Two Madia Events; Blogger Responds to Erik Paulsen's Attack

Rep. Chris Van Hollen and Ashwin Madia

I attended two Madia for Congress events yesterday--a press conference at the state capitol and a fund-raiser at the home of Sal and Mia Mendoza in Edina. Now that the CD3 DFL leadership, Brian Melendez and the DCCC's Rep. Christopher Van Hollen are 110% on-board with Ashwin's campaign, the Madia organization has tightened up considerably. Ashwin rolled out an entirely new presentation at the Mendoza house party. He connected well with his audience and gave evidence of having his finger on the pulse of the campaign; an impressive, reassuring performance. This campaign is for real.

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Blogger Responds to Baseless Paulsen Attack

On April 1, 2008, I started emailing Erik Paulsen with a few questions on political issues. He refused to respond, so I addressed an innocuous question to him: I provided Paulsen with my address and asked him who my state representative is. I had an objective: I wanted to initiate a dialogue with Paulsen so that I could learn what he stands for. Paulsen doesn't want any such dialogue to occur, so he refuses to answer any question from me. Furthermore, he has directed his staff not to reply to any inquiry coming from me.

I find it astounding that my own state representative has, for reasons undisclosed, blacklisted me. Paulsen's pettiness on this point cannot be overstated.

To bring this to a wider audience, I linked to published, publicly-available information which demonstrated that Paulsen and I are neighbors. If you are clever enough to know of an online telephone directory and Mapquest, you can quite easily verify that Erik Paulsen and Gavin Sullivan do not reside far from each other. You can easily verify the name of my state representative. With Zillow, you can easily get information about someone's house. None of this is secret information.

This point has not been lost on righty bloggers, one of whom has attempted--lamely--to respond. Rather than encouraging Paulsen to step up to the plate and start participating in the democratic process, the blogger has elected to try his hand at character assassination: He's calling me a stalker [and worse]. Like Paulsen, he does not bother buttressing his accusation with anything so cumbersome as evidence.

Since the blogger does not even allege any instance of stalking, there's not much for me to rebut. Of course I defend my right to link to publicly-available, relevant information.

Erik Paulsen blacklisted me long before I published the links mentioned. I confronted Erik Paulsen at the 42B GOP Endorsing Convention, politely asking Rep. Paulsen why he refused to answer my emails. He provided one reason only: He said he refuses to reply to my emails because he believes that I am insincere.

If you politely emailed your state representative with straightforward, in-bounds questions and that person refused to reply to you, you would have legitimate cause for feeling outraged. If you asked your state representative for his position on global warming and he was so bold as to justify his refusal to respond by attacking your character, ethics codes applying to the conduct of public officials ought to kick in. Perhaps they don't; they should. Or perhaps the representative's political party ought to provide an ombudsman who can receive and act on ethics complaints against the party's elected officials. In the absence of such a system, I emailed a request to file a formal ethics complaint against Erik Paulsen to the CD3 GOP Executive Committee on April 10, 2008. I await their reply.

A Note on Insincerity:

Paulsen believes that before he responds to my inquiry concerning his position on Darfur, he needs to conduct a lengthy sincerity-inquisition on me. (He assumes all flattering commentary directed at him to be 100% sincere.) I hold the conventional journalistic viewpoint: The journalist's sincerity is irrelevant. Either the issue merits a response or it doesn't. Erik Paulsen does not believe that genocide quite rises to his lofty pay grade. I think he's wrong, and until he provides an answer, I will continue to responsibly pursue this 100% legitimate line of inquiry.

Let's say I was your state representative and I was running for US Congress. You email me a number of policy questions. I use that well-known stalking tool--Google--and learn that you are a blogger whose opinions I don't share. In such a situation, do you think it conceivable that I might not want to reply to you?

Why might I not want to reply to you? Because I want to maintain control of my political messaging. So in our hypothetical, I view you as a pest and you view yourself as a friend of democracy, and you continue sending me emails. I continue to refuse to reply; you think up a question which a reasonable person would consider the ethical obligation of a Minnesota state representative to answer: You start asking me who your state representative is. I persist in stonewalling; you repeatedly publish updates on your efforts to get a reply. In response, I feel frustrated, embarrassed and angry--but I still don't want to reply, since that would require clarifying my many murky political positions. (I believe that keeping my views murky helps my political prospects.)

Hence, Erik Paulsen's feigned sincerity concern. Ditto Jack of All Trades. Desirous of a campaign based solely on empty sound-bites, Paulsen and his blogging valet have elected to personally attack me. It's not going to work, Erik!