“Do you want to backtop my driveway”?

I keep bumping into people who tell me that they voted for me. I tell them that they were in pretty exclusive company.

The 5,508 votes I got cost me $1.8 each. It looks like Grams spent about $5 each for his 97,000 votes and Oberstar $7.75 for each of his 180,000 votes. I’m salving my wounds with this remarkable financial success. My sense of humor, which seems to have returned in full now that the election has come and gone, is also a helpful tonic. Now I can return to doing something useful which in my case means resuming the book I was writing until I filed for Congress.

I decided not to harp on the book during the campaign because its old news. It might be a cautionary tale for the resurgent Democrats who have just regained control of Congress because it involves beloved Minnesota Democrats of the past and proves that the scandal plagued Republicans were no aberation. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I met with my principal witness, Donald C. Boyd, today for breakfast. He told me he got a call from an old friend who still close to Jim Oberstar. Don was surprised because he hadn’t heard from this fellow for ten years.

“What do you want?,” Don kept asking him. Eventually the caller asked Don if he would be interested in paving his driveway. Don’s paving days are long past and given this lame excuse Don told him to tell Oberstar that he and Harry (meaing me) were just fine.” Thus ended the conversation.

Three months ago I would regularly talk politics with a person intimately acquainted with the workings of the Oberstar DFL of decades past. We often swam in adjoining lanes of the Miller Dawn Fitness Center Pool. Our conversations continued until I asked her about the UGLRC and she told me that her friend, a former secretary at the Commission, had one refused to hand a paper bag filled with cash in it over to a mayoral candidate. Shortly afterwards when I began writing about the old scandal on the Web she stopped coming to the fitness center pool.

What should I make of a call out-of-the-blue or a regular swimmer’s sudden loss of interest in exercise? I don’t know. I’m like a cat that can see shadows underneath a locked door. They make me want to slide my paw under it to bat at them.