Even though Jake Wagman of Political Fix didn’t know, a week ago, who Byron DeLear and Mike Garman were, he had a more accurate sense of how that election might go than I did.

I bow to Wagman’s superior knowledge.

A Political Fix posting about Byron DeLear’s new TV ad reminded me that Post-Dispatch writers and Show Me Progress writers live in parallel, but alternate, realities.

Jake Wagman seemed bemused at Byron’s tilting at windmills.

One of [the five Democratic nominees foolish enough to challenge Akin] – Byron DeLear – even has a commercial out.

(Who? Yes, I had to look him up, too.)

Wagman is familiar with names from past elections:

As a Democrat, he’ll face some sturdy opposition in Tuesday’s primary.  Opponents include David L. Pentland, who was a St. Louis alderman, and former city School Board member Bill Haas, whose serial attempts for higher office have gained him, if nothing else, name recognition.

But Wagman is–I would say–unfamiliar with the present. DeLear has been off his radar screen and Mike Garman still is.

Now, in my alternate reality, DeLear and Garman dominate the primary race in the Second Congressional District. Between them, they’ve scooped up endorsements from just about every local Democratic group and Garman even scored an AFL-CIO endorsement–an honor that group virtually never grants before the primary election.

Pentland is a nice fellow, I’m sure, as is Bill Haas, but I don’t see either one of them working his patootie off out in West St. Louis County as DeLear and Garman have been. But what do I know? It’s been less than a year (Aug. 5, 2007–our first birthday is coming up!) since I started blogging on state news. I’m a newbie.

Perhaps on August 6th of this year, I’ll be bowing to Wagman’s superior knowledge of Democratic politics in the Second Congressional District. I’m sure he has a depth of knowledge on many topics that I couldn’t approach.

On the other hand, August 5th is primary day. And perhaps, on that evening, I’ll be toasting the victory of DeLear or Garman in the primary and savoring our first birthday with the (OK, minor) coup of having known who the real contenders in the Second were.

Update: Here’s the ad, in case you’re curious.

Gambling is a fool’s occupation. I’d as soon flush money down a toilet as put it on a horse, but I–and you–we’re gamblers, all the same. We just prefer to gamble on political candidates instead of on boxers or dice games.

Where there are gamblers, there are handicappers, and the odds makers are pretty much agreed that Todd Akin will still be in office this time next year.

They’ll point to what happened to Ted House in 2000. Akin was making his first run for the office and House was a name in that part of town, a popular name too. But an internal poll showed House losing to Akin, getting only 43 percent of the vote. House raised the funds, though, to make a credible run for the office: one million dollars. He spent half of that on billboards and half on TV advertising. And garnered 43 percent of the vote.

So? That was eight years ago. It was a Republican year. This is a year for the Democrats. Think of Republicans saying bye-bye in recent special elections to Dennis Hastert’s seat in Illinois as well as strongholds in Mississippi and in Louisiana. As both Mike Garman and Byron DeLear, running for the D nomination, will tell you, more Democrats took ballots in the Second Congressional District on primary day than Republicans.

Mmm-hmm, say the odds makers, but primary voters are a different animal than general election voters. Apples and oranges.

The cockeyed optimists will admit that there are lots of well to do Republicans in West County who wouldn’t vote for a Democrat if George Bush himself told them to, but St. Charles County is trending bluer every day and we can expect to take some House seats there.

DeLear’s campaign manager, Kevin Caravelli, doesn’t think his optimism is cockeyed. He sent me an April 2006 article–by Dave Drebes, one of the handicappers who’s convinced that Akin is invulnerable–about a poll Sam Page conducted in 2 CD a couple of years ago.

Last month Sam Page nearly filed to take on incumbent Congressman Todd Akin. Page, a Democratic state representative from the 82nd district, created lots of scuttlebutt by waiting weeks to file for re-election. He finally did on the second to last day possible. That was after fielding a poll on the 2nd Congressional District to measure the political landscape. It was encouraging enough that Page seriously considered giving up his safe seat for a chance to go to Washington.

Considering that the district has a dismal 42 percent Democratic Performing Index (DPI), and that 98 percent of incumbent congressmen who seek re-election win, that must have been some poll. Apparently it showed a Republican-Democratic split within the margin of error. And when framed as “Would you rather have a Republican rubber-stamping President Bush’s agenda or a Democrat to keep him in check?” the results were even more appealing to Page: 60 percent-40 percent in favor of the Democrat.

