Politics in Minnesota: The Weekly Report - Vol. 3, Issue 7 - 8/10/2007
Thoughts From The Publisher
Thanks to a record-number of 100-plus of our subscribers for giving us your thoughts on last week's special bridge collapse edition. For the most part, you liked what we did. Particularly gratifying was that many of you appreciated the survey of the MnDOT documents, which we put at the end of the report (and now available on our website). Said one emailer, "Remarkable excerpts from the engineering documents. You beat everyone else in getting them out to us as average consumers." Our GOP subscribers thought our report was "level-headed in an emotional time."
Not so our DFL subscribers, who thought that what we wrote was "over the top in defense of Pawlenty." Notably, in our discussion about a special session and what will happen when--not if, now--we have one, we speculated that "chicanery" was likely because the Minnesota constitution specifies that the Governor has the power to call a special session, but that because the Constitution is silent on the matter, the Legislature can then do whatever it wants when in special session. One highly respected reader thought that was too partisan: "When the GOP was in power in the legislature, or if it gets there again, would you ever speculate on "what chicanery super...majorities...might create" when talking about a special session? Of course not..."
For the record, that's not true. If it was a DFL governor who wanted a gas tax increase and GOP super majorities in the Legislature that did not, in our heated, purple state political environment, the same chicanery might be created. Any and all feedback is always welcome at staff@politicsinminnesota.com or via our online Tips form.
We've been remiss in not bringing subscribers up to date on what's happening at PIM. Our web site is starting to come together nicely. We hope you make it part of your regular web surfing routine and note that besides (kinda/sorta) daily blogging, we're adding new permanent information resources at the top. Comments and suggestions here are welcomed, as well.
Publisher Sarah Janecek is currently joined by a couple of Democrats, Dan Feidt and Nick Lambert. Feidt has been with us for several years, working on PIM directories and now besides reporting and writing, he's our web editor. Lambert's been on the case for several months, contributing research, writing, and pinch-hitting on the tech stuff. Both are recent college grads with degrees in political science (Dan went to Macalester College; Nick, University of Kansas). [Readers might recognize that "Lambert" last name. He's the son of long-time Twin Cities media critic, Brian Lambert. This familial connection might explain why Lambert (Nick) decided to pursue his college studies in Kansas.] Tracey Howell, another Macalester College grad (English) continues to work on our Morning Reports.
Speaking of our Morning Reports, we'll have a terrific announcement next week about a new venture giving much greater visibility to our Morning Reports--the only place to find a comprehensive amalgamation of links to the important Minnesota political stories of the day.
Finally, in case we forgot to mention it, we love to hear from our subscribers via staff@politicsinminnesota.com.
Should She Stay Or Should She Go?
The number one topic of speculation on everyone's mind this week is whether Lt. Gov. and MnDOT Commissioner Carol Molnau should resign.
First, our reasoning. Second, our conclusion.
As we wrote last week, underfunding transportation infrastructure maintenance has been a decades-long problem, with no political party or person--including Molnau--to blame. Even if transportation infrastructure had been better funded over time, the I-35W Bridge was not on any of the "must do now" lists. The most recent news reports indicate the inspections problem may lie with the federal and the state government.
Never mind.
GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been quite clear that, in the aftermath of the bridge collapse, the transportation funding world changed. He would now support a gas tax increase as part of an increased transportation funding package. The Governor's communications director, Brian McClung, when talking about the Governor's change of heart on a gas tax increase, said, "[T]hese are extraordinary circumstances. The governor feels we need to come together and work as aggressively as we can to address these issues. He thinks that's the right thing for our state."
Under heated questioning from reporters about her long-time opposition to increasing the gas tax, and whether she would support the Governor, the Star Tribune quotes the following as Molnau's response, "On a gas tax, she said, 'we do need to look for resources we can count on long term.' But in order to solve the problem, she said, 'we would have to raise gas taxes 34 or 35 cents a gallon. I don't think the motoring public can sustain that.'"
While Molnau was absolutely dead on in this answer (see next story), it's an obfuscating answer. In times of political crisis, an obfuscating answer is the wrong answer.
As Transportation Commissioner, Molnau serves at the pleasure of the Governor, who appointed her. That should have been her answer, "I serve at the pleasure of the Governor, he decides the policy and I execute that policy."
