Do your kids love fish sticks? Have you recently read the ingredients on the side of a box of fish sticks? If the answer to both questions is yes, you will want to try this great, easy fish stick recipe. The only variation I made, which I strongly recommend: don’t mess around with trying to sautee them, just deep fry those suckers.

This week, I will be announcing that we are literally putting Deputy Insurance Commissioner Mike Vild out to pasture. After serving as the Deputy Commissioner from the first day of my administration, Mike is leaving to take a job he couldn’t refuse as the new in-house counsel for Delaware Park.

I had actually started writing a long soliloquy about Mike’s service to the Department, but then I stopped for three reasons. First, it was starting to sound like a eulogy, and Mike is still a lot closer to the beginning of his career than the end—especially after the financial hit he took in giving up his law firm partnership for the Deputy Commissioner’s job. Second, Mike refuses to read my blog, so he will never see any of this anyway—he contends that my campaign will come tumbling down as the result of something I blurt out at 4 a.m. on the blog, and he can no more bear to read it than he can watch an unfolding traffic accident. And third, whatever nice things I say about Mike will simply result in my being mocked by him and others around the office during the days that he has left.

So let me just say a couple of things. First, Mike is the best Deputy Insurance Commissioner Delaware has ever had. Period. Don’t take my word for it—ask the employees at the Department, the members of the Delaware General Assembly, the other 49 states’ insurance commissioners who dealt with Mike far more often than they dealt with me, or the reporters who cover the insurance industry nationally. They will all tell you the same thing: that Mike is super-smart, works harder than anyone, has infallible business and political judgment, and is an absolute pleasure to work with or for. The people of this state owe him big time. Second, and more selfishly, I will miss having the chance to work with a great and trusted friend every day. I have known Mike for almost 20 years, and one of the things I have enjoyed the most about the Insurance Commissioner’s job was actually getting a chance to work side by side with him. For several years our excuse for hanging out was the Eagles season tickets that we shared, then it was the Insurance Department. Now I am going to have to develop a gambling habit.

There are three things that Mike loves more than anything else: his family, horses, and Ohio State football. (There are probably more than three, but by making it three I could lay the foundation for a Monty Python Holy Hand Grenade joke.) This new job at Delaware Park will allow Mike to see his family far more often, be around the racetrack every day, and…well, it won’t do much of anything with respect to Ohio State football, but that’s for the best because the team is best known for one of the biggest title game chokes in modern NCAA history and for an insane coach who ran out onto the field to punch the other team’s player. I will bid Mike a partial farewell on that note, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

On Wednesday night, I had an opportunity to speak at a meet the candidates night held by the Brandywine Area Democrats (BAD), and the biggest news I walk away with is that I almost couldn’t find a parking space. Man, how times have changed.

Four years ago when I was running for Insurance Commissioner, the 6th District in Brandywine Hundred was represented by the Republican who would later be my opponent, David Ennis. Now it is ably represented by Democrat (and Denn campaign co-chair) Diana McWilliams. Four years ago the 7th District was represented by Republican Majority Leader Wayne Smith. Now, after pulling off a stunning upset in a special election, the district is represented by Democrat Bryon Short (also a Denn campaign co-chair) (ok, I’ll stop that now). The other two districts in Brandywine—the 10th and 11th districts—didn’t even have Democratic committees in 2004; we had to reconstitute them in a caffine-driven constitutional convention held around a table at the Concord Pike Brew Ha-Ha.

Well the day is long past when we can fit the Brandywine Area Democrats into a coffee shop—we could have invaded a small country with the Democrats who showed up on Wednesday. (President Bush, if you are reading this please note that the prior statement was rhetorical.) And soon we will win back the 10th and 11th district House seats—the 10th district already boasts a majority Democratic registration, and the 11th district’s Democratic registration has risen to where Democrats are within 90 registered voters of the Republicans.