Page might have stood a better chance than the two candidates leading this year’s field, being already known because he’s a state rep. Neither Garman nor DeLear have held political office. Nor do they seem to be on track to rake in anywhere near a million dollars.

By contrast, Kay Barnes is challenging another political dinosaur, Sam Graves, on the west side of the state. Barnes, the former–and popular–mayor of K.C., had hauled in almost a million and a half dollars as of the end of March.

Byron’s campaign says he’s up to about $150,000 ($100,000 of which he loaned himself, according to the FEC). Garman had receipts of only $21,590 at the end of March ($15,000 of which he loaned himself). At the end of March, Akin had $615,159.

Numbers like that can make Dems dread that Akin will hold on. Caravelli recommends that instead of dread, we dare engage in the audacity of hope. He believes that if we all backed whichever Democrat gets the nod, Akin would be history.

Who knows? I’m just telling you what the handicappers say–and hoping that DeLear or Garman will turn out to be a Seabiscuit.

There are endorsements and then there are ENDORSEMENTS. If a state rep endorses Mike Garman (running for the Democratic nomination in Todd Akin’s district), that’s nice. If the Missouri AFL-CIO endorses Garman–in May!–that’s huge. For several reasons.

First, an endorsement during a primary race is unprecedented. One St. Charles Democratic official with ties to labor told me that he can’t remember the AFL-CIO endorsing in a primary contest. But it happened. The Missouri AFL-CIO’s Executive Council and its president, Hugh McVey, have announced their endorsements in Missouri’s federal races: Russ Carnahan, Lacy Clay, Emanuel Cleaver, Ike Skelton (no surprises so far), Kay Barnes (also not a surprise) and … Mike Garman.

Now that the endorsement is in place, money from the international union in D.C. might follow. The Missouri chapter of the AFL-CIO can write letters of recommendation urging the parent union to lend support to any of the endorsed Missouri candidates.

And finally, the state AFL-CIO will send out 2-5 mailers to let its members know who it’s endorsing. In St. Charles County, 35 percent of the voters are union members. Presumably, that percentage would be considerably higher among Democratic voters. Lots of those union Dems will note Garman’s name on a mailer and vote for him.

When I talked to Mike last night, he was elated with the news. He feels that people in St. Charles County respect him as a hard worker who knows first-hand the problems they face. He pointed out that for months now he’s been working a forty-hour a week, working some of the hours for St. John’s Hospital and the rest for the ambulance service in in St. Charles. Once the day job is over, campaigning begins. Mike puts in sixty hours a week at that and gets four hours of sleep a night. A few nights back, he knocked on 300 doors–in pouring rain.

Sheer doggedness has made Mike a serious contender in this race, and this endorsement can’t do anything but help his chances.

By the way, I wrote about Mike in December here and here, in case you want to know more about him.

Hotflash will have a fuller post on this today, but Mike Garman, running in the Democratic primary for the chance to face Todd Akin in the fall, just got the AFL-CIO endorsement. They rarely endorse in a primary.

Look for hotflash’s post later in the day for more details.

Mike Garman, who is running for Todd Akin’s seat in the second congressional district, wants to focus on the plight of American workers.

Garman remembers when American companies were the envy of the world.  According to his website, he grew up in that world and understood that American workers made those companies great:  “Mike’s father, a Korean War Naval Veteran and a post-war United Auto Worker, lived the adage of ‘an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.'”

Now that union membership has fallen from around 30 percent of the workforce in the fifties and sixties to only 12 percent of the workforce, Garman blames the hard times for blue collar workers on health care and the evisceration of labor laws.  

Canada still has a 30 percent union workforce, and part of the reason unions continue to thrive there is that Canadian companies aren’t saddled with paying for the health care of their employees. Garman insists that if we had government health care, our corporations would be far more competitive.

As for the disembowelment of our labor laws in this country, Garman would like to see the NLRB given the teeth it needs to enforce fair labor practices.  He especially wants to see what labor advocates call “fifty plus one” enacted.  

Fifty plus one refers to what happens after union reps get a majority vote in a company to form a union there.  Typically, the owners stall month after month, maybe up to a year, firing the people who voted in favor of the union and hiring people who will vote against one.  Eventually, they fire enough old workers and hire enough new ones to defeat the union proposal.

