I am holding my big three-county announcement tour of the state on Saturday, June 7th. Mrs. Denn is still haunted by one searing memory of the 2004 tour: driving between Georgetown and Dover, on a day that was over 90 degrees, I insisted that we roll up the windows in the car and turn off the air conditioner while I was doing a call-in interview on a radio show. She was several months pregnant with the twins, the temperature in the car rose to sauna levels….Let’s just say that I am still very happily married, but we are probably going to skip the in-transit radio interviews this time.

One of the challenges with an announcement tour is deciding where in each of the three counties to do the announcement. You want it to be symbolic of your campaign themes, dignified, not too big but not too small. After we agonized over these issues for weeks, I decided to chuck the traditional playbook. Because the Sussex County announcement is on a Saturday morning during beach weekend, I decided that we would have two new priorities: (a) no beach traffic, and (b) lots of food. So we will be having what I think will be Delaware’s first Lt. Governor announcement in a Sussex County diner. It has nothing to do with any of my campaign themes (though let me hasten to add that I endorse diners and oppose, um, not having diners), but it should be a lot of fun. More details on all three county locations will be posted next week.

In the Other Good News department, I have been endorsed by several more local Democratic party committees, including the 10th District in Brandywine Hundred, the 17th District in New Castle, and the 21st and 23rd Representative Districts in Newark. So far, 13 districts in New Castle County have made official endorsements in my race, and they have all endorsed me.

When Michele and I were living on Rodney Street in Wilmington and walking the boys and dog up to Rockford Park, Michele would sometimes look at the houses on Kentmere Parkway and say something like “wow, look at the beautiful landscaping and architecture.” My response would be “yeah, that would totally be a good place to have a fundraiser.” And then she would quietly sigh to herself and repeat “not in front of the children, not in front of the children.”

And then our friends Craig and Amy Sternberg, who have one of those houses, offered to let us have a fundraiser there. I reacted roughly the way that one of the contestants on Survivor does when Jeff Probst throws a pound cake on the floor and says the first one to eat it has immunity. The fundraiser is on Wednesday, May 28th, from 5:30 to 7:30, you can get more details about it by e-mailing me at mattdenn@hotmail.com. Our fundraisers have all been great events—we always have a good crowd and good food and drink, so I encourage you to think about coming.

If you follow my race in the press, you know that fundraising has become even more of a priority for me than it was in the past. It is looking more and more like I am going to face a very expensive, very negative campaign in November, and in order to make sure that my message of advocacy for Delaware’s children and families is still heard, I need to have the resources to make it heard. I will bother more shoppers and greet more fairgoers than anyone, but we still need the money to be on the airwaves.  So even if you can’t come to the fundraiser, click on the ”get involved” link at this web site and help us out. Thanks.

Turn your speakers on and just click it. I promise it won’t get you fired. Probably.

I was held up for a while this morning preparing some letters saying different variations on “send money now!”, so instead of offering my usual thoughtful and comprehensive analysis of the futures market, I will offer some random thoughts from the weekend.
1. We are having a pizza get-together at Grotto’s on Main Street in Newark at 6:30 tonight. I think the deal is that in exchange for getting pizza and soda, you have to brush tears from your eyes and pretend to be riveted by whatever I am saying for five or ten minutes. We will soon find out if one of the core philosophical beliefs of my campaign, College Kids Will Do Anything for Pizza, is true.  (Seriously, college students have been our very best volunteers, so this is an effort to try to get a few more of them involved in the campaign.)
2. If you have never been to the First Baptist Church’s annual Patriotic Sunday in New Castle, you should definitely check it out next year. In place of the traditional Sunday morning service, the church has an enormous tribute to men and women in the armed forces, the highlight of which is a part of the service where dozens of veterans from each of the branches of the military line up along different walls of the giant church, and all of the other attendees line up to (in the words of Reverend Sears) look them in the eye, shake their hand, and thank them for their service. They even bring up the older kids from Sunday School so their parents can have them thank the veterans. It is an incredibly moving thing to watch and in which to participate.
3. The Woodlawn Library is awesome for kids. The boys and I go to the library every weekend while Mrs. Denn tries desperately to hold our household together, and this was the first time they had been to Woodlawn. Aside from being a beautiful building with very friendly staff, it is the only library we have been to with a playground right outside, a full collection of Wiggles videos (including the newest ones with the strangely off-putting new Wiggle, Sam), and a parking lot set up to minimize the amount of space that parents with kids need to spend staggering through traffic trying to balance overdue books and daredevil children.
4. Please vote for me. I have been advised by my consultants that I should return to that theme intermittently.

I was driving to the Governor’s Prayer Breakfast yesterday morning, and because it was so early I couldn’t bother anyone on the phone I turned on my podcast of the previous day’s radio shows. I came across an NPR interview with Steven Beck, a United States Marines colonel whose job it is to notify families of their loved one’s deaths in Iraq, and Jim Sheeler, the journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles he wrote after following Beck on his rounds and spending weeks with the families whose loved ones had been killed. You can still listen to it at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90065224, and I absolutely urge you to do so. As the number of young people who die in Iraq keeps mounting, I think we have started to become numb to the horrible tragedy that each death is for the soldier and his or her families. This radio show, where the authors give compelling firsthand accounts of how the families struggle to cope with their losses, brings it all back home.