With Minnesota teetering on the edge of battleground territory in the presidential race, Republican nominee Mitt Romney and President Obama sent in their top campaign surrogates Sunday, expanding the field in the closing days of a wildly unpredictable contest.Here's reality. For a number of days now, both Clinton and Obama have been focusing their efforts in states where Democrats have close races to defend, or opportunities to pick up, U.S. Senate and House seats. Whatever they can do toward flipping state legislatures, like in Minnesota, is a factor as well. They're confident doing this because they know that, barring an unprecedented concatenation of flukes that they couldn't do anything about anyway, they've got the top race sewed. In fact, they appear more confident than I am, given my status as an unrepentant political worry-wart.After largely sidestepping Minnesota other than a brief dinner stop last week, Romney running mate Paul Ryan attended a "victory rally" at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, holding out the prospect of ending the state's 36-year stretch of voting for Democrats in presidential elections.
Hours later, former President Bill Clinton touched down in St. Cloud to energize DFL volunteers and shore up a firewall of Midwestern states, including Ohio and Wisconsin, which could play a critical role in picking Tuesday's winner. It was his second trip to Minnesota in less than a week.
I suspect that the author of the article does know better, in the way that I just described. But his superiors clearly made the decision, years ago, to provide pandering feel-good fluff to misinformed conservatives, at the expense of credibility with the knowledgeable. I suppose they gotta do what they think they gotta do. I consider the approach a mistake, but my livelihood's not on the line.