There is a reason that a parade of Republicans keep skipping across the front page of the News Journal to announce that they are not running for Governor. (It is starting to remind me of the Garrett Morris “Generallismo Francisco Franco is Still Dead” skit from Saturday Night Live.) The overflowing parking lot in Arden on Wednesday night was a big part of it. Well done, Brandywine Democrats. Well done.

When running for Insurance Commissioner in 2004, I promised one night to visit every senior center in the state at least once a year, so I could stay in touch with the concerns of Delaware’s seniors and be available to help them deal with their insurance problems. The reaction of my campaign advisors was something along the lines of “Matt, you are aware that the healthy heart diet calls for one glass of red wine before bed, not seven?” And my snappy rejoinder was “relax, how many senior centers could there possibly be?”

Um, a lot. But I have kept my promise—at least, with respect to those senior centers that have allowed me to visit. (Some of them have had the usual, and often correct, instinct when a politician calls: feign inability to speak English and hang up.) Many of the centers have me stop in during lunch, others schedule me weeks in advance and advertise that I am coming. But almost every trip results in me learning something about what is going on with our seniors, or being able to help a senior with a problem that he or she brought to the center knowing I’d be there. So I am glad I did it. It is on my mind today as I gas up the car for a trip to the Long Neck Senior Center in Millsboro.

If I am elected Lieutenant Governor, I am going to keep visiting our senior centers. Our seniors deserve our respect and our attention, and hearing their concerns on a regular basis is an important part of that.

Nobody closes a show like Bonnie Raitt, especially when she has Bruce Hornsby and Jackson Browne in the role of the Pips. Here she is doing Angel From Montgomery.

On Saturday, Michele and I took that giant step with the boys that all parents dread but must eventually face squarely. We took them to Sesame Street Live at the Bob Carpenter Center.

Things did not start out well. We had timed everything on Saturday morning with the precision of a military operation (well, a military operation not overseen by Donald Rumsfeld). Breakfast, snack, sleep…everything had been coordinated so that when Elmo and friends burst on stage at 10:00 a.m., there would be no need for us to leave our seats and the boys would be at full attention. We arrived at precisely 9:40 so the boys wouldn’t get antsy. As the minutes counted down, I looked around the nearly-empty arena and said to Michele “I wonder why these were the best seats we could get. This place is pretty empty.” At 10:01, I got a sick feeling in my stomach and pulled the tickets out of my pocket. The show started at 10:30.

Several graham crackers and frenzied singalongs of “Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood” later, the show began. The boys were stupefied for the first half—I think the actual appearance of their idols was an event of biblical proportions for them, and they just couldn’t get their minds around it. But by the end they were totally into it, with Zach screaming out hi to The Count and Adam going into Ed Sullivan Show style gyrations when one of his favorite songs came on.

Later on Saturday, I drove down to the Bridgeville Banquet Center to be one of the celebrity servers for the county’s annual thank-you dinner for volunteer firefighters and police officers. It is a fantastic event—a free Jimmy’s Grille dinner for the county’s first responders—and there had to have been a couple of thousand people there. This was my second year as a celebrity server, and I don’t like to concede anything to the Republicans, but I have to say that State Representative Dan Short (R-Seaford) serves a mean glass of tea.

I had a great night last night for three reasons:

1. I was endorsed for Lieutenant Governor by the 16th District Democratic Committee, one of the most active committees in the state. The 16th district covers the Southbridge area of Wilmington and much of New Castle stretching down Routes 9 and 13. This is a big one.

2. I had a chance to visit a meeting of members of the 15th District Democratic Committee down in Bear, under the leadership of its dynamic new chairman Mike Taylor. Not only was it a great group of people—some of them long-time residents like Bill McCloskey who helped get me elected in 2004, others brand new to Delaware—but Mrs. Taylor made a great spread of food that substituted for my dinner.

3. Between the time that I got home at 10:00 and 5:00 a.m. this morning, no children were awake. I love my children, but I love them even more when they sleep past 4 a.m.

