This morning, National Public Radio reminded listeners that on this day in 1981, Sandra Day O'Connor was sworn in as a Justice of the Supreme Court.
We thought it a good occasion to remind readers in Minnesota's First Congressional District of a thoroughly tasteless and sexist--heck, downright cruel--crack perennial congressional candidate Jim Hagedorn made on his "Mr. Conservative" blog when it came time to replace O'Connor at her retirement.
A screenshot of the original text on Hagedorn's site is at the top of this post--preserved in the Bluestem entry that first discussed the blog, in October 2009.
A funny thing happened on the way to our post: we discovered a PDF of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee oppo research on Hagedorn--and were reminded through links to "Mr Conservative" in that document (embedded below) that Hagedorn had changed the offensive text from "fill the bra" of O'Connor to "fill the high heels" of the jurist.
This illustrates an unsettling tendency by Hagedorn to muddying the waters into which he wades.
The original O'Connor quip
In October 2009, we wrote (and later updated):
Gender, too, is a fertile ground for that "cutting humor." A post from October 2005 begins [edited as of December 2 to read as "high heels"]:
The nomination of White House legal hack Harriet Miers to fill the bra of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor simply enhances the bush-league legacy of a family that time and again proves the Peter Principle applies to elective politics.
Lovely. Surely this will appeal to all three women voters in Southern Minnesota who measure the performance of female SCOTUS justices by their bras. I suspect more women and men, however, will simply wonder WTF?, given the pink ribbons that have graced the last 25 Octobers, and Justice O'Connor's own high-profile story in that fight.
A question of residence
Heading into the August primary for the Republican MN01 slot, primary challenger state senator Carla Nelson's literature noted that Hagedorn had spent no time in the district between his childhood and his return to the district to run for office. Martin County Republican activist answered in letters like this one in the New Ulm Journal: Jim Hagedorn is one of us.
Just as Hagedorn's attacks on Nelson for challenging her party's endorsement seemed sketchy when Hagedorn challenged the endorsed Republican (Aaron Miller) in 2014.Unlike Nelson's clear intent to go to a primary, Hagedorn had pledged to honor the party's endorsement in 2014, then changed his mind.
A fluid situation.
The same thing apparently held true in 2009, when the Faribault County Register reported in Blue Earth man makes bid for Congress:
When his father was elected to Congress, the young Jim Hagedorn went with him to the nation’s capitol. He graduated from George Mason University in Virginia, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in government and politics.
After that, he spent 25 years working in Washington. He was a legislative assistant to former Congressman Arlen Stangeland. [Stangeland was defeated by Collin Peterson after the late Bill McAllister reported on Stangeland's use of a House credit card to make several hundred calls to a female lobbyist. Heckova swamp].
From 1991 to 1998, Hagedorn was the Director for Legislativeand Public Affairs for the Financial Management Service, the U.S. Department of the Treasury agency responsible for the management of more than $2 trillion in federal funds.
He also served as the Congressional Affairs Officer for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the department of the Treasury that manufactures U.S. paper currency. . . .
Approximately six months ago, he decided to move back to his home area, and decided to call Blue Earth his home.
“I came back to Blue Earth often during the past years, and always loved it,” he said while on a brief stop on the day he announced his bid for Congress. “I still have relatives here, and wanted to make my home here.”
He bought a home on Upper Valley Drive recently, and says he loves living in Blue Earth – calling it a very nice town and very comfortable. ...
Well, probably not--but the purchase of the home was reported again by the Faribault County News in May 2010 in Hagedorn’s political career over before it begins:
Hagedorn moved from the Washington, D.C., area to his native Blue Earth for the express purpose of trying to get the endorsement to run against incumbent Congressman Tim Walz, Democrat, in the First Congressional District. . .
“I was the second choice of many of the delegates,” Hagedorn says. “But not their first. I think I needed a little more time to get them to know me better – they didn’t reject me, they just didn’t know me.”
That could be because Hagedorn has spent the last 20 years working in Washington as a congressional assistant or as a lobbyist, and has not spent much time in Minnesota.
Now that his campaigning days are over, Hagedorn is pondering his future.
“It is my intention to stay in Blue Earth and Southern Minnesota,” he says. “If there is one thing I have learned, it is that the people here are so friendly, much more so than in Washington.”
Hagedorn owns a home in Blue Earth . . .
Bluestem noted in The acorn that stuck close to the tree; or a first glance at Hagedorn family values that that property was for sale.
The DCCC document notes on page 6:
According To The Faribault County Assessor, Hagedorn Does Not Own The Residence Associated With His Voting Records. [Faribault County Assessor, Property Records Search, Accessed 4/6/18]
Hagedorn Has Been Associated With Several Minnesota Addresses Since 2010 [Nexis Comprehensive Person Report, 2/10/18]
…But Did Not Appear To Have Owned Any Of Those Residences. [Faribault County Assessor, Accessed 2/12/18]
This data squares with readers' tips about their searches of Faribault County property records. While there's nothing wrong with renting a home, one should probably not tell the local newspaper you own it if that's the case.
Hagedorn then moved away from Blue Earth, returning again to make a bid in 2014, as the Faribault County Register reported in Back for another campaign:
In 2009 Hagedorn moved back to Blue Earth to run against Walz, but lost the Republican nomination to Randy Demmer of Rochester. Hagedorn left Blue Earth then in 2010.