And therein lies the problem with what seemed to be such a good idea back in 2002 when Pawlenty appointed his Lt. Gov. to be his Transportation Commissioner, the "one-woman SWAT team at MnDOT." [Lost here is the fact that even then, Pawlenty recognized the decades-long problems at MnDOT.] Molnau's role has always been confused. Pawlenty selected Molnau to be his Lt. Gov. running mate at a time when he was facing a conservative credential showdown for the GOP gubernatorial endorsement against another impeccably credentialed conservative candidate, Brian Sullivan. Her GOP-endorsing delegate bona fides were unimpeachable: An entire legislative record of the right votes on the social issues and the right votes on the fiscal ones, including no funding for the then-highly controversial light rail transit (LRT) and no increasing the gas tax. And, oh, yes, she wore a skirt, not slacks, and lived in the GOP-vote rich western suburbs while at the same time sporting a legitimate rural resume as a former dairy farmer.
As a legislator, Molnau had her own agenda. On transportation funding, that used to match Pawlenty's. Pawlenty changed his mind, or recognized the need for compromise. On LRT, and now, on increasing the gas tax. Molnau doesn't have the standing to somehow try to hang on to some semblance of staying consistent with her previous legislative record. She's not, in President George Bush's infamous words, "the decider." Pawlenty is.
All of which explains her problem at the Legislature, particularly with key Senate player, transportation Policy & Budget Committee Chair Sen. Steve Murphy (DFL-Red Wing). Understandably, he has never been sure he's dealing with former legislative adversary former House GOP Transportation Funding Chair Rep. Carol Molnau, a Lt. Gov., or the Governor's chief transportation policy point person.
Over the years, Molnau has been an exemplary public servant. Knows her stuff, smart as hell, heart of gold. All that. Molnau is the right person for one of the two jobs but not both. Combining the two jobs made sense back in the era of historic budget deficits, but not in the new era of the bridge collapse tragedy. The tough public policy debate ahead requires leadership that can be focused and free from political encumbrances.
Our conclusion, then, is that Molnau should step down from the MnDOT job.
With everyone's best wishes, a collective fond remembrance of seriously and hilariously rattling former Independent Gov. Jesse Ventura by tapping his shoulder on the TPT's Almanac famous public policy couch, a clear understanding that the bridge collapse was not her fault, and the same clear understanding that life's not fair--and sometimes political life is exponentially unfair.
[The exchange between Molnau and Ventura happened on the Almanac couch, but not on Almanac, the show. The two appeared on a special edition of the now defunct NewsNight Minnesota on March 3, 2000. That night the show was hosted by Almanac co-host Eric Eskola and Almanac political reporter Mary Lahammer, so most people recall thinking the venue was Almanac. NewsNight discussion links are no longer active. However, an excerpt of the exchange lives online in the Almanac: At the Capitol archives. You can find this link by going here and clicking on the show from March 20th. The exchange can be found at the 23 minute mark of the show.]
[For the record, the liberal faction of PIM believes that Molnau has to quit because she failed to elevate the bridge's danger status: The buck for repair priorities, based on ominous reports, clearly stops at her desk. Democrats think Molnau purposely failed to advance big projects in the inner metro area. The appearance is that everything got put off in favor of the six-lane Highway 212 project, her only real mark, an 11-mile, $200 million project in core GOP territory. Some Democrats note that while the Cities choke on congestion, the Bearpath gated community has fabulous new access. Also, Molnau shouldn't have spent $15,000 to join the NASCO Coalition, a weird Texas-based superhighway advocacy group closely linked to Lockheed Martin, as PIM reported recently.]
Prevailing Public Opinion: The Lack Thereof
The collapse of the bridge translates into the most heated public policy debate Minnesota has undertaken in decades. In the modern political era, public opinion polling by major media has been an important, if not determinative, factor in what gets decided. Used to be that all the major Minnesota media paid for polls, whether by themselves or in joint ventures.
To date, only KSTP has conducted a poll. It could well be that only KSTP continues to poll public opinion. That strikes us as a stunning shift in how our deciders will decide. This is where out-of-state ownership hurts the most. Newsies desperately want to poll, but owners accountable to Wall Street now say screw it. We checked with the two most likely media polling candidates, the Star Tribune and MPR. The Strib, of course, has historically run its Minnesota Poll, directed by ex-Stribber Rob Daves. We're a little unclear on whether there will be continuing "Minnesota Polls," but we're betting not. If ever there was a time to run a poll, it's now, but whether Star Tribune owner Avista Capital agrees to pay for one is a different question. The official line from the paper is "We cannot say for proprietary reasons."
