No time this morning to report on the Denn family’s barnstorming tour through New Castle and Sussex Counties over the weekend, but as you can tell from these pictures, we had a great time. These were taken by my friend Greg Patterson at Rodney Square in Wilmington. A full report is forthcoming, including:

1. Uberlobbyist John Flaherty babysitting my children

2. 38th District Democratic Chairman Pete Keenan holding a bag of poo, and

3. My son Zach doing a strip tease behind the Lt. Governor as he speaks

Some children have memories of lazy Saturday mornings eating cereal, watching cartoons, and lounging around in their pajamas.

For better or worse, that will not be my children. Oh, don’t worry, they watch more than enough t.v.—I think I’d rather be hit in the head with a mallet than watch The Wiggles Live one more time—but Saturdays as the children of a political candidate with a working wife are a different cup of tea. This Saturday, we have a full agenda. First, we will be visiting with our friends at the A. Philip Randolph Institute at the Longshoreman’s Hall in Wilmington. The APRI is a national organization of black trade unionists, and I have been attending its meetings pretty regularly for years. I will be briefing them on our new credit scoring bill, and trying to enlist their help in our campaign to enroll more children in the CHIP health insurance program. Then the boys and I will head up to Rodney Square, where the boys will eat lunch and I will be the guest of honor at the 2007 Family Safety and Health Fair, a daylong event dedicated to promoting safety and crime prevention in the City of Wilmington. As guest of honor, I will be demonstrating my techniques for disarming a potential mugger through karate blows to nerve centers.

Next will come a nap. For most of us, this would be a welcome interlude. For Adam, that is also the case. But for Zach, the declaration of naptime is the initiation of a long twilight struggle. We have, over the last two and a half years, employed a variety of tactics to induce drowsiness: driving in circles, getting in bed with him and holding him down, and the infamous “up down” where I literally hold him and squat up and down until I am going to collapse. Unless he is too tired to resist, nothing works—and come 6:00 or 6:30, when he is so exhausted he can’t see straight, we all pay a heavy price. So if you are at either event on Saturday morning, I encourage you to chase him in circles.

Following the nap, we will pick up Mrs. Denn and it is off to Seaford for the AFRAM festival, and then over to Rehoboth for the annual Stonewall Democrats fundraiser at Dr. Jim D’Orta’s house. And then, like all other kids in America, the boys will have their diapers changed and get into their pajamas in the back of the Pacifica parked along Silver Lake in Rehoboth, fall asleep in their car seats on the way home, and get carried up to bed. Fifteen or twenty years from now, we will find out how this all worked out.

First, my report on the Delaware Electrical Co-op dinner Tuesday night will be mercifully short: it was great. A big part of the reason was the absence of politicians—only John Carney and I were shaking hands with people, while State Auditor Tom Wagner, our outstanding new Sussex County Sheriff Eric Swanson, and equally outstanding new State Representative Bob Walls served food. I got to say hi to a few thousand people, almost all of them from Delaware, and actually got to talk to people for a few minutes which was nice. Everyone who talked to me told me I was doing a good job; those who thought otherwise were intimidated into silence by my menacing physical presence.

Another big plus to the Electrical Co-op dinner: as of a couple of years ago, there is now a Wawa on the way from Western Sussex back to Route 1 heading north. Sure, there are lots of gas stations and Quicki-Marts along the way, but someone who is constantly on the road, there is something very comforting about finding a Wawa. It is one of the best-run retail businesses of any type I have encountered—they always have the type of coffee I want, just about any type of food, and it is clean and fast. I’m sure I will now receive an e-mail from someone telling me that the company is secretly propping up the dictator of a repressive government overseas or putting something in my food that will melt my intestines, but I’m not buying it.

Tomorrow, a preview of the Denn Weekend Itinerary, which includes two stops in Wilmington, one each in Seaford, Rehoboth, and Greenwood, and our regular stops at Acme, Target, and the Kirkwood Highway Library. I know the wait will be agonizing, but try to endure.

I know what you are wondering: where did your boys get those George W. Bush dolls? Well apparently while I was at work yesterday, my wife & mom took them to the mall, and Zach said “Micky Mouse” while they were walking past a Disney store. He hasn’t said “Micky Mouse” before, so my mom interpreted it as “I must own every Micky Mouse doll that is offered for sale at the adjacent store” and bought them all. My wife is now trying to drill him to say “necklace.”

