Polinaut: June 30, 2006 Archive

I hate out-of-office autoreplies, but ...

Posted at 9:18 AM on June 30, 2006 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

I'm going to be doing some writing on my own for the next few months. It won't be about politics and it won't be here. It's just little slice-of-life stuff to keep the arthritis from the fingers. If you're interested in adding it to your RSS reader, go to Stirrings from the Empty Nest.

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Soap opera update

Posted at 12:02 PM on June 30, 2006 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)

Laura McCallum reports she talked to DFL candidate Amy Klobuchar this morning for a piece she's working on about primaries. Laura asked her about her campaign "forcibly detaining" the GOP crew yesterday. According to Laura, "she said it wasn't her campaign, it was the Humphrey Institute folks. She said she told her campaign manager to give the Kennedy folks the tape. She doesn't have a problem with them having it."

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Does it get any better than this?

Posted at 12:07 PM on June 30, 2006 by Bob Collins

There are some days when you just know God is looking out for bloggers. Otherwise, how does stuff like this fall into our laps?

Gov. Pawlenty had his final radio show this morning and talked with 107-year-old Minnesota native Sygny Broberg. Bless her heart.

Listen in Real Audio.

A big step in the right direction

Posted at 1:35 PM on June 30, 2006 by Bob Collins

The Ford Takes Five feature on the Ford Bell Web site may be the single most impressive thing I've seen in this campaign so far. It's really great. Mark Gisleson has really done a great job setting it up and, obviously, Ford Bell is to be congratulated for being front-and-center when it comes to answering questions.

This week, Gary Miller over at Kennedy vs. the Machine has the five question.

I can think of nothing better that could come from this election season than this becoming standard practice.

"Who gives a Rip?" revisited

Posted at 2:13 PM on June 30, 2006 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

Friday is shaping up as the slow day Fridays usually are so this will be my last post on Polinaut until September. Tom Scheck and Mike Mulcahy are going to be posting here during my absence and their stuff will be great.

So for my last post, I'm bringing back my favorite "column" of all-time; one I wrote in 2004. I often wonder what happened to the kids and whether the delegates to the RNC actually did adopt this place as they said they would. Maybe when I get back in September, I'll make a few phone calls and find out.

The theme here isn't "Republicans are better" or "Democrats are better." The theme of this piece was actually the transformative abilities of kids.

I hope you enjoy it. I hope I can write like this again someday.

---

Who gives a rip?

Lacey, Yassin, Angel, and Yasmill wouldn't know a Republican if one stepped off a bus and painted their daycare center. Today, a bunch of them did.

On a day in which the theme of the convention is "compassion across America," delegations fanned out across the five boroughs of New York to prove they have a heart and give a rip; a concept that is likely to provoke chuckles from Democrats. But even if the Republicans were working in the community for only a day, that's still one more day than the Democrats put in in Boston last month.

Indeed, the event had all the makings of a photo op -- well, yeah, probably because it was a photo op. And one young man whose name appeared to be "I work at the White House" (hey, that's what he said when someone asked) was making sure that "Compassion Across America" stickers were prominently displayed on the delegates as they approached the paint brushes, cans, and rollers with all the self-confidence of a teenager who discovered a pimple on the morning of the senior prom.

(Photo by Lacey)

The kids -- Lacey & the gang -- were sent with their leaders to the corner park to play. And, later, some of the delegates were sent there too, since too many of them had volunteered and there was no room to accomodate them all. The luckiest ones got to play; the rest got to paint.

I played.

It doesn't take much to entertain a 5-year-old and if you have any parental experiences at all, you know that a digital camera and a strong back are about all you need, although delegate guest Lowery Smith's (Minneapolis) 4-fingered hand provided a good backup.

For an hour the delegates played, before the kids were called to the park bench to eat their lunch. During the time, an occasional "can we play yet?" plea would be registered. It came from Dan Kihistadius. He's not a kid. He's a delegate from Burnsville.

Nobody talked politics; they talked 'kid,' a language that -- if spoken often enough (and preferably with kids) -- can often refocus a person's priorities to forget about method and worry about results. The delegates at the park all seemed to lead lives of personal mission not at all inconsistent with taking a bus to a day-care center in Brooklyn. Where they differ with their Democrat counterparts is the method of helping the Laceys, Yassins, Angels, and Yasmills. The ones I talked to all had stories of mission work, mostly in other countries and mostly with a faith-based organization. If they were talking the talk, they seemed to know how to walk the walk too.

Photo op? Well, after I stopped taking photos, they kept playing.

In a political campaign, the debate often gets boiled down to this: (Political party of your choice here) cares about the kids. (Political party you don't like here) doesn't. Some debate, eh?.

By early in the afternoon, it seemed that the tendency to talk politics was in reverse proportion to the amount of time actually spent with the kids. Back at the day-care center, the walls in Brooklyn are pretty much the same as the ones in Minnesota. A delegate hurt his finger. "Is your finger OK?" one delegate asked. "Yeah, and I put in for a Purple Heart," he replied.

Because the bus driver was to go off duty at 2 p.m., the group had to leave. Some delegates stayed behind to finish the painting; they'd figure out how to get back later. Delegate Missy Graner, a University of Minnesota student, didn't want to leave. Not before she said goodbye to the kids, she said.

It would've been easy to get back on the bus and head back -- self-satisfied -- to Midtown. The delegates at least earned that. But on the way back, Rep. Mark Kennedy said he'd heard the day care center has more needs than just freshly-painted walls, and delegates began offering ideas of more ways they can help. They intend, as a group, to establish a relationship with the center -- and the kids -- and provide money and supplies to continue the work. One delegate suggested a plan that would link their kids with the kids in the center.

There's an episode in West Wing in which the jaded White House staff is forced by White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry to spend a day meeting with members of the public and listening to what they're interested in. Apparently it's something that Washington (George, not DC) required. By the end of the day, the staffers bubbled, ostensibly for having learned something about people, but also for having been reminded that they do what they do for more reasons than just saying "I won" on a Wednesday morning in November.

The delegates clearly took away more than they'd thought they would. Kids can do that to you. Especially in Brooklyn.

Maybe we'll get a better debate out of it. All in exchange for a few hours work and some buckets of paint.

Good deal for everyone.

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