I keep bumping into people who tell me that they voted for me. I tell them that they were in pretty exclusive company.<\/p>\n
The\u00c2\u00a05,508 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\u00c2\u00a0sense of humor, which seems to have returned in full now that the election has come and gone, is also a\u00c2\u00a0helpful tonic. Now I can return to doing something useful which in my case means resuming the book I was writing<\/a> until I filed for Congress.<\/p>\n I decided not to harp on the book\u00c2\u00a0during the\u00c2\u00a0campaign because its old news. It might be a\u00c2\u00a0cautionary tale\u00c2\u00a0for the resurgent Democrats who have just regained control of Congress because it involves\u00c2\u00a0beloved Minnesota Democrats of the past and proves that the scandal plagued Republicans were no aberation. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.<\/p>\n I met with my principal witness, Donald C.\u00c2\u00a0Boyd, today for breakfast. He told me he got a call from an old friend who still\u00c2\u00a0close to Jim Oberstar.\u00c2\u00a0Don was surprised because he hadn’t heard from this fellow for\u00c2\u00a0ten years.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n Three months ago I would regularly talk\u00c2\u00a0politics with\u00c2\u00a0a person intimately acquainted with the workings of the Oberstar DFL\u00c2\u00a0of 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\u00c2\u00a0hand\u00c2\u00a0a paper bag filled with cash in it over to a mayoral candidate. Shortly afterwards when\u00c2\u00a0I began writing about the old scandal on the Web she stopped coming to the fitness center pool.<\/p>\n What should\u00c2\u00a0I make of a call out-of-the-blue or a regular swimmer’s sudden loss of interest in exercise? I don’t know.\u00c2\u00a0I’m like a cat that can see shadows underneath\u00c2\u00a0a\u00c2\u00a0locked door. They make me want to slide my paw under it to bat at them.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I keep bumping into people who tell me that they voted for me. I tell them that they were in pretty exclusive company. The\u00c2\u00a05,508…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,47],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}