While my mom was fulfilling the Bush administration’s economic agenda of “um, get people to buy stuff,” yesterday was the one day a year when I parade around the Insurance Department office in my gym shorts and endure the silent mockery of department employees. It was my now-annual pilgrimage to have my health evaluated by Cardio-Kinetics, as part of a program I started last year for Insurance Department employees to choose healthier lifestyles. Using some money that we saved by cutting other costs, we contracted with Cardio-Kinetics to come into the office once a year to allow our employees to undergo a pretty complete fitness evaluation—cardio, strength, body fat, cholesterol, blood pressure, flexibility, and so on. The folks who do the evaluations give recommendations to improve personal health down the road, and obviously if they spot a problem such as high blood pressure they can let the employee know about it so it can be taken care of. It is a good program and very popular with the department staff.

My evaluation is pretty entertaining, since the trainer who is doing it—apparently aware that I have something to do with whether they come back next year—professes amazement at my Olympian-level physical skills while simultaneously scribbling down the sober truth to review with me later. When I did one more sit-up in 60 seconds than I did last year, he reacted like he had won the lottery.

Finally, in identifying a couple of “cool kids” from Delaware Democratic campaigns yesterday, I obviously offended other cool kids who were not identified. I would like, therefore, to officially dub Kristin Dwyer, Dana Rohrbough, and Molly Jurusik as cool kids. I am not sure how old Erik Schramm is, he may need to be a Cool Kid Emeritus. I am happy to accept other nominations for cool kids at mattdenn@hotmail.com. You may also purchase the right to be a cool kid for $1,200 at this web site.

Yesterday, I was present to see the Governor sign two bills that were major priorities for me.

The first bill was Senate Bill 31, a landmark bill making Delaware the fourth toughest state in America on the practice of using credit in the setting of insurance rates. As I told the supporters present for the bill signing, this bill has been a long time coming. When Senator Margaret Rose Henry and I unveiled it on January 7, 2005, I had been in office for all of three days. The Denn boys had been born for only seven days. I hadn’t even had time to have my formal swearing-in ceremony: my friend Joe Schoell came over to the house on the morning I took office and administered the oath in my living room before I even had time to put my socks and shoes on. Michele was at the hospital, so our pug Lenny was the only witness. (Yes, there is a picture of this event taken with an automatic timer, including Lenny, and no, it will never be publicly displayed.)

But I digress. The reason this bill took so long to get passed was that the insurance industry fought it, as they do every credit scoring bill introduced in every state. The bill that was ultimately passed wasn’t the outright ban on credit scoring that Senator Henry and I had sought, but it did move Delaware from having no law and a toothless regulation all the way to having the fourth toughest law in America. Not bad. The other folks in the picture are Representative Helene Keeley, who was the sponsor of the bill in the House of Representatives and did great work to get it through, and Reverend H. Ward Greer, the senior pastor at Ezion Mt. Carmel United Methodist Church and president of the Interdenominational Ministers Action Council. In short, a man of God who you do not want to mess with—and a vocal supporter of the bill.

The second bill signing was for Senate Bill 78, which requires insurance companies in Delaware to cover medically necessary nutritional supplements for Delawareans who suffer from a rare metabolic disorder known as PKU. If people who have PKU don’t maintain a strict diet that eliminates almost all forms of protein, they can suffer mental retardation and other serious neurological problems—but the nutritional supplements they must take are extremely expensive. This bill is going to dramatically change the lives of some Delaware families. I had the opportunity to meet a lot of these families while the bill was making its way through the General Assembly. They are great people, and their personal lobbying for the bill is what got it passed.

I finished off the day at a meeting of the Progressive Democrats of Delaware, an outstanding group whose members have always been very supportive of my efforts. When I got up to speak, three people yelled “where’s Lenny?”. I have never taken a Toastmasters class, but even I could figure out that if the crowd is shouting for my dog before I have even said anything, that’s a sign to keep the remarks brief, so I did. Among the attendees was Jason Scott, who is the overseer of the Delawareliberal blog. I chastised Jason for failing to acknowledge my blog, and he admitted that he feared that once people know about mine, his readers would desert him. OK, that isn’t true; he actually just said that he hadn’t gotten around to it—but I could sense a tremor in his voice. [Update: he has now given me a shout-out.] I also got a chance to catch up with some of the remarkably talented young people who we have working for our state party and for various political campaigns. Both Sheila Grant of the Markell campaign and Erin Kernan of the Carney campaign said that they were regular readers of this blog, and asked for me to acknowledge that they are “cool kids.” They are.

Today some guy is coming to my office and making me do sit-ups, push-ups, and run on a treadmill while I am hooked up to a bunch of electrodes. Sometimes my job is very strange. I will explain later.