It is 1:15 Am and I just got back to the hotel room. This will be posted in the morning when I get back to the school.

So I didn’t get a chance to post again last night at the convention. So sue me. I was very busy. I was a helping with credentials, and god love her, the person in charge had no clue. Clusterfrack sums it up. Luckily, she was busy with meaningless stuff, and I recruited some volunteers from my BPOU (SD51), and we got er done, and done right.

I can’t tell you all that much about what happened on the floor. I was occupied most of the night. I was on the nominating committee. It is a pretty boring thing. But the good news is that got all 4 candidates to answer a question (Is there anything currently, or in your past, that if discovered, would be embarrassing to the Republican Party?) All 4 said no.

There was a discussion in the committee to not nominate one of the candidates that all of us know lied on that one. The Person that raised the issue, after the fact, did not question the candidate’s answer at the time, and thus, on my urging, the committee decided not to with hold nomination of that candidate.

Instead I helped craft an amendment that would have the question asked to the entire convention as part of our Nominating report. We felt this was the fairest thing to do. We would provide the body with the first 5 questions we asked the candidates, and the fact that all 4 answered exactly the same way to them. “No!” We would leave it to the campaigns to raise the questionability of the one candidate’s answer. (The candidate was Bachmann.)

The rules were strongly challenged, Just like I had posted the rumor of before, which was poopooed by Andy Parish of Bachmann’s Campaign. But it was the Bachmann campaign who was behind it. On numerous items, they sought to change things. The biggest one was on the length of time for the candidates. The original rules have it set at 30 minutes. There was a strong attempt by her people to have that changed to 15 minutes. This was seen by the other campaigns as a negative because the longer each candidate has, the longer they have to lay out why they are the best. If Bachmann can keep it short, fewer of her people will be peeled off. The longer she has, the worse she does.

The rules were passed pretty much as is, as I understand it. Again, I was not on the floor hardly at all. This was seen as a victory for the non-Bachmann folks, IE Krinkie, Knoblach, and Esmay supporters, of which there are a lot. The final vote on the rules was 130 to 127. Very close, but Bachmann’s people were defeated. That seems to mean that Bachmann did not have 50% plus support there last night, or is not as strong as she was saying.

I can tell you that Bachmann Delegates were pushing to have alternates seated, and they were well organized. I heard there was even a Bachmann staffer in the back of the hall with a red and green sign. If they wanted to defeat a rule’s argument, Red, if it is ok to pass, Green. Then there were selected Bachmann supporters that would go up and argue their side, accordingly. They made sure ALL of their people were in the hall, and ready to be seated, and not necessarily according to rankings.

The initial feeling I have is that Bachmann may not have it all locked up. She was unable to get a majority on the vote to change the rules to suit her and hurt the others. The only big challenge she will face is whether another candidate will be able to get to 60%. (the total needed to win the endorsement.) We could end up with a hung convention, if you will. No endorsement, since no one would get 60%.

The Knoblach people seem very hostile to the Krinkie campaign. I got a few dirty looks or navel gazes as I passed a few of them that I knew. Plus, they have their fellow legislators out smearing Krinkie to his supporters. Since a lot of his support is either in the St. Cloud area, or the legislative types (get things done aka spend money on everything) they may not be willing to back Krinkie if needed. (if Knoblach is eliminated.)

The Esmay people, and Jay himself are so up beat. I don’t think he will come close to winning, and will probably be eliminated early on, but you wouldn’t know it from the demeanor of everyone. This guy is very good at this, and has a great future in politics. He had a really cool booth/table. Just pictures of him and his family. I gotta take a second and look at that closer today.

I don’t know where this thing will go. There is a strong chance that we may not meet the 60% for endorsement. There are a lot of die hard Bachmann supporters here, and I think they’d literally rather die than not vote for her. And the Knoblach people are so negative about everyone, that I don’t know if they would vote for Krinkie, even if it meant stopping Bachmann.

I had 2 highlights of the night that were unrelated to the actual 6th District endorsement. I received word earlier today that Mark Kennedy wanted to have a few minutes with me to talk. (If you don’t know, I had left KennedyvMachine the other day, and I assumed it was about that.)

I was pretty humbled by the fact that he wanted to have a word to me, and even his campaign folks on hand made sure to let me know that he’d like to get a chance to talk to me tonight early on.

I ended up meeting him just outside the hall, right after his speech, and we had a few minutes. That appreciation I was looking for, uh, well, I got it. The guy is great. He comes up to me, and his first question for me is how was the speech, do you think people are getting tired of it? You see once before I had said that he is getting so much better at it. I told him I had heard most of it before, but that he is really delivering it so much better. ( There is just something about me sticking my foot in my mouth with VIPs, I tell ya.)

He asked me how I was, and about the blogging thing. He thanked me for all that I had done, and am doing. He is such a great guy. I was just trying to look smart, since they were snapping photos. So uh, um yeah, twisting my arm to rethink my decision? Not at all. It never came up. But, it was on my mind.

I will also let you know that Gary from KvM and I were in touch earlier too, and we arranged to talk tonight. I took him around and introduced him to a few folks. I was pretty busy during the convention, but afterwards, I got him to come over to the Krinkie party.

We talked about what happened at KvM over a drink or two. And I will be rejoining the crew. That may have been the shortest break ever. It was all really, just one big misunderstanding.

I also introduced him to a friend of mine that may bring the estrogen we were always looking for to KvM. I’ll double check with her again in the morning, but soon you will see Andy and another name back up under the banner at KvM.

OK, it is now 2:10 AM. I gotta be up around 6:30, so I must sleep.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 6th, 2006 at 7:05 am and is filed under MN 6th - Bachmann, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.