The MPR newsroom has put in a formal request for a poll, and we're betting that MPR President & CEO Bill Kling, himself, will make the decision. [It goes without saying that polling is expensive.] Let's hope he makes the right one. Maybe throw an extra few days onto the next pledge drive.
Given the current state of ownership and/or current resources devoted to public affairs coverage, we're betting that the St. Paul Pioneer Press, KARE-11 and WCCO don't poll. On the other hand, maybe the biggest national story in decades to happen in our state makes a difference.
Prevailing Public Opinion: What We've Got
We've already given KSTP President & CEO Stanley Hubbard a standing ovation for his station's most thorough and extensive coverage (25 hours straight live, no commercials). Not unpredictably, the last locally-owned commercial station in town went right into the field after the bridge collapsed. That's good news, given KSTP may be the only poll we get. For some, that's bad news, because KSTP uses Survey USA. Detractors dismiss SurveyUSA as "robo-pollers," because they use an automated phone system. However, in our collective memories, in elections, SurveyUSA seems to get pretty close to actual results. [We welcome hearing from readers who disagree with and have examples of where SurveyUSA was wrong. Email your thoughts to staff@politicsinminnesota.com.
For better or for worse, here's a summary of what KSTP found in the poll the station released this week:
Do you approve or disapprove of the way Gov. Tim Pawlenty has responded to the 35W bridge disaster?
Approve: 75%
Disapprove: 19%
Sampling Error:+/- 3.9%
Do you approve or disapprove of the way President George Bush has responded to the 35W Bridge disaster?
Approve: 65%
Disapprove:32%
Sampling Error: +/- 4.3%
Do you think the state gas should? Or should not? Be increased to pay for improving the conditions of our roads and bridges?
Approve: 38%
Disapprove: 57%
Sampling Error: +/- 4.4%
How much more in gas tax would you be willing to pay?
< 5 cents: 47%
5-7 cents: 35%
7-10 cents: 9%
>10 cents: 8%
Sampling Error: +/- 7.3%
If the gas tax is increased should the money be used solely for roads and bridges? Or should it also be used for mass transit?
Roads and Bridges: 66%
Also for Mass Transit: 29%
Sampling Error: +/- 4.2%
Do you think a special session of the legislature should? Or should not? Be called in order to pass a transportation funding plan?
Should: 52%
Should Not: 40%
Sampling Error: +/- 4.5%
If a special session was called, should the focus be on transportation only? Or should other issues be included?
Transportation Only: 56%
Other Issues: 36%
Sampling Error: +/- 4.4%
Do you think the federal gas tax should? Or should not? Be increased to pay for transportation infrastructure nationwide?
Should: 30%
Should Not: 62%
Sampling Error: +/- 4.4%
Kudos To The Star Tribune
There's no way to convey this sentiment without being crass, so we'll just say it.
The I-35W bridge collapse tragedy has been terrific for morale at the Star Tribune.
Most of our readers carefully follow the Star Tribune saga. Our state's largest newspaper has experienced two new recent owners, McClatchey and now Avista Capital Partners. The latter owner has been the most disturbing...the buy-outs, the decrease in public affairs coverage, etc., along with the general decline of the newspaper industry and that little lawsuit in which Star Tribune Publisher Par Ridder is accused of crossing the river with trade secrets from the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
All the angst in the newsroom was long forgotten in the paper's coverage of the bridge. About a third of the 75 people in the newsroom have been working on covering the bridge, bringing myriad compelling human stories to life and up-to-date and almost live coverage online. The night the bridge collapsed, the paper had some four million new unique visitors and 30,000 more hard copies were printed and sold. Kudos to everyone there, but in particular to Editor Nancy Barnes and Managing Editor Scott Gillespie.
Another crass angle in the news business is that in recent years, stories by newspapers about local tragedies win Pulitzer Prizes. Given the Star Tribune's extraordinary coverage, and early reports showing that the bridge disaster is one of the top stories of the year, the Star Tribune will be well-positioned to achieve a Pulitzer, the top prize in journalism. Moreover, once Avista Capital gets the sure-to-be-huge final bill for the paper's bridge disaster coverage, the Star Tribune could find itself winning a Pulitzer right about the same time there's another round of buyouts, or worse, mandatory lay-offs.
