Who is Barry Casselman?

Posted at 8:36 AM on February 9, 2006 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

Greetings, Earthlings:

Another Barry Casselman sighting. Two days in a row after going a lifetime of never having heard of him. He's in the Washington Times today with a piece critical of Patty Wetterling called "Democrats in Minnesota." He has an engaging writing style but the headline action needs a little work. That's two Wetterling-critical mentions in the media in two days from Casselmanm, who -- it says at the bottom of the article -- writes about national politics for the Preludium News Service, whatever that is. Gotta find out who this guy is. There's no Preludium News Service Web site (hey, who doesn't have a Web site these days?) and I can't find anything in the dictionary that even says what a "preludium" is. We must explore.

Rasmussen is out with a survey today showing a drop in support for Hillary Clinton.

Al Franken, anyone? AlterNet has a profile of the man who is occasionally dropping the line that he may run against Norm Coleman in '08.

I'm still working that decision out. I think I'm going to let it evolve. I don't have to decide for a while, and I'm sort of doing the things that I'd have to do if I did run. So if I do make the decision to do it, I'll have done the things I needed to have done. I'm learning -- traveling within Minnesota, talking to people. I've been raising money for candidates in Minnesota and around the country. I've formed a national PAC called the Midwest Values PAC.

He's traveling within Minnesota. Gut-check: who's seen him outside Minneapolis St. Paul? And where? Fess up.

In Mankato, the Free Press has taken on Bob Gunther in an article about a fundraising letter that, it says, appeared to link cash with legislative action.

You know, a few years ago the Pioneer Press did a Sunday column that exposed the relationship between campaign contributions and legislative action. As I understand, the Press rolled a copying machine outside the campaign board's office on the day financial filings were due. As the legislators handed them in, the Press made copies of them, then whisked them downtown where a team of computer folks entered the data and then spent the entire night on a Friday making a database that compared the source funds to that legislator's actions in the next session. The reporters then spent Saturday writing the story and there it was on the front page on Sunday. It was a marvelous effort that I haven't seen repeated anywhere since, and it landed with a shrug of the shoulders at the time.

Not much on the "blog burp" today because my RSS reader is down (Bloglines) and I'm too lazy to enter all the URLs by hand. It's a long campaign season and Polinaut must pace himself.

Comments (1)

BC,

Casselman has been writing about politics in this town for decades. He fearlessly predicted the rise of Gary Hart as a contender for the '84 Democratic nomination before Hart even achieved asterik status. He predicted Clinton would be the '92 Democratic nominee before Clinton gave his disastrous nominating speech for Michael Dukakis.

In addition to writing for the Washington Times, Barry is now a columnist on RealClearPolitics, perhaps the single best aggregator of news and blogs on the center-right.

Michael Barone asks HIM for his thoughts on politics. Better get to know him. Fast.

Posted by Gary M. Miller | February 9, 2006 10:03 AM

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