So the beautiful weather is going to continue all weekend — get out, enjoy it, and hit the Saint Paul Art Crawl!

Lowertown Saint Paul has been hard hit by the light rail construction, and the artists and businesses down there are working extra hard to make this art crawl worth the trip! Parking is actually pretty easy in the surface lots (which are usually about $1 at night and on weekends), and there are shuttle busses and such as well. Besides, when do you get to see art and big diggers at the same time?

If you go Friday night Nautilus Music-Theater (who I still consult with) will have free performances by three of my favorite performers (Ann Michels, JP Fitzgibbons, and George Maurer), plus great food. If you go Saturday or Sunday, you can hit the farmer’s market as well.

No matter when you go, be sure to stop by my friend Kelly’s store PLAY BY PLAY BOOKS on the 2F of the Northern Warehouse (above the Black Dog). She just opened and has wonderful books, great gifts, and a really welcoming atmosphere.

http://www.stpaulartcrawl.org/ for more information.

Life has been overwhelming me, and in the past this has led me to write copiously about things that are going on.  Things have changed, and the things I used to be able to write about no longer flow out of me.  I used to be able to see a post through to the end.

I have become more private and withdrawn, more moody and less able to talk to people about the things that are bothering me.  I don’t know whether it has to do with my dad dying the same year I turn fifty, and realizing I will never live up to his hopes and dreams and expectations for what I will make of my life, but I think that this is part of it.

It has a lot to do with the realization that the older people get, the harder it is to reboot and start fresh; my dreams of what I wanted to accomplished were thwarted by my bad decisions that I seem to make at every turn.  Dad had been able to plan his life pretty well, and so when things didn’t go his way he had the means to find his way through and fix them squarely.

He taught me well, and I lived his lessons faithfully until my mid-thirties. Then I changed. I tried to do things without planning, and I started taking measures out of desperation thinking that I would be able to fix them later.  But the “later” is caught up with me, and I see so few avenues remaining for straightening them out.

I am not going to go into detail about what is happening in my life, but I find myself tempted to withdraw and resign from most of the volunteer opportunities from which I had been getting pleasure and fulfillment.  Now I am starting to see them more as chores and obligations, and I don’t think that I am really able to give people what they need.

I am exhausted, mentally.  I can’t see how tomorrow is going to work out let alone next year.  Step by step, I am sliding backwards and I just can’t write much about it.

I sincerely hope that this is a funk and that my constant struggle will soon pay off.  But the hours seem to get darker and the promised dawn further away.

When I get arighted, I will pass it along.  In the meantime, please listen to my radio show. It’s the one fun thing that I have left.

Come for the spectacular view from StoneArch’s Mill Ruins office and talks from Minnesota’s outstanding scientists and biotech leaders — and for a little bit of art.

The BioBusiness Alliance invites you to witness the unveiling of “Unfolding the Natural History and Science of Life,” by local artist Lynn Fellman. For Minnesotans with a stake in the biosciences, the spirit and concept of Unfolding the Natural History and Science of Life is a visual representation of our shared scientific achievements and the promise for our health and our planet.

The event will feature a keynote presentation by Dr. Doris Taylor, Director of the University of Minnesota Center for Cardiovascular Repair, an opportunity to view and win samples of the art, and light refreshments.

Program speakers for the September 30 event
• Dale Wahlstrom, CEO of The BioBusiness Alliance
• Keynote – Dr. Doris Taylor, Director of the University of Minnesota Center for Cardiovascular Repair
• Dr. Eric Wieben, Director of Mayo Genomics Research Center
• Lynn Fellman, Fellman Studio Inc. will speak about the ideas in the art

Based on his book The Myth of Religious Violence (Oxford University Press, 2009), Cavanaugh will argue that the idea that there is something called “religion” that has a tendency toward violence is a piece of secularist folklore that in fact underwrites violence on behalf of Western social orders. The myth of religious violence helps construct a religious “other,” prone to fanaticism, to contrast with the rational, peacemaking secular subject. In domestic politics, the myth underwrites the triumph of the state over the church in the early modern period, and the nation-state’s subsequent monopoly on its citizens’ willingness to sacrifice and kill. In foreign policy, the myth of religious violence reinforces the superiority of Western social orders to non-secular—especially Muslim—social orders.

September 15, 2010, 7:00 p.m., Room 331, Smith Hall, 207 Pleasant Street SE, University of Minnesota

My dearest love, my absolute dearest love, I am sorry. I am sorry for abandoning you, sorry that these last weeks have been wrought with anger and focused on my selfishness. You are right of course; I am totally being selfish. But you were wrong about my feelings, Alex. You have always been my everything: my lover, my closest friend, the family who would never abandon me. And now I am abandoning you. I am so desperately sorry, darling.

The only thing I am afraid of now is that you will assume I didn’t love you with the depth and passion that I have always felt for you. I am terrified that my leaving now means just that. It hurts me. It literally hurts me, my stomach clenched, my mouth dry. It hurts more than the loss of my parents and brother when they cut me out of their lives. You have cared for me and loved me in ways I never imagined possible, and I have always loved you with every little bit of myself. I am afraid that every bit of me is simply not enough.

I am sure you are thinking that if I really felt this way I would be with you right now, that I wouldn’t have left you alone. I am sorry that I am so weak, my body so broken. I am sorry that I cannot take anymore. I am dying too slowly, poisoned so painfully by these drugs that could keep me alive indefinitely. It is humiliating, no matter your claims that cleaning me up with painstaking care is an honor, when I can’t even move my head to that goddamned bucket.