Finally, on matters du Strib, in the past your publisher has taken issue with the editorial side of the paper. The paper's first major editorial the Sunday after the disaster was both superb and spot on:
"There can be no doubt that today, the adequacy and safety of the rest of this state's roads and bridges is Minnesotans' No. 1 public policy concern. That's a change. As recently as one year ago, Minnesota House DFLers crafted a successful campaign to win the chamber's majority around a "back to basics" theme that emphasized six issues. Transportation was not one of them. In that same election, Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty won a second term despite his 2005 veto of a major transportation funding bill that included a 10-cent increase in the highway-dedicated gas tax. He vetoed a similar bill with a 5-cent increase this year, and suffered no dip in public approval as a result. That suggests that, while many Minnesotans knew that their state was not spending enough to maintain existing roads and bridges at recommended levels, they were willing to tolerate the risk that entailed, to avoid raising taxes. They were, until Wednesday night."We trust that Star Tribune political columnist and editorialist Lori Sturdevant wrote that one.
Hortman Gets A Warm Rush
Sometimes the polarity of the political conversation in our country becomes hilarious. In the aftermath of the bridge collapsing, Rep. Melissa Hortman (DFL-Brooklyn Park) was quoted making the observation that, "90-plus-degree heat Wednesday and the above-normal temperatures of the past two summers may have been a contributing factor. “Did the heat put extra strain on the steel?” Hortman said. “You wonder if this bridge was built to withstand the massive heat we have had this summer.” That seemingly harmless observation, combined with what we all know are our cold winters, seemed perfectly reasonable. Minnesotans know that weather does cause enormous damage to our roads and bridges.
And most Minnesotans know that weather is weather. Commenting about weather is not commenting about global climate change.
Apparently some pretty important people don't know the difference. The quote took on a life of its own in the right-leaning blogosphere and voila!, Hortman became fodder on both Rush Limbaugh's and Sean Hannity's nationally syndicated radio shows.
Good for Hortman. She just won her next election.
Rep. Steve Drazkowski (R-Greenfield Township)
This week Republican Steve Drazkowski narrowly defeated DFLer Linda Pfeilsticker in the special election to replace retiring GOP Rep. former GOP House Speaker and now Commissioner of the Department of Labor & Industry Steve Sviggum. This was no regular special election. Rather it was a super-special election with winners and losers far beyond this race. Drazkowski defeated DFLer Linda Pfeilsticker by a margin of 3,762 to 3,333. Drazkowski won heavily in Sviggum's Goodhue County and narrowly in Wabasha County, where both Drazkowski and Pfeilsticker reside. Pfeilsticker won in Winona County.
Certainly the biggest winner was Drazkowski. To date, he's had a roller-coaster political career. In 2006, he lost the GOP endorsement to run against Sen. Steve Murhpy (DFL-Red Wing) to Steve Wilson, but then Drazkowski beat him in the primary and lost the general election to Murphy. Worth noting is that Drazkowski beat Murphy by 143 votes in Sviggum's half of the district. Last month, Drazkowski dominated a five-candidate field at the GOP endorsing convention. In the next four weeks he put together a winning campaign.
The second biggest winner was the House GOP caucus and Minnesota Republicans, in general. To lose this race would have sent the signal that the Republican losses the last two elections continue, which would have translated into dour spirits going into 2008, the good candidates thinking of running likely bowing out. Not to mention the huge psychological blow of losing the seat held by the former GOP House Speaker. [The inside baseball part of the loss would have also been huge. Had the GOP House Caucus lost, it would have lost legislative office space and staff, Sviggum's powerful committee slots (Ways & Means, Finance, State Government Finance) and probably a handful of other committee slots to account for the shift in party numbers.]
Another big winner was Rep. Marty Seifert (R-Marshall), the House Minority Leader. Seifert led his caucus through a bruising legislative session, without a single House Republican casting a vote against any of the Governor's vetoes. If the Republicans had lost on Tuesday, it would have been viewed by many as a repudiation of the hard-nosed opposition to DFL majorities in the House and Senate. Instead, Seifert has shown that he can focus the message, the money, and the machine into an electoral victory under difficult circumstances.
