislators who will help return our state back to sane are reasoned leadership.

With all your help, we will win and win big. If you have not already please sign up to do what you can in these final days.

Click HERE to add your energy to this historic election!