"I had both personal and business issues that I had to take care of which meant I had to leave," he says. "But, I have always returned to visit this town over the years."
Now he is back and has once more taken up residence in the city of the Green Giant.
Republican activists Spencer Robert Krier and Doug Baker both noted Hagedorn had lived in Southern Minnesota for his entire adult life--or only 2 out of 30 years--when he ran in 2014.
So where did Hagedorn go between that 2010 departure and 2013? According to voting records obtained by the DCCC (page 6), Hagedorn voted in Virginia elections in 2011 and 2012. There were no school board, city or county elections in Blue Earth (Faribault County) in 2013. According to a 2014 statement by the same Martin County activist on the Hagedorn website, Hagedorn first pent time in California and then elsewhere tending to a dying friend:
Jim gave up his secure executive position and returned home in 2009 to challenge Tim Walz, traveling the 1st Congressional District to reconnect with old friends and making many new ones. The 2010 race served as a great learning experience for Jim and people are seeing a more skilled and driven candidate in his 2014 campaign.
After the 2010 election, Jim focused on two important personal matters. First he committed to continuing his relationship with his girlfriend (who lived in San Diego with her three children from a previous marriage) hoping things would lead to marriage. After spending quality time together and based upon reflection and prayer, it was decided mid-2011 that marriage was not meant to be.
At the very time one monumental pathway in Jim’s life was closing, another was opening, albeit one filled with great tragedy. Jim received word that his best friend of 30 years was stricken with ALS – a horrible terminal illness. Jim set aside his life and devoted the better part of two years to help his friend, his friend’s wife and family, deal with the physical and emotional demands of the fast-progressing illness. Sadly, Jim’s friend passed away this past September, about the time Jim began running a full time, insurgent challenger campaign against Tim Walz.
Some have raised concerns that the Democrats will attempt to use these experiences against Jim, but I highly doubt Tim Walz and the DFL will be very effective attacking Jim for committing to a personal relationship and then serving as a caregiver for his terminally ill best friend. When alerted to this, most voters will respect Jim’s devotion and view him as a good and compassionate person worthy of serving as 1st District congressman.
That was 2014's story. Whatever the case, moving to the district twice makes Hagedorn's accusations that Democratic candidate is a carpetbagger resemble his promises to abide by the endorsement in 2014 and his scolding of Nelson for not abiding in 2018. Perhaps only moving to a district once isn't good enough to prove love for Southern Minnesota.
Truth seems to be fluid for Mr. Hagedorn, blogger and bureaucrat, who accuses others of behavior he himself has done.
The Trump Factor
Hagedorn has been an all-in sort of guy for President Trump. Earlier in this cycle, political observers thought this might be an advantage for the Blue Earth Republican. Just over a year ago, Minnesota Public Radio's Mark Zdechlik reported in Hagedorn, sole Republican running, sees path to a seat in Congress:
And Hagedorn said his unwavering support for the president will help him too. "The people who supported President Trump in the last election, the people who almost got us over the finish line in the last election, they're not upset with the president," Hagedorn said. "They're really upset with Washington, particularly Republicans in the Senate who have dragged their heels." . . .
While Republicans and Trump supporters are bullish on their chances to flip the 1st District, some prominent political analysts rate the race as a toss-up, meaning they think neither side has an advantage right now.
"I think the 1st District is going to get an extraordinary amount of national attention," said Nathan Gonzales, who publishes the Inside Elections newsletter.
Gonzales said the big unknown is how voters who sent Trump to the White House will feel a year from now about his presidency.
"Midterm elections are often a struggle for the president's party," he said, "and that means sometimes that the president's party has difficulty winning seats that they should win under normal circumstances."
And how do voters in Southern Minnesota feel a year later? According to Strib reporter J. Patrick Coolican in Tough news for GOP in Minnesota Poll:
After the Star Tribune’s first round of election-year polls in January, we used this space for some key takeaways. As you may remember, that poll had good findings for Republicans, with President Donald Trump’s approval rating holding up decently, while Democrats held a narrow lead in our congressional polling, but not enough to foretell any kind of “blue wave.”
Our most recent round of polling tells a much different story.
Because politics has become so nationalized, an unpopular president portends bad things for his party, as Democrats learned in 2010 and 2014.
Trump’s approval rating has dropped from 45 percent to 39 percent, while 56 percent disapprove of his handling of the job, according to our recent Minnesota Poll, which was conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy in partnership with MPR News. The pollster conducted 800 interviews, with a margin of sampling error of 3.5 percentage points. . . .
Perhaps most surprising and most troubling for the GOP: Trump’s approval rating in southern Minnesota is just 40 percent, which belies the conventional wisdom that Trump is popular in greater Minnesota.
Perhaps Hagedorn might need another reality show star to whom he might pin his wagon.
Here's the DCCC document, which demonstrates what a target rich environment Hagedorn's life is--and it's not just his rude name calling. (Bluestem Prairie wasn't sent this document, but DCCC sent us links from other online media sources who must have gotten the memo. We repost it here to help out other poor country bloggers expected to post about this material when "real" online media write about it. No need to publish stale trickle-down).
DCCC's Jim Hagedorn Book for ONLINE posted by Sally Jo Sorensen on Scribd
Screengrab: From our October 2009 post.
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