Other winners:
- GOP Party Chair Ron Carey. Besieged by reports of allegedly questionable involvement in the Minnesota Autism Center and disgruntled ex-party staffers about his chairmanship, not to mention the losses in the 2006 elections, Carey was due for a win. He stuck by Drazkowski as the endorsed candidate and delivered the party goods to win.
- U.S. Rep. John Kline (R MN6). He didn't cede more of his Congressional district to DFL legislative control;
- Kline's district director and former GOP Rep. Mike Osskopp. He helped organize Goodhue County.
- Maggie Osskopp, Mike's wife, who is also executive director for the 2nd Congressional District Republicans. We bet she did more organizing than her husband.
- GOP activist Deb Roschen. Behind every winning legislator usually stands one campaign person who brought the legislator to the dance. Roschen executed a textbook operation with 200 volunteers spread in the district's 54 precincts. She helped keep the volunteers committed, persistent, and disciplined during the campaign.
This may come as a surprise, but we don't consider DFLer Pfeilsticker to be a loser. Her 3,333 votes would have been enough to win all but one of the other special elections held in Minnesota in the past decade, but she was tentative in her campaigning, skipping several debates and forums. After an interview with Pfeilsticker, the Star Tribune's Lori Sturdevant wrote that she was not "Ms. Courage" when Pfeilsticker declined to take firm positions on the gas tax and other issues. Nevertheless, a close legislative loss for a first-time candidate bodes extremely well for her future, if she runs again.
The House DFL Caucus is not a loser. The group came close on GOP turf and their 85-House member majority didn't need another vote that badly.
Perhaps the biggest loser is DFL State Chair Brian Melendez. Shortly after the DFL's August 24th primary, the state party direct-mailed a strident letter that attacked the record of Drazkowski's 14-year divorce proceedings. The letter focused on his 16-year-old daughter, Kinsey, who nominated her father on July 9 and was at his side throughout the campaign. The letter had the unintended effect of energizing Republican activists and their reaction translated into high motivation to win.
Timing is everything, and the Minneapolis bridge tragedy also played a role in the special election. Given transportation funding was a key issue in the race, voters received a DFL mailing on the day of the bridge collapse which featured a cartoon of a tractor falling. Obviously, the piece was crafted before the bridge collapsed, but it had people shaking their heads at local feed stores.
Other losers were the special interests that made major investments in money and people to try to win the seat for the DFL. We won't know until we see the campaign reports, but anecdotal reports indicate Education Minnesota, several unions and MoveOn.org were heavily involved in a get-out-the-vote effort.
As soon as Politics In Minnesota has interviewed Drazkowski, we'll have a downloadable PIM: The Directory page available on the web site to cut and paste into books. As soon as Drazkowski is sworn in and the State Canvassing Board certifies the election returns, he can be reached at (651) 296-2273, or by email at rep.steve.drazkowski@house.mn.
Bits & Pieces
There's a reason DFL St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman is pushing for $18 million in Local Government Aid (LGA) in a special session. Our sources tell us that before the bridge collapsed, he planned on proposing three years of tax increases, 15%, 9% and then 6%. We simply ran out of room this issue to get more in-depth on the coming special session. But, there's always next week.
In the aftermath of the bridge collapse and with a special session looming to rethink Minnesota's funding of transportation, one of the conversations conservatives desperately want to have is the one that has yet to surface in St. Paul. That conversation is about a more market-based model, i.e., toll roads and toll bridges, and perhaps even the private ownership of some of both. Enter the Center of the American Experiment and its president and founder, Mitch Perlstein. He scrambled to set up a luncheon forum to discuss market-based transportation infrastructure for Wednesday, September 5, at the Airport Hilton. The event will feature a presentation by Robert Poole, Director of Transportation Studies for the Reason Foundation. Register online or contact Peter Zeller at peter.zeller@americanexperiment.org.
Minnesota Democrats Exposed's Michael Brodkorb is having quite the conversation with the St. Cloud Times. In a story about the House working on federal aid for the bridge disaster, St. Cloud Times reporter Pamela Brogan wrote, "Earlier in the day, [U.S. GOP Rep. Michele] Bachmann and Republican [U.S.] Rep. John Kline had voted to adjourn the House before it approved the federal aid." That's true, but so did the Minnesota Democratic members of the Minnesota delegation and the vote was procedural--the House was reconvening the next morning. Contextually, in the story, the statement is outrageous. The mystery is why the St. Cloud Times doesn't just say, we goofed.
