by Tony Petrangelo

Oct 5, 2012, 6:00 PM

The Weekly Wrap 10-5

The Wrap, as originally conceived, was supposed to run on Friday afternoon. It quickly moved to Saturday and then Sunday where it has stayed since.

Nobody reads political blogs on Sundays though, or even Saturdays for that matter. So I have made to long overdue decision to move the Wrap back to its more natural Friday home.

♣ David Brauer brings us the news that Minnesota Public Radio is out of the polling game, at least for now. This comes in the aftermath of the much derided Humphrey Institute poll of the 2010 Minnesota Governor’s race which just so happened to have the MPR moniker attached to it.

The political polling landscape in Minnesota has been ever so gradually shifting, as it has in most places, from media outfits driving the polls to the polling firms themselves doing it.

I’m of the opinion that the more polling the better, so this isn’t a good thing in that regard, but as Brauer points out MPR was in a bit of a no win situation here and their money probably is better spent doing investigative journalism.

♣ The National Journal had reported that the DCCC was trimming ad spending in Minnesota’s eighth congressional district and at the time it didn’t make any sense to me.

While this is the time of the cycle when triage begins in earnest, I don’t think anyone expected Minnesota’s eighth district to be among those getting the shaft.

And as David Nir points out, it appears as though the The Hotline was just wrong. There were a number of local reports that the cancellations were for airtime in support of Tim Walz who doesn’t seem to be having any difficulty closing the deal.

♣ PPP will be polling in Minnesota next week!

♣ Rather than embedding, I’m going to just link to the following ads. So here than is the weekly ads round-up:

Marriage Amendment: Minnesotan’s for Marriage is up with it’s first two spots. One focuses on the God and Constitution and Voters should decide angle. They literally say in the ad that marriage was made by God. It seems to me like it’s a bad idea to try and tie God to your Constitutional amendment. Or am I being naive?

The other one doesn’t talk about God, but does talk about voters again. Making sure voters have the final say in denying people equal rights seems to be the common thread between these two ads.

If you were to think about how the concept of letting the voters decide might have played out with other civil rights questions throughout the history of this country, you would get a pretty good idea why this is a stupid argument to be making.

Senate: Amy Klobuchar goes up with an ad about her helping the Walser’s keep their GM dealerships, with the key line being the last one delivered in the ad. The ad itself, and that last line specifically, pretty much encapsulate the image that Klobuchar has dutifully crafted around herself through her work in her first term.

It’s this image, and the crafting of it, that makes Klobuchar such a formidable statewide candidate and at the same time occasionally disappointing to the activist base in her seeming unwillingness to spend any of her political capital on issues that don’t involve universally approved issues like say child safety. Or bridges to Wisconsin.

And while it’s not an ad, Kurt Bills borrowed a phrase from that renowned Minnesota wordsmith Michele Bachmann and called the ad an example of “crony capitalism.”

Um, Kurt, I know you haven’t been in the state legislature long, so maybe you’re not familiar with how things work, but I would call this a clear example of constituent services. But maybe you’re not familiar with what that is.

CD1: Allen Quist uses his granddaughter and a graph that his granddaughter is climbing up to help explain the problem of the National Debt and how it will not allow her to climb graphs, or something.

CD6: Jim Graves is up with yet another positive spot. Michele Bachmann, who has yet to run a positive spot this cycle and didn’t run any last cycle, is in turn running an ad that tries to tie Graves to the Republican’s chief villain of the 2010 election, Nancy Pelosi.

And again, as with every other ad this cycle and every ad in 2010, this one doesn’t feature Michele herself until the disclaimer at the end. For all intents and purposes she is running the exact same campaign this time as she ran in 2010.

CD8: Chip Cravaack uses his dad to attack Rick Nolan for cutting $700 billion from Medicare. It was one thing when Republican challengers were using this phony line in 2010 against incumbent Democrats who actually voted for the Affordable Care Act. It’s quite another when you’re using it against someone who hasn’t cast a vote in congress in over three decades.

The NRCC attacks Rick Nolan for stuff they claim he did while he was previously in congress. In the 1970s. And they call him a Washington politician, because Chip Cravaack isn’t I guess?

This ad from Rick Nolan starts by hitting Cravaack on his vote to end Medicare and then pivots to a really effective summation of why it’s so important to not end Medicare.

♣ Shouldn’t Kurt Bills have already done this? I mean what is he doing with all those buses he’s raising money for on his website if not to have already done this? Seriously?

There was some talk during the summer about the similarities between the Bills campaign and Paul Wellstone’s insurgent campaign for Senate. Yeah… about that.

♣ Our Vote Our Future has announced an ad buy in the campaign to keep the Photo Voter ID amendment off the Minnesota constitution.

♣ Grace “call me Kelly” made word clouds of the Wednesday night Presidential debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney. What I find kind of interesting about them is that two of Obama’s most used words were “businesses” and “insurance” while two of Romney’s were “government” and “medicare.”

And while they both used both pairs of words to some degree, they used them is inverse frequencies. I don’t know if that means anything, but it’s certainly interesting!