Thursday, August 07, 2008

Stockyard Days Parade


Today was the annual New Brighton Stockyard Days Parade. The parade celebrates New Brighton's long-lost heritage as a poor man's South St. Paul. I've written about the parade twice before so I won't bore you with the details, since they generally don't change that much year to year. Just a few quick observations.



  • As usual, the DFLers were right at the front of the parade. The mysterious Jan Parker was riding in a convertible early on, drawing essentially blank stares from the people I was sitting by. Shortly thereafter Kate Knuth came by. I was surprised at how few people she had with her. In 2006 she had an impressive orange armada but this time she only had about 10 people marching. Since New Brighton is home turf for la Knuth, you'd have expected a better turnout. I don't know if you can draw any inferences from this, but it wasn't an overwhelming show of support.

  • As usual, the Republicans were pushed to far back of the line. Ed Matthews came through with a small but enthusiastic band of supporters. Ed worked the parade line hard as he came by, so hard in fact that he inadvertently blew right by me. Don't worry about it, Ed -- we've got your back at Mr. Dilettante. No sign of Betty McCollum, which is surprising, because it's not as if she had anything else to do tonight. Maybe she's doing advance work on Nancy Pelosi's book tour.

  • Very late in the route Lori Grivna came by. Lori's marchers were a larger and considerably more enthusiastic group than what Knuth had. I was impressed by Lori's energy. I'll be revisiting her race for the 50B seat again soon. It's going to be interesting.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pffft. Wannabees.

- from a South St. Paul resident

Thrifty Scot said...

A considerable chunk of Knuth's shock troops have consisted in the past of volunteers from other legislative districts with "safe" DFL seats. They don't need to work their own districts, so they come over to 50B and pretend to be homegrown Knuth supporters.

It appears that the DFL caucus may consider HD50B "safe" for them this year. I hope they keep on thinking that.

Brad Carlson said...

Kate Knuth, eh? My condolences to you folks amongst her constituency.

My wife was taking classes this past Summer in Environmental Education (for her Masters Degree) and Kate was a special guest speaker. Not only did she demagogue for the Enviro movement but she called the folks at the Heritage Foundation "liars".