A fifty plus one law would mandate a ninety day period for setting up negotiating committees and a 120 day period for agreeing on a contract.  If there’s no contract in place at the end of that time, the matter automatically would go to binding arbitration.  Such a bill was introduced, but didn’t make it through both houses, and anyway, it would have faced a veto.

Of course, a devotion to getting everyone access to health care and protecting good jobs is no guarantee of success in the second congressional.  At best, Garman faces an uphill battle.  The insurance companies will love Akin with lots of cash.

I pointed out to Garman how strongly Republican West St. Louis County is.  I noted that St. Charles is only starting to trend Democratic and that Garman doesn’t have a big “name”. He wasn’t fazed.  Without a hint of conceit, he is rarin’ to take on the battle, because he feels that people’s fear of the health care crisis crosses party lines.  What he didn’t say about the strength of his candidacy–but that I can say–is that he comes across as a down to earth guy who’ll appeal to blue collar voters in St. Charles and Lincoln counties.  Furthermore, he knocked on 3,000 doors just to see if St. Charles residents approved of the Ambulance Service.  He’ll be a hard worker.  

Of course Garman isn’t going to face Akin unless he can get by Byron DeLear.  His attitude is that a primary challenge from DeLear (who has not yet filed) “would be the best thing that could happen to my campaign. I welcome it.”  Garman assumes that a primary contest would put his face and his ideas before the public early on.

Some of you are skeptical about anyone’s chance in Akin’s district, and others think this might be the year for Dems to wallop a few Bush clones.  Here’s hoping the optimists are vindicated, but even if the skeptics prove correct, Mike Garman intends to give Todd Akin a serious challenge.

Mike Garman is old fashioned, in the best sense of the word.  He’s the type that stands when a lady comes to the table.  And his Democratic values are old fashioned:  he enthusiastically believes that we’re all in this together.  Health care is his biggest issue–and always has been. Jobs are his second biggest concern.  

Maybe some people equate old fashioned with corny.  In his case, they’d be wrong.  What he is, is genuine.  You should see his face light up when he starts talking about health care.

Garman’s concern about health care is understandable, since he is 6th District Director of the Saint Charles Ambulance District and specializes in urgent care diagnostic imaging for Saint Johns Mercy Health Systems.  What that means in practice is that he sees thousands of patients a year, and he sees how many of them are concerned about not being able to pay for the care they need.  The real challenge of his job, often, is figuring out how to work the system so that such people get the care they need.

In fact, just such a situation was perhaps the impetus toward getting him into politics.  He knocked on some 3,000 doors a couple of years ago as part of his job.  He was surveying St. Charles residents, asking them what they thought of the EMS care and what, if anything, the city could do to improve it.  One of the first people he talked to was a woman who had Medicare D, the government drug prescription program.  She had been doing fine until she hit that $2500 donut hole and couldn’t pay for her prescriptions.  Her ankles were swollen to the size of soccer balls. Using some of his contacts as a health care provider, Garman was able to arrange for the woman to get her meds until the end of the year.

Sure, he can give you all the statistics you want about the health care crisis in this country:  How we spend $2.9 trillion a year on health care–16 percent of our GDP–and we could cut that cost by a third. How Medicare spends only 2 1/2 to 3 percent of its budget on administrative costs, whereas insurance companies spend 20-25 percent on that because there are so many companies, and each one has administrators duplicating the work done by the administrators in every other company. How insurance companies make $60 billion a year in profits.  He knows all the data, and he has plenty of ideas about how to correct it, starting with single payer.

But first and foremost, he just empathizes with the father of a boy who’s broken his arm and who can’t pay.  Certainly, hospitals must provide care when a boy walks in with a broken arm, but the follow up care is another matter.  Garman helps children he sees who are in that kind of fix, and the more often he helps them, the more incensed he becomes that health care is not a right in this country.

He wants to go to Congress and become the squeakiest wheel ever to grate and screak on the legislature’s collective ear.

I’ll have more to say about Garman tomorrow.  Meanwhile, let me point out that his kickoff fundraiser will be Dec. 17th at McGurk’s Public House at 108 S. Main in O’Fallon.  It’s from 5:30 to 8:00, and the recommended minimum donation is $25.