My darling Alex, I cannot, have never been able to express my frustration to you. I guess I feel too guilty, too selfish. Here you are taking such very good care of me, ignoring your own illness. You don’t even stop when you get sick yourself. But I am frustrated. I can hardly think anymore. I can’t really work anymore. It has taken me nearly three weeks just to write this letter. The other day, when I was thinking about my hateful fucking brother, I was horrified to realize that I couldn’t remember his goddamned name.

My body has betrayed me, my mind has betrayed me, and I am tired, ever so tired. I have tried to accept it, tried to accept your need to care for me no matter how bad it gets. I have tried and failed. It isn’t really the failure of my body. I could deal with the pain for you; I am almost certain I could. But I don’t want to forget any more. My memories are too precious to lose.

I keep thinking about the evening we first met. Poor dear Steven, he knew you two were over the moment he introduced us. He has always been such a wonderful friend, and it was never so evident than that moment, when with his characteristic good nature he smiled at us and told you it was wonderful while it lasted and then walked away. I keep thinking about talking with you until well into the next morning, when we were too exhausted to continue, and waking up in the afternoon to your kisses. That first week, pent up in my house, was so incredible. I almost decided to break a contract for the script I was supposed to be writing, because I never wanted it to end.

I hope that you know that you are the sort of man I used to wished I could be. You are so big and powerful, even as HIV and the HIV drugs ravage your body. I remember the first time you picked me up and carried me to bed, after I fell asleep in front of the television. I woke up to the feeling of being enveloped in your arms, pressed hard against your body as you carried me as though I was merely a child. I was aroused. I remember the tightness of my cock constricted by my pants. But what I remember most clearly was feeling that I was safe. For the first time since my parents and then my brother disowned me, I felt secure and cared for.

I love how you were so tender with me as I started to cry, afraid you had hurt me. You were unbelievably beautiful as I looked into your eyes through my tears. The love reflected in them when I whispered, “I love you” with awe was almost too much. I was overwhelmed by the increasing intensity of my feelings. I felt at first like I could never love more intensely than that, but I did, so much so that it was actually painful. It’s funny, but the pain I feel now is eased a little, as I think about lying there with you. I remember that we tried to make love, our bodies mistaking our emotions for arousal. But just holding you there, completely enveloped by your arms and your body was better than any sex could ever be.

As I sit here eleven years later, I am amazed as I have always been that I love you even more now than I did that night. I shudder to think what it might be like, were we to have another eleven years, or thirty or more. I couldn’t comprehend loving you any more deeply then, and I cannot imagine it now. I am desperately sorry that we will never find out. Yet for all we might have had, given more time, what we have had already was more than I ever imagined possible, more still than my most wondrous dreams.

You were so wonderful to me when my father died. I hated him for abandoning me, for hating me. I hadn’t even spoken to him in more than eighteen years. I was shocked to find myself grieving for this asshole who had promised, promised to love me no matter what and who then proved himself a liar–unable to love or accept a queer son. You were my strength then, as you have been for so much of our time together. You convinced me to see my mother again and were there to support me when we met with her. I think my mother understood then, as you held me while I read the letter my father had left for me, begging me for forgiveness. It wasn’t enough. Her understanding, his letter–they simply weren’t enough. It was too late for forgiveness. And you were there for me, as I finally and truly grieved for the loss of my family.

I thought that I was over it, that I had been over it for years. I didn’t realize until that moment, sitting there with you, my mother and my father’s letter, that eighteen years of rage had blocked my grief. I think that was when I was first able to grieve for my diagnosis, back when AIDS was still a death sentence, for the same reason. You carried me then, like you had carried me to bed that beautiful night, like you had so many times before and have so many times since. I love knowing you will carry me to the end.

I cannot take this, this losing myself. It is like my memories are mostly still there, but everything is jumbled. I could almost tolerate the indignity of losing control of my bodily functions, I could never suffer true humiliation with you. But my memories are getting all mixed up, and I am afraid of what is already being lost in the confusion. I am far more afraid of losing the life we have shared than I am of oblivion. It keeps getting worse. I keep trying to remember what we ate for dinner last night, and I cannot find even a hint. I am also trying to remember what color your tux was when we officiated our relationship, and I can’t fucking remember.

I do remember how I felt though. Knowing that our familial bond was recognized by the state, that our legal rights were protected by law. It wasn’t called marriage, but fuck marriage anyways. What we have is better than most marriages. What mattered most to me, was knowing that if I died before you, you wouldn’t have any problems with the family that abandoned me. You deserve everything I have on the merit of your love for me alone. You also deserve it all because you gave up your career and your other interests to care for me when it started getting bad. You kept claiming that you would eventually have to anyways, but you were infected late enough that the drugs prevented you getting as badly off as me. It isn’t perfect, but you could have continued working indefinitely.

Instead, you gave that all up for me. The least I could do was to make sure that what I have left will care for you for the rest of your life. And it was beautiful, wasn’t it? You and me, Steven and Garry, Kaylee and Mica–all of us standing together, done up like the Beautiful People, while the magistrate took us through the civil commitment. Fuck, why can’t I remember your tux? I remember Mica’s gorgeous dress. I remember Kaylee and Steven’s tuxes. But I can’t remember yours. I do so wish I could let you carry me further, but I cannot live with losing our life.

