The Left Side of the Toolbox.

I was visiting the newly blog-rolled The Appleton Blog by Jeff Lindsay and his blog is pretty much straight-up life in Appleton. He is close the Hmong community and pays attention to the incidents in the field between the locals and the Hmong. This is as about as close to politics he comes.

However, he commented on the flap with Congressman Kagen and the congressman's comments.

Jeff says:

Without wishing to be political here, let me say that as a supporter of civility and politeness, the story troubles me. It's bad enough for politicians to be rude to their opponents - understandable, yes, but unfortunate. It's worse to physically threaten opponents or to be rude to their spouses. But to think that someone would boast about such rudeness, or fabricate it and then boast about it - well, something's pretty wrong there. Dr. Kagen, a lot of fine people voted for you and are hoping that you'll represent Appleton and Wisconsin well. I hope you can make the appropriate apologies and move forward.

Source: The Appleton Blog – Congressman Steve Kagen of Appleton and National Controversy over His White House Comments

Jeff's blog elicited this comment:

Wow, I was so excited to find a blog about Appleton. Instead, I found a blog that you're using to make posts that are political and seem only to further conservative interests. How disappointing! Hopefully visitors from other places don't assume that the majority of people in Appleton think the way you do.

Look for Kagen to tell his side of the story on the Colbert Report in February!

Source: The Appleton Blog – Commentary on Congressman Steve Kagen of Appleton and National Controversy over His White House Comments

Wow, Jeff writes one post about our Rep. asking Steve Kagen to conduct himself with class and Jeff becomes a right-wing tool. Its real funny about the comment hoping people coming to his blog don't assume the majority of people think like he does. I assure you, they are much closer to Jeff's position than yours.

Look for Steve Kagen to tell his side of the story on The Colbert Report. Oh, like he hasn't had the chance to tell his story. In any event, this whole thing IS STEVE KAGEN'S story, remember he told it freely to an audience and was caught on tape.

What a leftoid tool.

What Happened?

Our now infamous and still new congressman Steve Kagen is living up to expectations.

What happened? What led to his winning?

Quite a few different thing mixed together to form the vote soup that put him into office.

A Tsunami of Discontent

Of course, the most widely attributed factor was a national GOP fatigue. This was brought on my many things. The culture of corruption hyped by Nancy and the Dems did its work and I would not say the GOP played the Dem scripted part but no doubt the likes of Foley lent credence to the charges. The DeLay case may have done so too but I would say Tom DeLay is a victim along the lines of the Duke LaCrosse player. He'll have his day in court. The Dems played it very skillfully.

Other points are lack of progress on immigration and in Iraq. Plus every now and then the independent voter gets change in their mind. Never mind asking them what needs change its just change for change's sake.

Don't whine about the MSM. We have proven we can win despite their best efforts.

Dissatisfied & Split Republican Voters

Many of the people I knew who supported John Gard did not do so enthusiastically. John's record in the State Assembly did not show a lot of promise. Looking for progress on TABOR and tax relief we did not find it. Looking for spending restraint we did not find it.

The Honesty Tour which of course gave the impression Terri thought John dishonest did not help. What were her supporters going to do? Vote for a person they spent months trying convince Eighth district voters was dishonest? In fact, quite a few of Terri's supporters went on to work for Steve Kagen's campaign.

Of course, the RPW & RNC did not help the situation by overlooking its own rules to favor John Gard. From the start, I viewed Terri's chances as a long shot. Still, one of the reasons we have primaries is to help strengthen our individual candidates, their staffs, and to give those conservatives who are a part of our grass-roots more of a say. Remember, it is them ultimately we need on our side. The executive is a top-down organization, congress is a bottom-up organization.

I am Not a Democrat, Only Goes So Far

Even in a right-leaning district you need to say more than I am not a Democrat. To be fair, I paid about 0 attention to the advertisements as I was in the Madison area for most of the race (for work) and in any event I watch DirectV's mostly The History Channel, FNC, and sports programming so I missed the deluge of advertisements. Like I need advertising to motivate me, anyway. Any positive TV presentation's to the voters were washed out by the negative ads.

Just like '00, '02, and '04 candidates have to present something about them as well. John Kerry's only attributes were he served in Vietnam and wasn't President Bush.

We had an operative in town in '02 to help with the Scott McCallum campaign. People complained about the negative advertising in that campaign. She told us that negative advertising works, expect more of it. Well, it did not then and did not now.

Negative campaigning will never and should never go away. However, we need to emphasize a candidate's pros over the opponent's negatives.