New organizations serving the Twin Cities African immigrant community are branching out. The Monitor of St. Paul noted (PDF, page 10) the growth of the Somali Cultural and Human Services organization, started last year by former Somali government officials Abdullahi Egal and Mohamed Burale, which is intended to help with human services and cultural integration around St. Paul's Frogtown and Midway neighborhoods. Ntuv Tunka of the African News Journal reported that a new African Chamber of Commerce has just been set up in Minneapolis by Martin Mohamed. The ACC will be near other Somali businesses at the Karmel Mall at 2910 Pillsbury Avenue, and will focus on teaching African immigrants "the American system of conducting business and banking, marketing, developing and implementing business plans," according to Mohamed.
Famed explorer Will Steger will speak about global warming before the Hennepin County Board on Tuesday, August 14 at 1:30 in the County Board Room on the 24th floor of the Government Center downtown.
Billed as "The Hottest Ticket in Town," the September 7 salute to former House Speaker Steve Sviggum will be held at 5:30 p.m. on September 7, 2007, at the Minneapolis Convention Center. Hosts include former Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz, longtime DFL House Majority Leader Roger Moe, former GOP Rep. Doug Stang and Minnesota Business Partnership Executive Director Charlie Weaver.
To generate excitement for Minnesota's 150th birthday, the Minnesota Sesquicentennial Commission will be handing out "constitutions on a stick." Here's more information about this year's activities at the State Fair.
Free & Affordable Tech Tools For Politickin': Part 1 of 2
Every year, spiffy new technologies promise to shift the political environment, and 2007 has been a good year for new tools and the maturation of older ones. On the other hand, tech always seems like an expensive investment with often elusive payoffs. The good news is that free applications, operating systems and add-ons can help out the foggiest baby boomer or the cleverest teen campaign volunteer. Political cash is always at a premium: Any one of these areas is worth checking out. We'll point out some new options, from the big-ticket items to mere Firefox plugins. In a few more campaign cycles, everyone's probably going to know about this stuff. This week we're looking at some basic tools you can use to maximize your electronic political impact. Next week we'll get into server technology and campaign planning software.
Why is all this tech talk relevant to PIM? Campaign websites and campaign coverage via the Internet are becoming the lifeblood of the business, even for people who don't care about blogs. Press releases, viral videos and event planning are just so big now, it's clear that this trend is really holding the gaze of the general audience and generating real results in the real world. So many districts are divided so closely, a slack effort can let an unexpected contender slip by (ask Phil Krinkie!). Conveying a candidate's identity and style in a fresh way that's updated on a regular basis, without consuming an inordinate amount of time and cash, can easily make the critical difference of 200 House district voters.
It's Google's World, We Just Live In It
Keywords - those Internet search terms - are the basic currency of how things are found on the Internet. When candidate X wants to ensure s/he has good coverage, they need to make sure that other people link to their website, preferably using those positive words inside the link itself (inbound links). Thus, X can take over the Google search results for 'Minnesota health care.' (Interesting things can be discovered by analyzing big candidates' carefully selected website keywords). The first big instance of this strategy, known as 'Google bombing,' was when thousands of bloggers linked "miserable failure" to the White House's site, promptly taking over that Google search, symbolically associating failure with the President. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is related to this and it's a huge topic of discussion on the Internets.
Check out googleguide.com and you'll learn something useful, regardless of skill level or web angle. The 'Advanced operators reference' is a nifty way to exploit Google's lesser-known special queries. If you're setting up a campaign website it would be wise to check out 'Developing a Website.' Finally, Google Analytics is a really comprehensive tool for tracking your web traffic - incoming keywords, which pages are popular, which areas people come from & so forth. (PIM's #1 visitor network is the State of Minnesota!)
Desktop Web & Media Tools For Mac or PC
If you're on a budget and you need to get an Internet operation together, you've got really nice options in Windows now. For image handling, instead of the expensive - but excellent - Adobe Photoshop, try the free, slightly wonky GIMP (Windows download). For FTP work (critical for web design) the free open-source FileZilla, combined with the also free Notepad++, will handle many web tasks with aplomb. For instant messaging, Pidgin for Windows and Linux or Adium for Mac can log into GMail, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo!, Novell Groupware and other services easily and efficiently, without obnoxious ads or wasted CPU cycles. On the Mac side, the venerable free text editor TextWrangler has most of the key features of its professional-grade sibling BBEdit, Opensourcemac.org and opensourcewindows.org are good places to find more great free apps. These are savings a politician can take to the bank.