I remember middle school more clearly than I do portions of our life. How sick is that? I remember being the faggot who got beat up all the time better than I remember much of our time together. I can’t go on like that, knowing that I will forget us before I forget my childhood and those people who abandoned me.

I am sorry you’re so angry with me and I am more sorry that I have been so cruel to you. I keep saying I am not afraid to die. I even think I mean it sometimes. But the truth is that I am a coward, choosing the option that is less terrifying. I don’t want to die, knowing that this is it–that it is most likely that this life is all there is of me. I mean, I will live on in you and my work will probably last even longer. But for me, this is it; this is the end. I am angry that I was so fucking stupid, that you were so fucking stupid. I am angry that we get to have this and only this. I am angry that we won’t grow old together, to discover how much deeper, how much greater this love could grow.

And I am angry that I am losing so much. I will never finish what might have been my best screenplay. I have tried and tried and I just can’t keep it all straight–can’t even keep my goddamned notes straight. I forgot the name of Steven’s current partner. I spent the entire evening they were here last week absolutely mortified and trying to avoid letting on I had forgotten his fucking name. I am angry and terrified of the important things I might have already lost. I am also angry that I can hardly even tell if I need to pee anymore and can barely control it when I am able to notice. I am horrified that I can’t make love to you anymore.

I wish so desperately that I could feel your mouth engulfing me, as I take your cock deep in my throat. I wish that just one more time, I could feel myself enter you–your back pressed against my chest, your body arching as I grow harder just before I explode inside you. I wish ever so badly that we could lay blissfully there in our bed, bodies spent, naked and sweaty. Maybe we will try for one last time tonight, our last chance. I am not sure how my body will react or even if my body even can react. I have been very angry that this has been stolen from us and scared that you would start to resent me and the weakness that has made sex so difficult.

I have been so angry, so scared, and I have been taking it out on you. You, in turn, have been angry and scared and have been well within your rights to take it out on me, as my decision has been the entire cause of it. I am most sorry that I didn’t take you to the doctor for my first appointment. I am sorry that I hid it from you, until I asked you to come with me to see the psychologist. I tried, my darling Alex, I truly tried to tell you. I tried to tell you when I had decided it was time. I tried to tell you, to ask you to join me for the first appointments. I even tried to tell you when we were on the way to see the psychologist. I just couldn’t. I knew it would hurt you, and I was afraid of what it would do to us. I think I even knew that not telling you would make it worse, but I just couldn’t get the words to come out.

I wish I could take back the cruel things I have said, every cruel thing I have said to you over the last eleven years. But I especially wish I could take back all of my anger of the last five weeks. It wasn’t you and shouldn’t have been thrown at you. I need you to know that I love you now, more than I have ever loved you. I can barely contain it and wish I could just die of it, if such a thing is even possible. As weak as I have become, I am not so sure it isn’t. I am sorry that I have hurt you so, when I know that my decision alone was cruel enough. Please my love, please don’t remember my anger and fear. Remember the evening we met. Remember the joy you brought into my life and the wonderful times we spent together.

I know that you are still angry and hurt and afraid. I have betrayed you here at the end. I cannot thank you enough for choosing to carry me again, just a few more steps, but what steps they are. I hate myself for putting you through this, but I can’t die alone, and no matter who might be here for me, without you I am alone. It is this need for you that makes me understand how cruel I really am. Yet I will be cruel to the end. I need to feel your arms around me. I need to feel your body as you hold me against you. I need to feel your tears on my cheek. Most of all, I need your face to be the last thing I see, before I slip away forever.

Thank you, my dear, darling Alex,
Nicholas

During Warren Harding’s 1920 presidential campaign, Boise Penrose, the Republican boss of Philadelphia, is reputed to have said, “Keep Warren at home. If he goes on tour, somebody’s sure to ask him questions, and Warren’s just the sort of damn fool that’ll try and answer them.” The risk in answering questions is, of course, giving an answer that loses more votes than it gains. Harding, the frontrunner in that contest due to public disapproval of outgoing Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, won the election, though how many questions he answered in the process is less than clear. It is usual for incumbents to keep a low policy profile, already possessing sizable advantages, and having nothing to gain by sharing their opinions. The wise strategy in an open-seat election is less obvious, but the Minnesota Third District was Republican territory, and the smart money had voters defaulting to established partisan tendencies.

There is another way to handle policy. A candidate could run by poll, attempting to position him- or herself in agreement with the public on as many issues as possible, but that’s hard to do in a congressional campaign. Public opinion on a wide spectrum of issues is difficult to gauge among voters within a congressional district. Both parties conduct polls to gauge voters’ preference of candidates, as do independent research firms, but getting a clear answer to district voters’ opinions on this or that issue is beyond what a survey could realistically accomplish. The news changes at an ever-increasing pace, and as voters do their best to keep abreast of the emerging details, their opinions can change equally rapidly. Candidates could make issue-by-issue decisions based on the most recent polls, and not, in the end, find themselves on the more popular sides of many issues.

Advice on how to handle policy issues in a campaign, when not contradictory, presents a tightrope that is nearly impossible to walk. Since knowing the respective positions of the district’s voters is impossible, and convincing voters to adopt the candidate’s position is just as unlikely, the only remaining approach seems to be to convince voters that they have been in agreement with the candidate all along. A campaign strategy paper once succinctly advised, “The goal is not to change people’s attitudes, but rather to define the choice so that a vote for the candidate is consistent with existing attitudes.” Given the constant fight for scarce media resources that a congressional campaign finds itself involved in, such a goal is quite unrealistic. Campaigns are often preoccupied with whether average voters will remember the candidate’s name.

