This link. The Times posted a short, tight endorsement editorial stating:
Our View: Bachmann isn't serving district's best interests
Times Editorial Board • October 17, 2010
Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District is diverse. It features rural, agricultural edges; vast stretches of exurban areas; an overload of suburbs; and enough urban pockets to raise eyebrows.
Growth-related challenges abound, and this recession — fomented by the bursting housing bubble — didn’t help.
All of that is why the district needs a U.S. House member who puts constituent service first. Sadly, after four years in office, Michele Bachmann has proved with unabashed consistency that serving 6th District constituents is essentially her last priority.
Come Nov. 2, voters should replace her with Tarryl Clark.
Regular Our View readers shouldn’t be surprised by this endorsement. This board in April of 2009 wrote off Bachmann’s desire to serve the voters who elect her.
We cited then three years worth of her rash, ridiculous, unsubstantiated, misleading and fear-mongering statements about national issues. We also noted — and this is important — her lack of any realistic solutions. In the 19 months since then, Bachmann has only refined an age-old political recipe: mix equal parts of fear and blame that raise your personal profile yet yield only sound bites, not solutions.
She does it so effectively (and relentlessly) that she’s become a grass-roots tea party heroine even while supporting a public policy agenda that helps entities that are anything but grass roots. Best example: In the wake of America’s financial collapse, do you really think Bachmann’s push to leave Wall Street alone was in the best interests of 6th District voters?
Also, look districtwide and we challenge you to find something — anything — that Bachmann has helped achieve or a cause she has helped advance. Much like her legislative ideas, we see nothing of substance.
In fact, these past four years renew our appreciation for House representation that provided this area with voices like Collin Peterson and Mark Kennedy. Sure, they have their partisan allegiances, but they realized when it was time to set those aside and do what was best for the district, not themselves.
Residents of the 6th District deserve a return to that philosophy. Clark is the person to provide it because in four years, Bachmann has proved she is incapable of such efforts.
My only gripe. It says too little about how sound and attractive a choice Clark offers. It properly focuses upon incumbent ineffectiveness and flaws. However, Tarryl Clark is more than a sane alternative. She is smart, ambitious in a good way in contrast to one pandering to mob sentiments, and I challenge anyone to name a legislative member who has worked harder than Tarryl Clark during her tenure in DFL legislative leadership, and otherwise.
Tarryl Clark will serve the district, well, and Maureen Reed, another very sound candidate should again be noted and praised as forestalling her own effort to represent the district in the interest of citizens having a single outstanding DFL option behind whom the entire party could unite.
Tarryl Clark is clearly the best choice out of three, and I say that with full respect for Bob Anderson as a gentleman who has been a sane and sensible conservative, and a good influence on the IP and its practices. Anderson's record has been as a responsible conservative voice.
And do not for a moment underestimate the effect the incumbent's corporate financed money barrage of mailings and television advertising can have on receptive minds. Hence, use this secure link, for your contribution to aid Tarryl Clark's successful election day victory:
https://secure.tarrylclark.com/page/contribute
Or send a snail-mail check:
Friends of Tarryl Clark
P.O. Box 489
St. Cloud, MN 56302
__________UPDATE___________
The substance of the St. Cloud Times analysis of the incumbent's priorities is underscored by the following image, (with a hat tip to the DumpBachmann people for locating and initially publishing it - and as always, click the image to enlarge and read):
CRASS HYPOCRISY AND NOTHING ELSE: Other than this single CYA letter, a cost-free thing to do instead of actually trying to establish ongoing credible contact and advocacy for the cause; there has been a zero effort of the incumbent. Beyond this one year-old CYA letter can any reader name one single additional step that this incumbent (sent to DC to serve the District) has done, to advance this alleged but only lately discovered priority of hers? ZIPPO. NADA. Nothing but one stinking CYA letter to show for six years in Congress, is not a decent showing on which to base a request to be returned for another ineffective two years. The incumbent clearly has put more effort into schmoozing Glen Beck than into getting the effort accomplished that the letter ostensibly aims to achieve.
Does the letter closing, you can contact me or my legislative director, not "Please contact me at any convenient time so we can discuss this major priority, I will be phoning to try to arrange a meeting," somehow ring as the most truthful thing?
There, my CYA has CMA, so here's a blow-off, a phone number, bother me or don't bother me, signed, "Member of Congress." That one single instance of a hand-off to her staff and to MnDOT, for a matter addressed to the top-level cabinet position holder, and not to his junior staff, says more about how sincere the effort Bachmann made is, than any further comment on it here.
"It speaks for itself," is an apt closing for the post.
____________FURTHER UPDATE__________
At first, I misread the item two ways, and made one other attribution error. First, I missed "me" in the closing, as well as "my Legislative Director," and I misread the date of the letter as if it were a recent CYA thing. Hence I changed the update wording.
Second, the letter is a year old, and DumpBachmann linked over on the letter to other sources, here and here, on the initial discovery and posting of the item.
Final error, and one for which I again apologize for not being thorough in my reading before posting the update - Bachmann on the same Sept. 2009 day used the same CYA form letter to mention each of several transportation projects in the Sixth District - underscoring her true belief that firing off a barrage of nothing-burgher letters in a CYA fashion without any true belief in what she was writing but which she could wave about if needed, was all that citizens of the District deserved from her. Or all she cared to give. It underscores exactly what the St. Cloud Times said.
You can read the six pages of Bachmann CYA form letters, and figure from that why nothing got funded for MN 6 when funding was attainable. Thanks to Minn. Post; this link.
Can you even for a moment envision Tarryl Clark in DC, pulling that kind of indifferent, lazy, insincere stunt?
I cannot. Clark would start with calls and letters and would be about as relentless as possible without wearing out her welcome. And she would work with Oberstar and members of his Committee.
Clark would work hard in DC, for the District.
What further contrast is needed?