March Madness is upon us. Office pools are being finalized, cash registers in Vegas are singing, and throughout America productive work is grinding to a halt.

For me, March Madness has a special additional meaning. Back in March of 2002, when I was dating my wife but we were not yet engaged to be married, my beloved California Golden Bears finally made it back into the NCAA Tournament for the first time in years. They even won their first round game, and earned the right to play a second-round weekend game. Michele and I had plans to do something together that weekend, and I gingerly brought up the possibility of changing our plans to accommodate the game. She said “Why don’t I just drop you off at Damon’s Steak House where all the games will be on giant screen tvs, you can order some food and watch them all, and I will come get you when the game is over.” Less than a month later, we were engaged–and she has turned out to be an even greater wife and mom than cool girlfriend..

This Saturday, as the second round games kick off six years later, I will be sitting with Michele and the boys at some show at the Bob Carpenter Center where people in giant Sesame Street suits cavort around and giggle to themselves about the fact that we have paid $30 a ticket to see them. Then while the late games are on, I will be driving to Sussex County to serve as a “celebrity server” at an appreciation dinner for volunteer firefighters. Man, my life has changed.

One of my guiding principles in writing this blog is to try to talk about things that other people aren’t talking about, but I have to break that rule to mention Senator Obama’s speech in Philadelphia yesterday.

In reading the papers this morning, the experts have all passed judgment on the speech’s content—it was magnificent, and I hope and expect that my boys will read about it when they take American history in school ten years from now. But not enough attention has been paid to how brave the speech was. It broke every rule in the political campaign handbook.

The political experts tell you to keep it simple. They also tell you that when confronted with an associate making offensive statements, quickly and succinctly distance yourself and try to move on. Senator Obama refused to do any of that. Instead, he gave an extraordinarily nuanced speech containing a number of single sentences which taken out of context—not that the Republicans would ever do that—could be used against him. He gave a speech that can only really be appreciated if you sit down, turn off American Idol, and listen for 30 minutes. And again, he didn’t have to do any of that to deal with the political problem that prompted the speech.

Although I think both Democratic presidential candidates would make good presidents, I was one of the first elected officials in Delaware to endorse Senator Obama when Joe Biden withdrew from the race. And when people asked me why, I told them that it wasn’t because of the stirring speeches that he gave at his rallies. Instead, it was because of the one-on-one interviews I had seen him give, where I was so impressed by the fact that he wasn’t tossing out poll-tested one liners in response to questions, but instead was giving thoughtful, candid answers that revealed him to have a superior intellect and a generous heart. The speech that he gave yesterday in Philadelphia was really the culmination of that, and it was an implicit challenge to Americans to demand much more of their political candidates. Let’s see how they respond.

You probably missed it over the weekend, but the Denn boys were briefly featured in the News Journal’s coverage of the Easter Seals annual charity volleyball tournament. In particular, the newspaper focused on the fact that the boys brought their toy medical kits to the game in the event that Senator Carper broke a bone as he had in last year’s game. You can read about it here.

As always on this blog, we try to bring you the story behind the story. In this case, the story is that Senator Carper—a good friend to whom I largely owe my political career, such as it is—did not find the “boys with medical kits” sight gag the least bit funny. Aside from having the best winning streak of any elected official in Delaware history and personally recruiting most of the young Democrats who make up the party’s much vaunted “bench,” Senator Carper also has the best sense of humor of just about anyone in Delaware politics. But on this occasion, whether it was because he had his game face on or whether because he didn’t think the mockery of his painful foot injury was all that hilarious, he didn’t crack a smile. I could practically see the comic book thought balloon over his head, reading “Laugh on little man, I’ve won more statewide elections than I can count and at this point I could get re-elected running up and down Route 1 in a chicken suit. So enjoy your joke, and then head back out to knock on doors until you have holes in your shoes.”

Senator, in the best tradition of American politics, I can only say this: I blame my children.