There are issues, as well, that resist the taking of a clear stance. Everyone likes a fiery candidate who takes a clear stand, but a congressional representative has to deal with policy issues that are intricate, as everyone in Congress, and everyone who wanted to be, found out last fall. When Wall Street firms began to fall like dominoes last September, the White House and both congressional parties agreed that an emergency had occurred that would require congressional action. That’s about as far as the agreement went, even within the party caucuses. The parties bickered between and amongst themselves over the amount of the bailout, where the money would go, who would be responsible for its disbursement, the degree of oversight, and countless other details. It’s frustrating to observe–and exactly how the process is supposed to work.

An immensely complex piece of legislation concerning levels of finance few of us understand was produced, and Congress was asked to pass it with maximum haste. For a candidate to take a public position on the bailout that was responsible and clear was a little like explaining how to tie a shoe to someone who’s never seen a shoe. Still, the press and the public demanded to know, rightly so, where the candidates stood. At a debate on September 22, with the package still under discussion, Ashwin Madia saw the inevitability of the passage of some kind of bailout, and said, “Unfortunately I don’t think there’s a choice when it comes to the package, so I support it, but I’m not happy about it.” When the first bill failed to pass, Madia issued a statement pointing out the bill’s lack of bipartisan support, and stating that his criteria for passage would include protections for taxpayers, prohibitions on Wall Street bonuses, and greater scrutiny of investment banks. When the compromise bill was passed and signed, the candidate issued another statement, this time stating that he was, “Pleased that a significant bipartisan compromise has been achieved. However, I am disappointed that compromise required more than $100 billion in pork barrel spending.”

To read Madia’s remarks now, it sounds like he was hedging his bets on the issue, never quite getting around to mentioning how he would have voted, but that’s not entirely fair. The candidate made clear that he thought the legislation necessary, and what his expectations of the bill would be. The bill fell short of those expectations, as well as being laden with measures he deemed wasteful, but was still being taken up by the Congress as an emergency measure. So should the hypothetical representative vote yea or nay? All we can reasonably expect of a representative is to advocate for the issues he deems appropriate, and vote his best judgment. The standard for candidates, however, is stricter than that. The deliberation you would wish for in a congressional representative seems like dodging the issue when done by someone running for the office.

In the election season, the greater concern seemed to be convincing the public that there was a campaign at all. In the case of an unknown candidate like Ashwin Madia, there was little to be lost in demonstrating his issue positions to the public. Just getting noticed amongst the extensive buffet of political information in a presidential year is the major, ever-present issue of the day. The mainstream media ignored most of the campaign’s issue-related releases, and showed little interest in covering policy-based events. By Election Day, despite the campaign’s best efforts, most voters likely walked into the booth with little knowledge of either candidate’s specific positions. In the end, candidates are often judged on something more intangible, as one political scientist put it, “Less by what they say than how they say it, less by their achievements than by their personalities.”

The Madia for Congress campaign’s approach to policy–making the candidate’s positions as clear as possible–was a clear strategy to appeal to voters who might be sympathetic to that candidate’s positions. It probably made little difference, though, in the final outcome. Of course a candidate could always attempt to pander to voter preferences, going public with only the most popular of initiatives, as Dick Morris, former strategist to President Clinton has advised.

The key is to advertise your positions only if the public agrees with them. If the public won’t accept your basic premise, it doesn’t matter how much you spend or how well your ads are produced; they won’t work.

That is an ugly sentiment, one that places winning the election as an absolute goal, and gives cause to wonder what the point is in running for office in the first place. At any rate, there seems to be little evidence indicating that this cynical approach leads to electoral success, at least at the level of a congressional election.

The Madia for Congress campaign went out of its way to make its policy positions as clear as possible. To the degree it succeeded in portraying the candidate’s governing philosophy, it was the right approach, if for no other reason than because it was the right thing to do. Policy position may not, in the end, change the minds of very many voters, but voters who take an interest ought to have access to their potential representative’s opinion, and know who they’ll be voting for. Running for Congress is a massive undertaking, and when all is said and done, you might lose. You may as well lose being what you really are.

The day before the election, I was leaving the Madia for Congress office to prepare for the candidate’s visit to a community college that I had arranged, and on my way out, overheard a colleague from the campaign’s finance office down the hall, saying, “You know, I feel like this whole campaign has been a loud argument on about ten blogs between a bunch of people who already had their minds made up.” He might have been right.

After an exhausting campaign that, between the endorsement and the general election, lasted over a year, Ashwin Madia lost the 2008 congressional election in Minnesota’s Third District to Erik Paulsen by over 7.5%. The most frustrating aspect of losing an election is never quite knowing the full reason for the loss. The campaign might have been a failure, or, perhaps, it was a waste of time from the outset, never having the ghost of a chance of picking up a Democratic seat in a traditionally Republican district. There is no clear answer, and for all I know, the results might have had nothing at all to do with effectiveness of the either campaign.

Some time ago, I attended my soon-to-be ninth grade daughter’s registration program at our neighborhood high school, at which teachers from various departments presented what the school had to offer. A couple of dozen parents were in the small auditorium, and the teacher from the Social Studies department decided to liven up the proceedings by asking questions about the recent election, rewarding correct answers by throwing candy. “Who is the new President of the United States?” he asked, and a woman in the sixth row answered, “Barack Obama!” The teacher asked the name of the current winner of the hairpin-close Minnesota U.S. Senate race, and an eighth-grade boy in front got his candy for answering “Al Franken.” “Here’s a tough one,” the teacher said, “Who is the newly elected U.S. Representative from Minnesota Congressional District Three?”

