Eleven! Can I say it too often? That's how many seats Dems need if they're going to to take the House. And HD 16 in St. Charles is one of the 17 or 18 chances we have statewide to reach the magic number. So Kristy Manning's candidacy matters. And it just got stronger, because her primary competition, Tom Fann, has dropped out in order to run for the St. Charles County Council.
Opting for the County Council race was a smart move for Fann. He stands a better chance of winning that contest, and he improves the chances of us getting the state rep seat. Here's why: Fann, who just lost the special election there on Feb. 5th, wouldn't, realistically, have been likely to succeed on the second try.
Manning, though, has a credible shot at it, and Fann's withdrawal strengthens her prospects.
The DPI number (Democratic Performance Index) for that district is somewhere between 46 and 47. It'll take more than 47 percent, of course, to win that election, but consider these additional factors in Kristy's favor:
There's a Democratic groundswell this year. That oughta be worth a point or two. Note that 52 percent of the primary voters in HD16 took Democratic ballots.
Furthermore, conventional wisdom holds that a well organized field campaign is worth somewhere between two and five points. The full name of the only Democrat left in this race is Kristy Organized Hard-working Manning.
I never saw it coming. A Democrat filed against Tom Fann, who just lost to Republican Mark Parkinson in the special election in St. Charles HD16 on primary day. The someone who filed against Fann is Kristy Manning, a young legislative aide to Senator Joan Bray.
I met Manning last fall at a meeting of the Women's Democratic Club for the Second Congressional District. Kristy was the speaker. She burbled cheerfully--and with undeniable authority--about the chances for the various House races in St. Charles County in '08. In fact, she was so enthusiastic and knowledgeable that someone asked if she would consider running for office instead of just campaigning for everybody else. Cheryl Hibbeler, who knows as much about Democratic politics in that county as just about anybody, laughed and said that although Kristy'd make an excellent representative, she'd be wasted in elective office, because the Dems in St. Charles couldn't spare her as a campaigner.
The GOP is worried about the Fann race in house district 16, St. Charles County. Or at least Kit Bond is, since Fann's Republican opponent, Mark Parkinson, is Bond's protegee, and Bond figures the Republican mayor of St. Peters has been ... too kind ... to Tom Fann. Parkinson is barely thirty and has only one job on his resume: as an aide to Kit Bond.
So we know why Bond wants Parkinson to win. Let me tell you why I believe Bond is worried about his guy: he bothered to show up in St. Charles within the last few days to ream out Mayor Len Pagano (pictured at left) for apparently endorsing Tom Fann.
Not that Pagano did endorse Fann. Not really. It all started when a Fann campaign worker put together a piece of campaign literature with a picture of Fann and Pagano on the back, with words of praise from Pagano about Tom. Those words were in quotation marks, but weren't actually quoted. They were only the gist of remarks Pagano had made about Fann. Fann himself, preoccupied at the time with his daughter's kidney infection, didn't proofread and approve the literature before it went out on a doorhanger to several thousand homes.
"Ding-dong! The witch is dead." Okay, technically he'd be a warlock and he isn't dead, but Carl Bearden isn't running for re-election in district 16 in St. Charles. If any politician deserves for a tornado to drop a house on him, it's Bearden. First of all, he's just flat mean. If he doesn't agree with your policies, he looks for ways to make your life miserable and to humiliate you in public.
Maybe that's why, when Chuck Gross resigned his senate seat in St. Charles last May, the Senate leadership gave Tom Dempsey instead of Bearden the nod to run in September's special election. And when that happened, Bearden looked at his options: He'd be termed out after next November, and he had a good lobbying job offer on the table now--from, in effect, Rex Sinquefield, who will be the number one customer at the new lobbying firm paying Bearden multiple times his former State Representative salary.
So we know why Bond wants Parkinson to win. Let me tell you why I believe Bond is worried about his guy: he bothered to show up in St. Charles within the last few days to ream out Mayor Len Pagano (pictured at left) for apparently endorsing Tom Fann.
