A Weekend Without Politics

I pretty much avoided politics this weekend. It's a good thing to do sometimes. Politics continue, of course and a few things happened over the weekend that merit a comment or two:

• The slow-motion train wreck that has been Herman Cain's presidential campaign appears to have come to an end now. It is easy to like Herman Cain but there was never any real evidence that he had the skill set necessary to be the next president. Whether you think his 9-9-9 plan had any merit, and I was pretty skeptical about it, he did raise the importance of rethinking the current tax code in a big way. That is a public service.
• Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich becomes the most formidable Not Romney yet. The standard objections still apply -- he's pretty much the dictionary definition of hubris. What I still wonder is this: we still haven't seen a single vote cast. Are we really sure that we know anything about the race yet? I'm not convinced we do.
• At the state level, the big news was the resignation of Tony Sutton as head of the Minnesota Republican Party. While I'm largely sympathetic to the Republican Party and have done some work at the local level, I've tried to stay away from the machinations of the party at the state level. Sutton has been a controversial figure within the party from the get-go. While he's certainly been more visible and voluble than the two Rons who helmed the party previously (Carey and Ebensteiner, respectively), he also had a management style that lacked some, ahem, transparency, especially on the financial side. The challenge is similar to what the Republican Party faced on the national level when Michael Steele was there -- if you can't account for where all the money is going when you are running an organization that depends on donations, you are going to have trouble maintaining control. Finding a guy who can talk the talk and keep things tidy simultaneously seems to be a problem. As always, Mitch Berg has some useful thoughts on the matter.
• So what did I spend my time on this weekend? Family and football. And it all went very well.