Silence filled the room. The two major party candidates had spent a combined five million dollars running for congress, not counting the campaign of the third-party candidate and the millions of dollars in resources the two major party congressional committees had poured into the race. Untold volunteer hours had been donated. Doors were knocked on, phone calls made, TV ads run. This was a room full of active participants in the community, parents who most likely voted, many of whom probably voted for their new congressman whose name they did not know, much less the name of his defeated opponent.

Finally I could take no more. “Erik Paulsen,” I called out, and was dully rewarded with a strawberry Starburst. It was like some kind of bitter joke. If a congressional candidate falls in a district where nobody much is paying attention, does it make a sound? Apparently not. The time, effort, and resources poured into convincing voters in the district to have an opinion on who represents them in Congress had no effect at all, at least not among the parents of eighth graders in East Bloomington. They may have simply been among the nearly 12,000 voters in the district who cast a vote for President, and didn’t bother with the election for the U.S. House.

The contest for the congressional seat in Minnesota’s Third District had the attention of two major political parties, the national press, and political watchers all over the country, which is to say the contest was watched by everyone except the people who mattered most, the residents of the district who would cast a vote for the seat. Those are the people the campaign competed for, and those people have other things on their mind. The campaigns are left with one comprehensive communications strategy to capture the attention of voters: Try everything.

It’s a new age of politics, and you have to campaign using every new piece of technology that comes along, but that doesn’t exempt anyone from using the tried and true methods of campaigning that candidates have always engaged in. Your supporters might be posting on blogs, but they’d better not neglect to send letters to the editor of their local free weekly paper. You might have a slick website, but don’t forget to knock on doors. Email your supporters, and anyone who might possibly become a supporter, but you best send a bulk mailing, lest your name become lost in the spam filter.

While you’re in the middle of a congressional campaign, that campaign seems drastically important, and truly it is. This is a representative democracy, and elections decide who makes the nation’s important decisions on all of our behalf. Most people don’t think about that every day, though. They don’t wake up every day and check their email to see where their candidate’s name has been mentioned. They don’t care how many people showed up at the West Minnetonka Rotary Club last Wednesday morning to hear his speech. They don’t have a bumper sticker. So the campaign does what it can to bring it to them, and so does every other candidate campaigning for every other office.

It’s all background noise after a while. The commercial break during every local TV news broadcast is filled with one political ad after another–the Presidential election, Senate contest, House races not just in your district but all the others that are in the same broadcast market. Mailers arrive from candidates, parties, interest groups. You get phone calls, people at the door, fliers on the stoop if they miss you. The state house candidate shakes your hand at the local farmers market. Your friends send you emails. Pundits on the radio handicap the races. The parties send you sample ballots. After a while, no one can distinguish one candidate from another. Ashwin Madia, right. Remind me what he was running for again?

It’s a couple of months after the election, now. My candidate lost, and life seems to be going on, my family currently escaping the clutches of the looming economic crisis. The Presidential candidate I supported won, and I have enough distance from the disappointing election to see that President of the United States is probably more significant than a freshman representative in the U.S. House, even if that’s not the campaign I poured my energy into. I won’t be voting for anyone for anything for a couple of years, so my attention can drift back to the concerns that make up life for normal people–who’s making dinner, whether the kids got their homework done, how to handle the latest car trouble, how stable the Twins third base situation is. It’s enough to fill up the days, and then some. If someone wants to tell me they’re running for Congress, well, they’ll have some work ahead of them to get me to notice.

Perspective gained, politics can resume a more reasonable role in life, as it does for most people. No more Google Alerts in my inbox. Well, that’s almost true. My state senator is up for reelection in 2010, and I do have an alert for his name, as well as the three prominent Republicans in the district that might consider challenging him. This morning, I saw that one of them is giving a talk at a meeting next week. I wonder if anyone should be taping that.

My first reaction to that, as an anthropologist, was this: “Hey, Imma let you say that now, but if you diss my Pygmies like that I’ll kick your ass.” In other words, I do find it rather condescending when western occidento-hetero-caucasoido-normative types take it on themselves to make blanket statements that some other group of people of which they know nothing are stupid. I understand the whole being annoyed at the bible thing, but this is where modern-day new atheists can be thoughtless when unpracticed in their philosophy and its application.

But it was only a Facebook comment.

My second thought was this: I never read the sports section of the newspaper, but last year when I came across a large fragment of a 30-year-old sports page from the local paper, hidden inside a wall, I read every word. Wouldn’t you? And the Dead Sea Scrolls are two thousand years old, and about a topic that is pretty much as interesting to me as hockey scores and basketball.

In the end, I went to see the exhibit, and I assure you, the part about the stupid shepherds is not only overwhelmingly outdone by other aspects of the scrolls, but in fact is rather inaccurate. The keepers of the scrolls were more like Moonies than shepherds, except when they were tour guides. That’s a topic I may address at another time.

