AJ is a marvelous zany guy who is locally best known for liberal, working-class sympathies and marathon, Guinness-Book-of-World-Records concerts, such as last year’s 50 hour Danny Boy singalong and this year’s ten-day, non-stop “Assembly Line” concert.
Hoekstra is a solidly conservative 55-year-old, a native of the Netherlands, an intelligence wonk and a former executive of the Herman Miller furniture company. He didn’t quite fit in at AJs, where the standard uniform is T-shirts and tattoos.
When I asked him, he didn’t know much about the place.
So why was he there? Someone told him to show up. Why wasn’t he off in Washington or serving his constituents over on Michigan’s west coast?
Simple. Because he is running for governor. Didn’t know there was an election for governor this year? Well, there isn’t. The next election is not till nineteen months from now, on Nov. 2, 2010.
Men and women who don’t yet know each other will meet, fall in love and have babies before we vote for governor again. But Pete is out there running, when he doesn’t have to be in Washington voting.
And that’s not unusual. In fact, his folks aren’t at all concerned he is starting too early. They are more worried that his main rival, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, may have gotten too much of a head start.
Welcome to the world of the perpetual campaign. Hoekstra is far from alone. Take Paul Welday, a longtime aide to former Congressman Joe Knollenberg. His boss went down to defeat last November, and so did Paul, in a race for state representative. When the election was over, Welday flirted with running for GOP state chair, but gave up when he saw he didn’t have the votes. Now, he’s running again.
Last week, Welday said he would challenge Gary Peters, the man who beat Knollenberg, for congress next year. This can hardly be a reaction to Peters having piled up a terrible record; the man has only been on the job for three months. But campaigns take time to put together, especially when you consider the huge amounts of money needed. Welday would have to raise $2 million to have a prayer.
Hoekstra told me he thought he could run a winning campaign for governor for $15 to $18 million. He’s more likely to need twice that.
If you think all this is bad, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin are running around the country running for the Republican nomination for president. That’s not what they say they are doing, but they are.
Well, I am not a candidate for anything except election fatigue, and I would guess those who give to all these campaigns may have wallet fatigue. The long campaign has gotten out of control.
In Canada they set aside a few weeks for campaigns, and otherwise live normal lives. We might want to think about something like that, before we end up watching the 2016 presidential debates sometime before the 2012 election.
Yawn...
Posted by: Thrasher | April 21, 2009 at 04:44 PM