Amy Klobuchar

Kurt Bills will now pass quietly off the political scene. He lost badly to Sen. Amy Klobuchar and will return to inflicting his disturbed worldview on the students of Rosemount Senior High. He was a one-term, back-bench Republican legislator who dreamed of joining his idol, Ron Paul, in Congress.

Like the clay character that graced SNL back in its heyday, Kurt Bills is a sad clown who just can’t catch a break. This photo epitomizes the Bills campaign:

Yes, that’s Mister Bills bus broken down on the southbound entrance ramp to I-35 just south of Forest Lake.

Mister Bills rode a wave as Ron Paul supporters took over the Republican Party of Minnesota. The Paulbots organized at the caucus level and ended up sending all Ron Paul supporters (with the exception of Michele Bachmann) to the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, FL.

Mister Bills seemed like he was counting on Ron Paul to help him raise tons of money and help his campaign gain traction. Apparently, he forgot that a primary tenet of libertarianism is you’re all on your own.

Mister Bills immediately began work on an edgy, non-conformist ad to define himself and his campaign. That was the intention but, while it certainly defined him, it didn’t define him in the way he intended.

WORST CAMPAIGN VIDEO OF 2012

Seriously, this is worse than Carly Fiorina’s Demon Sheep ad or Mike Gravel’s ad in which he just stares into the camera for a minute before walking away.

Mister Bills lurched from failure to flop.  
It appears that the people who helped win him the endorsement weren’t about to work hard to get him elected.

Mister Bill frittered away the summer. Two candidates challenged him in the primary. He barely broke 50% in the MNGOP primary. That’s embarrassing.

In September we learned that Mister Bills hadn’t quit his day job. Instead of campaigning full-time, he’d been teaching and then campaigning in the evening and on weekends. And he wondered why the media didn’t take him seriously?

When the Minneapolis Star Tribune released a poll showing the inevitable. Mister Bills fought back. First he claimed that the Strib was lying and he was only losing by 15% not 28%. Then he had his surly and rude campaign manager, Mike Osskopp, complain that the Strib was only helping the daughter of their former correspondent. Her Dad hadn’t worked for the Strib in 20 years (at least).

Then Mister Bills decided that attacking Sen. Klobucher for saving jobs in Minnesota was a good idea and a surefire way to garner his campaign a little attention.

Kurt Bills told MPR he would have opposed saving the auto industry, which would have been absolutely disastrous for our economy. Trying to turn his foolish stand to his advantage, Bills claimed Klobuchar supported saving the auto industry so she could get Walser’s donation:

“I don’t know why you do an ad like that,” Bills said. “It’s showing you’re a crony capitalist. You’re going to side with the people who can fill your campaign coffers up.”

Sigh. No, Mr. Bills. It shows that people value results over abstract ideology. Nobody cares about your ideological basis for saying you’d have let the American auto industry collapse; they’re simply going to vote for the person who saved a million jobs, including their own.

When September job numbers were released, they were bad news for Republicans. Unemployment drop below 8% for the first time in a long time. This didn’t fit the Republican narrative, so Mister Bills joined the chorus of crazies claiming the unemployment numbers were faked.

In mid October I noticed that polling guru Nate Silver had given Sen. Klobuchar a 100% chance of reelection. That had to hurt. But Mister Bills is a happy kind of clown. He suggested the following:

With polls showing little hope for his bid to upset Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Republican Kurt Bills found what he thought was a silver lining courtesy of Google.

Somebody told him that if you typed the Democratic incumbent’s name, one of the first results the search engine guessed was: “Amy Klobuchar’s opponent.”

That, the GOP longshot reasoned, must mean that voters are searching — quite literally — for an alternative, even if they don’t know his name.

Mister Bills next brilliant strategic maneuver was to attack Klobuchar based upon a conspiracy theory concocted by a guy Klobuchar jailed while she was Hennepin County Attorney.

But the final two scenes in Mister Bills sad journey into irrelevance epitomize his campaign:

Republican Kurt Bills cancels today’s press conference bc Bill Clinton visit to MN and Ryan visit to Hudson, WI made it too difficult.

— tomscheck (@tomscheck) October 30, 2012

Umm is Kurt Bills bus broken down on the ramp onto 35 south from Forest Lake? twitter.com/cttrace/status…

— Cole Trace (@cttrace) November 6, 2012

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Amy Klobuchar was declared the winner 2 minutes after polls closed. I’ll keep you updated on Senator Klobuchar’s margin of victory, and I’ll try to check in on other Senate races throughout the country this evening.

11:50 PM: Democrats have won 53 seats, the same amount they currently control. There are still three seats up for grab, all of which are possible wins. In a year where it once seemed the GOP was a shoo-in to regain control, it now looks likely that Dems will instead gain a seat or two.

10:20 PM: Dems have clinched control of the Senate. Can they add a few seats over the rest of the night?

9:40 PM: Klobuchar is now making her acceptance speech. Congratulations, Senator!
9:20 PM: Incredible. Now seeing projections that Tim Kaine (D) will defeat George Allen (R) in Virginia. It seems unlikely that Dems will sweep the table in these tossup races, but so far, that’s what they’re doing.

9:10 PM: CBS news now calling Missouri for Claire McCaskill over Todd “legitimate rape” Akin. So far, an incredible night for Democrats in the Senate. They may well be on track to actually pick up a seat or two.

9:00 PM: The string of Democratic victories continues, as Joe Donnelly will defeat Richard Mourdock in Indiana.

8:25 PM: More good news for Dems in the Senate: Tammy Baldwin wins in Wisconsin.

8:15 PM: I’m seeing reports that NBC has called MA-SEN for Elizabeth Warren. A major win for the Democrats, and for liberals in general.

8:02 PM: KLOBUCHAR WINS! WCCO is already calling Klobuchar the winner, 2 minutes after the polls close. The only question is how large the margin will be.

7:50 PM: Polls are still open here in Minnesota, but we’ve already got a Democratic win on the East Coast. CBS is already projecting a win for Chris Murphy in Connecticut. A few months ago, this was seen as a major opportunity for the Republicans.

11:58 AM: With the polls closing in 8 hours, I think I can confidently project a Klobuchar win tonight.

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