So the other day I visited the Jeffers Petroglyphs site in southwestern Minnesota. That’s also a religious exhibit of sorts, if we assume (and we should) that the symbols pecked and carved into two-billion-year-old red quartzite played a role in various Native American cultural practices having to do with spirits, gods, afterlife, and so on. Jeffers has thunderbirds, lightning symbols, warriors doing battle with shamans, turtles, magic turtles, hands, bison (probably the extinct kind), atlatls, and more. The guides, polite and well informed caucasionormatives, describe various hypotheses about the symbols and who made them and why, play down the violent parts (maybe that one of the guy with the spear in his chest bleeding all over the place is all about the transition from boyhood to manhood?) and try to link the religious nature of the site to the presumed religiosity (or, at least, spirituality!) of the visitors. The prayer we make now at this site is enhanced by the thousands of years of others coming here to pray. And so on.

And both subjects have their holocaustic contexts. The Dead Sea Scrolls were probably kept by a Jewish religious sect, or at the very least, were part of a Jewish Renaissance following an exodus of sorts, and were a big deal in a Jewish world increasingly controlled and colonized by repressive and violent outsiders known today as heroes of Western Civilization. And the next two thousand years is, as they say, bloody history.

Jeffers is much older and diffuse in its cultural associations but was a sacred site to the Dakota (and others) at a time when the practice was to do war with the Indians, kill a lot of them, cut off some of their body parts to sell later in town as curios, or deflesh their bones, varnish them, keep them on display in your office, and to do all the killing in a way that maximized your votes, if you happen to be a politician. And, just to put this in perspective, I think we as a civilization came to abhor the Jewish Holocaust at the time it was revealed, in the mid 1940s. Most of the native body parts harvested, for example, during the Dakota Uprising (centered geographically near Jeffers) were returned between 1971 and 1990, and by force of law, not a sense of shame or propriety.

I recommend a visit to both. But don’t be a dick about it. Your ancestors have already pretty much taken care of that.

It seems like a simple and obvious application for the web’s most successful brand-named search engine, but its implications are dramatic. The Madia campaign had a subscription to the local daily newspaper, but really, it was a wasteful and anachronistic expenditure. Every day I would pick the Star Tribune up off the sidewalk in front of the office door and pitch it into the paper recycling bin beside the office copier. It was already well after 7 a.m., and to anyone who had checked their email since dinner the evening before, whatever was in the morning daily was old news.

The technology available to the campaigns constantly improves with new applications that make communications faster and cheaper. Tracker footage gets posted to YouTube within minutes of an event, and campaigns have begun to produce viral video ads specifically for the site. It’s much less expensive than TV, simpler get the content to the target audience, and of course, faster. Blogs with relevant stories feature updated postings, minute-to-minute, that you can check from your Blackberry. All of it happens at digital speed, and campaigns do what they can to keep up.

And you have to keep up, and use the available technology at least as well as your opponent, or give away an advantage. The idea is to make use of these resources for the campaign, but you start to wonder if, in some perverse way, it’s become the other way around, and the resource is using the campaign. Are candidates truly building a campaign online, or are they just not giving ground, worried that the opponent will come to dominate the medium, as Republicans have taken over the talk-radio airwaves and the Obama campaign claimed ownership of text-message communication? If daily newspapers don’t get stories to us fast enough anymore, how far does this go? Will the 2010 midterm election feature frazzled campaign staffs obsessively checking for new scandal updates on Twitter? Will campaigns turn the cameras on themselves to defend against trackers taking remarks out of context? There is not a clear answer, but you have to wonder how much video footage of candidates is floating around YouTube, every tracker looking for the next macaca moment.22 How many political blogs would have given up on posting into the unread void of cyberspace without candidate supporters attending to their day-to-day postings? We don’t know, and won’t, because no campaign can afford an experiment in conceding the electronic battlefield. Doing so would render the November election a referendum on whatever issues your opponent selects, on terms defined by the other campaign.

A key moment in the campaign?

On September 30, the Erik Paulsen campaign called a press conference in which Senator Geoff Michel, a Republican member of the Minnesota Senate, was the only speaker. Press conferences exist to get attention for the candidate, and are, as a rule, heavily promoted by campaigns. Attention from mainstream news sources is desired, and TV news coverage is the Holy Grail. It was odd, then, that Erik Paulsen, himself, did not appear at all on that day. For a press conference, the atmosphere was markedly low-key.

Senator Michel, as it turned out, was there to point out the differences between Erik Paulsen and Ashwin Madia. “Raising a family in the district, sending your kids to the public school, owning a home, working in the Third District, paying property taxes in the Third District. Erik Paulsen has done all these things,” the Senator told us, “and Ashwin Madia has not.” “I don’t want to use the word ‘carpetbagger,’” Michel went on to say, though of course he just had. Madia is a 30-year-old bachelor who rents an apartment. Representative Ramstad, who had served the district as a Republican congressman for nine terms and had endorsed Paulsen, also had no children, but that was hardly the point.

The Paulsen campaign, taking care to speak through their surrogate, made the point on that day that Minnesota’s Third Congressional District is made up of, and should be represented by, a certain type of person. The district is suburban and its residents are, for the most part, white. Ashwin Madia, the dark-skinned son of Indian immigrants who had left the district to be educated in New York City, was not these things. Erik Paulsen, by contrast, very much was, as Minnesota GOP Chairman Ron Carey later, explained, noting that, “Erik Paulsen … really fits the 3rd District so well, as one of them.”

It was an old school campaign play, updated. The Paulsen campaign did not invent the tactic of pointing out the otherness of a political opponent as a negative. Dividing the electorate between us and them has been one of the defining tactics of American politics since World War II. The acknowledged master of the tactic was Richard Nixon, whose campaign slogan for his first successful congressional run was, “One of Us.” Paulsen, like Nixon before him, was attempting to tap into the way suburban homeowners in his district see themselves.

