Plugging along

Too busy to go swimming yesterday.

I spent the morning lining up ads for newspapers in the southern and western counties of the Eighth Congressional District. The ad is simple. It directs voters to my website. I’m not very confident that it will do the job. Voters tend to be passive and wait for ads to show up on their televisions. I put the ads in twenty papers and because of the short timeline had to pull out my personal credit card to pay for them.

If I correctly understand the law I’ll have to report the expense within 48 hours since they ad up to over $1,000 and all contributions of this size late in a campaign must be reported. Today I’ll order my television ads. I’ve been asking myself how much of this spending is pure vanity.  I’m not sure I like the answer.

My spending is peanuts compared to lots of well-heeled political junkies. For some givers they are helping a cause. For others its just insurance to curry favor with people who might return the favor. In my case it may simply be a grim irritation with contemporary politics that I have to scratch.

I spent some of the afternoon pulling paperwork together to file my quarterly campaign finance report. Never having found a campaign treasurer this onerous duty falls on me and I’m a lousy form filler outer. I’ve only sporadically looked at the rules. Basically candidates who raise less than $5,000 are given a pass but I crossed that border a few weeks ago.

I’d gotten a couple of notices recently from the Federal Elections Commission which I misinterpreted because they referred to an entirely different report than the quarterly report which I’ve been puttering around with. It turns out to have been due by Oct 20th. I’ll try to finish it up this morning and then after placing my TV ads I’ll try to spend the rest of the afternoon putting up lawnsigns around UMD.

I plan on a hand shaking expedition to the campus in a day or two to coincide with the ad I put in the Statesman UMD’s student Newspaper.

Late this afternoon I’ll pay a call on the editorial board of the Duluth News Tribune as they prepare their rationale for a congressional endorsement.