Nifty Firefox Web Tools & Techniques
Mozilla Firefox 2 has really matured nicely as a web browser that contains pop-up ads and spyware while also offering smooth performance. (It certainly has more predictable behavior from the perspective of web designers, who spend countless hours jerry-rigging fixes for IE's myriad bugs). But most people don't know that Firefox also has a huge passel of add-ons and extensions that can streamline and enhance web browsing, political messaging, blogging and, of course, wasting time. FireFox add-ons also generally work across Windows, Mac and Linux.
ScribeFire allows you to post to any number of different blogs via a handy panel on the bottom of the browser window. You can save drafts, notes, paste text from other sites, and easily apply basic styling. It auto-detects account settings to many different blog engines, including Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, LiveJournal and Drupal. If you're operating 2 or more blogs on the run, this free tool really helps you put out a fresh message without hassle. Even a few paragraphs a couple times a week can really generate a sense of ongoing buzz around a campaign. (More about Scribefire)
For tweaking websites, two addons are indispensable: the Web Developer toolbar and Firebug. The toolbar has many features that show you exactly how all the HTML elements fit together on the page (so you don't have to guess what you're altering), which could really help reduce the 'ugly factor' we see so often on campaign pages. Firebug tells you exactly which style rules are acting upon any specific page element, which takes all the guesswork out of understanding why a given bit is positioned, colored or styled like it is. Web design guesswork takes a huge amount of time: these two tools are incredible time-savers. (More on how to use Firebug)
Web2.0: Tagging, Open Hierarchies And Social Bookmarking To Promote Your
Message
Web2.0, the latest big but hazily-defined buzzword, in a nutshell means a new platform for content, especially by attaching tags to millions of elements of content generated by everyday people. This tends to create a kind of crowd wisdom that rapidly allows everyone to spot the hot stuff going on (like Flickr, Digg, or its 'social bookmarking' equivalent, the Yahoo!-owned del.icio.us service). Then, in turn, the developers who created these systems create application program interfaces (APIs) to the backend of the system, which allows third parties to scrape the raw data together into new and ever-more rich and well-targeted collections of information. The latest example of the new media and Web2.0 intersection were the batches of I-35W Bridge collapse photos put on Flickr.com, where thousands of viewers quickly tuned in via well-organized tags.
How would you use Web2.0 content? Let's say you wanted to create a Web portal for Congressional District 1. In the Wordpress engine, for example, you add a couple of plugins that pull in Flickr photos with certain tags, Technorati posts with certain tags, and Del.icio.us bookmarks with certain tags. All that stuff can be automatically presented on your site, and it can refresh itself every 30 minutes, so you instantly get a live portal exploiting the organizing efforts of all these people into a sweet, ever-changing website of your own. Many services, like Del.icio.us, can automatically post the bookmarks you create to your blog every day (and have nifty Firefox toolbars as well).
There's no fixed set of tags that people are limited to. They just name whatever sounds intuitive, and the results pile up into a mesh of interconnected names that quickly reveal what is popular and which tags seem related. It's almost certainly worth the few minutes to add your candidate's home page to these services, associating them with positive and relevant keywords. (Generally, it's not considered unscrupulous to self-promote as long as you explain what you're doing on the service's user profile).
Bloggers across the spectrum (from the liberal
DailyKos to the
conservative RedState)
have tended to use certain keyword formats (MN-Sen, MN-01, MN-Gov) to
designate races across the country: many of the 'aggregators' that pile blogs
together (like
BlogNetNews
Minnesota) especially focus on these keywords. Make sure to use these tags
if you want your material to be picked up more widely.
Another fun Firefox addon is the StumbleUpon toolbar, a 'collaborative surfing tool' which offers an endless, random Stumbling through categories of websites that you select. If you give a site a thumbs-up, you'll get more sites like the one you approved of. Again, it's probably worth it to add your candidate's website to this service - and its results are almost always interesting, or else an infinite well of distraction. StumbleUpon also will offer you websites that your friends like - and it can collect your friends from services like GMail (this is another typical use of APIs to drive Web2.0 development).
Politics In Minnesota: Lobbyist Watch
--Who is working what issues--
From the Minnesota Campaign Finance & Public Disclosure Board:
Morning Reports