William Schneider examined the suburban ethic in a 1992 Atlantic Monthly article, noting, “The prevailing life-style in all these places remains distinctively suburban, meaning home-owning, homogeneous, and largely white.” Schneider interviewed Dan Walters, a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, who further explained, “The theory…is I bought this house. It’s mine. This is my little preserve.” In the suburban preserve, as Senator Michel seemed to suggest, people are like you. They are from the neighborhood, and they stay there. Their family looks like yours, their job is similar, and they do not look like their parents came from another part of the world. The Paulsen campaign was tapping into the same impulse then-Vice President Nixon had in 1952 when he gave his infamous “Checkers” speech, as Rick Perlstein notes in his book on Nixon’s lasting political legacy.

To a new suburban middle class that was tempting itself into Republicanism, admiring Richard Nixon was becoming part and parcel of a political identity based on seeing through the pretensions of the cosmopolitan liberals…The America over whose direction they struggled for the next fifty years, whose meaning they continue to contest.

Senator Michel, on that day, made the case that it should be obvious who we are and just as obvious that Ashwin Madia is something else altogether. Covert racism is no small part of this tactic. Dan Carter, in his book on the 1968 George Wallace campaign tips his hat to Nixon’s (and later Ronald Reagan’s) mastery of subtle race-baiting.

Nixon had taped a television commercial attacking the decline of “law and order” in American cities…Nixon did not have to make the racial connection any more than would Ronald Reagan when he began one of his famous discourses on welfare queens using food stamps to buy porterhouse steaks.

There are votes to be had by distinguishing yourself from your opponent in this way, but it needs to be done with great care. A risk is run that you will offend the public, losing more votes than you gain. Erik Paulsen wanted his suburban pedigree on his candidate resume, but only to be read by the people who would appreciate it. The strategy was to call attention to it, but not too much attention. Have it said, but not by the candidate. Get some news coverage, but not too much. If the press conference stays off the TV, but shows up in the online publications and the blogs, the right people will see it and internalize it. Those people are already voting for you, but now they have a clearer picture of why, an identity that they might pass along to their social groups. Anyone who finds it and takes offense wasn’t going to vote for you anyway.

Ashwin Madia called a press conference the following day, essentially asking his opponent to campaign by discussing the issues. Senator Michel and Minnesota Republican Party Chair Ron Carey were present, though again, not Representative Paulsen. Each of them, in turn, took the microphone after Madia left the room, and tried to clarify, or perhaps distance, the remarks of the previous day, ensuring that Paulsen was not portrayed as an overt racist. Carey began, pointing out that, “From a demographic standpoint, Erik Paulsen fits the district very well.” Senator Michel spoke further about Mr. Madia’s fit for the district, using the phrase, “When you look at the candidate…” Then, when asked by reporters about the racism implied in the words they chose, both Republicans representing the Paulsen campaign denied using them.

As the questions from reporters became somewhat hostile, Carey and Michel became visibly agitated, apparently not having expected a backlash from reporters concerning what appeared to be underhanded tactics. Michel began to phrase more carefully, now explaining, “If you look at the candidate’s resume…,” and Carey became almost incoherent, rambling something about what a good soccer coach Ashwin Madia would, indeed, make, as he was clearly in good physical condition.

It was a strange moment. The Paulsen camp seemed genuine, simply expressing what, to them, was their candidate’s fitness for public service and not possessing the self-awareness for it to occur to them that their comments might be offensive, until they had already made them. They were just stating the obvious–a certain kind of person lives here, and Ashwin Madia is not our kind. It was, again, more than a little Nixonian, as Perlstein, examining Nixon’s definition of the “silent majority,” recalls.

Nixon made political capital of a certain experience of humiliation: the humiliation of having to defend values that seemed to you self-evident, then finding you had no words to defend them, precisely because they seemed so self-evident.

Given the energy the campaign put into the two days of press conferences, Erik Paulsen’s absence continued to confound, though in retrospect it seems like a shrewd decision.

The controversy was, in the end, largely ignored by the mainstream press, as was, it would seem, its intent. Minnesota Public Radio’s politics blog covered both days of conferences, and the Minnesota Independent posted the videos. Minnesota Democrats Exposed was present and did the obligatory blog postings. The Paulsen campaign likely made their case successfully, to exactly the audience with whom it would resonate.

The internet takes the communication between a candidate and a voter inquisitive enough to seek information about a candidate to a more intimate level, one in which television crews and newspaper editors are absent. The public seems to be responding. A 2008 survey reported that 39% of internet users (29% of all adults) have gone online to read or watch “unfiltered” campaign material, which includes candidate debates, speeches/announcements, and position papers.

My own tasks at the Madia for Congress headquarters were ample evidence of this. Each day, the Communications Director would send me e-mails from web users who had clicked the link on our website to ask policy questions, and I would respond. The issues in question were all over the board: same-sex marriage, energy policy, the Iraq War, gun control, the financial services bailout, and so on. Questioners would give their email address, and I would reply with the candidate’s position. Usually the questioner would then reply to my response. While I would get the occasional angry reply from voters who disagreed with Mr. Madia’s position, or from voters with whom the campaign’s position was aligned but not strongly enough to satisfy them, the vast majority of emailers were grateful for our attention, and for being taken seriously, even if the candidate’s position was at odds with their own.

