Vulnerable?

I swear that my dear friend Gary sent this to me just to see what it would do to my blood pressure. Well, after the hysterical laughter subsided, the blood pressure did go up just a titch.

Incumbent Kline is surprisingly vulnerable, despite his 2006 margin of 16 points. Kline toes the Republican Party line in the House, focusing mainly on legislative issues within the jurisdiction of his two committees, Education and Labor and Armed Services.

Kline's vulnerable not because of missteps on his part, but he isn’t in a position to tout major legislative accomplishments. His race was originally considered "safe," but Congressional Quarterly determined it was competitive with the emergence of Democratic challenger Steve Sarvi, an Iraq War veteran and former mayor of Watertown. In a presidential year, Kline, like other Republicans, needs to worry about increased Democratic turnout and enthusiasm in Minnesota.

The gales of laughter came from the fact that Ms. Pearson used the term "enthusiasm" and Steve Sarvi in the same paragraph. As Janet from SCSU Scholars noted a couple of weeks ago...

Last week, in Watertown, MN, home of John Kline's opponent, Steve Sarvi, there were at least 67 Kline supporters marching to Mr. Sarvi's 25. Needless to say, we had a great day.

With that kind of enthusiasm it's no wonder she thinks that Kline is "vulnerable". Seriously though, you can measure the "enthusiasm" there is for Mr. Sarvi based on a couple of other measurments. First is fundraising where Sarvi has raised $163,623 to Congressman Kline's $482,262. Sarvi has $98,240 Cash On Hand to $647,193 COH for Kline. Sarvi's campaign also is carrying $10,000 in debt to Kline's $0.00. The other is the fact that the DCCC still has not put a whole lot of effort into helping Sarvi with his Herculean challenge.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has rolled out its latest round of Red-to-Blue candidates, along with 20 "emerging races," and has included Minnesota's 2nd and 6th district races in the latter category.

This doesn't mean anything directly -- the races in which Steve Sarvi and El Tinklenberg are taking on two of the worst congressional representatives ever aren't yet on the Red-to-Blue list -- but it means the races are on the DCCC's radar, and have the potential to receive more focus as the campaign goes on.

Of course, for that to happen, several things would have to occur first: the candidates would need to raise a bunch of money, the DCCC would have to see some polling suggesting a close race they can help put in the bag, and the D-trip's huge financial advantage over its Republican counterpart would need to stay in place.

Now as we saw with the fund raising numbers prior to this, Kline outraised Sarvi almost 3-1. I have spent the last hour searching the local media websites (WCCO, Strib, PiPress, KSTP etc) and there is no polling information available on this race. Ditto Survey USA (who does KSTP's polling), AP Ipsos Zogby and Gallup!

John Kline is so vulnerable that he is going back to Washington DC to rejoin the Texas Tea Party to demand that Speaker Pelosi call Congress back into session to allow Congress to vote on real energy reform. Does that sound like the activities of a vulnerable? I think not.