You may remember this YouTube video in which I berated Congressman Earl Pomeroy for not holding any open public meetings with his constituents. Well, some events actually showed up on his website this week, as shown above! I decided to pop in and see if I could ask a question.

I found out, as did other people who attended similar “meetings” across North Dakota this week, that it was not any sort of public meeting, “town hall”, or other such event. This was a Democrat political rally, period. It’s not depicted as such on his website, but that’s exactly what it is. Apparently Conrad and Dorgan are going to show up and endorse him over and over again at these things. Yeah…that should really drum up support.

Speaking of support, it doesn’t look like Earl’s enjoying any. I showed up to find plenty of parking at 6:20, ten minutes before the start of the event. Around 6:28, people started trying to get the few participants to bunch up in front of the stage to at least look like there were some attendees. Heidi Heitkamp made repeated pleas for people to come up toward the front. It was embarassing.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the nearly empty room. Also empty was Ms. Heitkamp’s rallying cry, which consisted of so many uses of the phrase “failed policies of the Bush Administration” that I was ready to yell “DRINK!” at the sound of the next one! By this time we were ten or fifteen minutes into the event, and it was obviously a flop. None of our notorious Congressional delegation had showed up yet, I had church at 7, and it was obvious there wasn’t going to be any Q&A for me to ask Mr. Pomeroy my question. I decided to give up on my chance to get a free t-shirt for spotting Earl Pomeroy and left to go to church.

As I left the Elks building, I saw this black beast parked out front. I couldn’t help but think that it looked like an industrial strength hearse, an appropriate metaphor for the way Earl Pomeroy’s campaign for reelection has been going this year. I might add that there’s the possibility that then entire group from inside the building could fit into this one truck!

By the way, if you read the text of Congressman Pomeroy’s “events” website, you’ll see that he loves meeting with “the folks that I represent.” You can now see who those “folks” are: Democrat Party first, period…just like in Washington. This same Party was apparently unable to even wrangle more than a few dozen people into getting all Hopey-Changey for Pomeroy on the night of his big endorsement by Conrad and Dorgan.

If it wasn’t so good for North Dakota, it’d almost be sad. Who knows? Maybe Earl was able to bring in a few hundred loyal union fans fifteen minutes late, after my camera and I had split the scene. Not likely.

Don’t worry, I’m sure the Congressman will get some cushy insurance job once he’s bounced out of office…after all, those evil insurance companies are his biggest donors.