Giving voters this kind of attention was, in itself, the point of the exercise, and a luxury for the campaign and voters alike. The campaign received some extra assurance that policy positions were being accurately articulated to voters who were truly interested in a specific issue. Voters got answers to their questions, quickly and with little effort. A worker who came home from the second shift and wanted to know Ashwin Madia’s position on the Employee Free Choice Act could Google the candidate’s name, bring up the website, and send us as nuanced a question as she wished, right then, at 4 a.m., while it was still fresh in her mind. That’s easier and less intimidating than taking to the microphone at a candidate forum, to which she likely couldn’t make it anyway because she needed to get supper on the table and run her kid to basketball practice. This way, she knew she’d get an answer, quickly and easily.

Online interaction between campaigns and voters has increased consistently over time, every election producing a larger, more impressive statistic of internet use among voters. In the 2008 election, 46% of Americans (up from 31% in 2004) used the internet, email, or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views, and mobilize others. That is a big number, almost half the American public and probably closer to 80% of those who vote. There is every indication that there will be a new statistic after the 2012 election that will make this one seem relatively unimpressive.

Accessing candidate websites is far from the only manner in which voters search for information on the web. There are uncounted numbers of online news sources and political blogs on the internet, open to anyone with a connection and the inclination. Just as users of candidate websites interact with them directly, users of online news sources have a much more immediate relationship with their preferred websites than consumers of traditional media can expect. Gary Selnow calls this “up-lining,” the ability of web users to respond to the initial information source in a manner that renders their response as a part of the content. “Up-lining topples the traditional hierarchy of sender and receiver,” argues Selnow, “and in the years ahead, it is destined to have a profound effect on political communication.”

Indeed, it seems it already has, especially when the phenomenon of blogging is added to the on-line mix. A blog was initially a sort of online diary posted by a single host, but has become something quite different. Blogs, today, especially those that concern themselves with politics, are daily postings of whatever news items the host deems relevant, followed by (usually, but not necessarily) brief responses from readers that can number into the thousands per day, depending upon how well-trafficked the blog, and perhaps to some degree, how inflammatory the initial posting. Andrew Sullivan, a writer who stumbled into the form partly by accident, and in the process helped to invent it, appreciates the style of immediate feedback as a sort of hyper fact-check.

Unlike newspapers, which would eventually publish corrections in a box of printed spinach far from the original error, bloggers had to walk the walk of self-correction in the same space and in the same format as the original screwup. The form was more accountable, not less, because there is nothing more conducive to professionalism than being publicly humiliated for sloppiness. Of course, a blogger could ignore an error or simply refuse to acknowledge mistakes. But if he persisted, he would be razzed by competitors and assailed by commenters and abandoned by readers.

Due to its emphasis on immediate feedback, a blog, though in print, is not a printed medium in quite the same static way as a newspaper or a book. Sullivan continues, “The key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.”

There is no arguing that online blogs have a loyal, even a fanatical, audience. There are not many indications, however, that those dedicated online reader/responders add up to very many people. Only an estimated 4% of online users read blogs. The few vigilant blog readers are then divided up among the multitude of competing blogs, and traditional news sources, having brand names and websites of their own, retain most of the market share.

Due to the type of user that blogs draw, there seems to be little likelihood that readers are open to persuasion by either candidate. On the web, as in other walks of life, people like to have conversations, political and otherwise, with people like themselves who will validate their opinions. Web users looking for political content find blogs with a supportive audience that will confirm already held beliefs. At the end of the day, blog readers very likely hold the same political positions they did at the start, now with a greater degree of certitude.

Blogs are an irresistible venue for campaigns. If they don’t directly change the mind of voters, they affect the campaign in a more subtle way. Campaigns have a narrative, and any public policy issue has a vocabulary. It is difficult for an elected representative to vote against something called the Patriot Act because of a concern for civil liberties—one does not want to be bogged down in nitpicky issues of constitutional law at the expense of a perception of being lacking in genuine patriotism.

Much as right-wing talk radio shows do little to convince anyone who does not already subscribe to their point of view, blogs give supporters a productive way to stay engaged, lend a general atmosphere to the campaign, and most importantly, define the terms of the debate. If a campaign is a public conversation about who should govern a society, the framing of that conversation is a way to influence its outcome. Campaigns fight hard to determine the political vocabulary, and blogs are good places for supporters to make the campaign’s case, on the campaign’s terms.

Also, blogs are cheap. Blogs already exist that are friendly to the issues that make up a candidate’s platform. All that needs to be done is to develop the relationship and send supporters to the site to post comments, which doesn’t cost a nickel. The Paulsen campaign went a step farther than that, putting an established blogger on payroll. Michael Brodkorb owns and operates a blog called “Minnesota Democrats Exposed,” its obvious raison d’etre to attack Democratic officials and candidates. The Paulsen campaign wrote several thousand dollars in checks to MDE, with the expense identified in Paulsen campaign expense reports as “Public Relations Services,” The actual service rendered was to turn the blog’s attention to attacking Ashwin Madia on an almost daily basis. A few thousand dollars is not chump change, but it is a small fraction of the cost of producing and airing a television ad buy. Of course, the blog only reaches a fraction of the number of voters televisions ads do, but that’s beside the point. The Paulsen campaign was paying for the attention of an already assembled audience, an audience that would be willing and able to take direction, internalize the campaign’s talking points, and work on the campaign’s behalf to define the terms of the debate. While energizing supporters, a blog like MDE casts a wider net, as political reporters follow the daily postings as a potential source of leads for what might be legitimate mainstream news stories.

… continued …