May 17, 2008 4:32 am

My Democratic primary opponent Ted Blunt suspended his campaign yesterday, and I wanted to use this space to say something about Ted.  This is not the usual ‘nice stuff you say about your opponent when it doesn’t matter’ routine, nothing I say here is anything I haven’t said about Ted in his presence, in front of audiences, out on the campaign trail.

Ted has had a truly extraordinary life story, growing up in difficult circumstances in public housing in Philadelphia, putting himself through school as a student athlete, and serving for decades as a civic leader and public official.  And yet when he and I had joint appearances during the campaign, the thing about which he was the most animated was his family, and in particular his three daughters.  Ted’s daughter Lisa—a long-time friend of mine—has served in a variety of cabinet posts in Delaware and will undoubtedly run for office some day herself.  Marla has become a seasoned and respected political professional, heading up constitutent services for Senator Biden and doing a great job running her dad’s campaign and helping with Barack Obama’s campaign in Delaware.  And Thea is a successful engineer.  All three of them are dedicated to their own families and respected in their communities.  I said it on the campaign trail and I will say it here: if I could look back forty years from now and talk about the way I raised my kids the same way Ted does today, I would consider myself to have had a successful life no matter what happens in my career or in politics.

Ted is going to be playing a leadership role in our state for a long time, and I look forward to working with him as I have in the past to make this state a better place for our kids.  

May 16, 2008 5:23 am

First, some brief campaign news.  More endorsements rolled in since Wednesday: one from the 7^th Representative District Democratic Committee in Brandywine Hundred, and one from the University of Delaware College Democrats.  The 7^th District endorsement means that 16 out of the 16 representative districts that have officially endorsed candidates have endorsed me.  That is obviously pretty good.  The College Democrats endorsement is also a big deal, because those College Dems are the die-hard workers of the Delaware political scene.   

Additional campaign news: our lawn signs were successfully unloaded on Wednesday with no injuries. Teamsters vice president Michael Ciabattoni had planned to help his members unload the signs, but instead supervised the process from his home while reclining in his kimono and bunny slippers.

Finally, some non-campaign news.  I was reminded again last night why I love doing the work that I do.  I was speaking to a group of adoptive parents at Simpson United Methodist Church, and after the meeting was over as I was getting to leave, a woman came up to me and asked if she could introduce herself.  She had been in another part of the church wrapping items for a fair the church is having this weekend, and she had heard I was in the auditorium.  She has a young child who wears hearing aids, and she wanted to thank me for my help with a pending bill to require private insurance companies to do what the State of Delaware already does for its employees—help the parents of hearing-impaired children pay for part of the cost of a new set of hearing aids every three years.  Policyholders who don’t have hearing-impaired kids won’t even notice the difference—the impact on health insurance premiums will be between six and twenty cents a month.  But for people like the woman who came out to thank me at the church, it means the difference between buying the hearing aids her son really needs to succeed in school and having to buy a less expensive set.  Almost every day I run into someone who has been affected by something my office does—a person we helped resolve a claim with an insurance company, someone who is now able to keep their young adult child on their health insurance, or someone like the lady at church last night.  It makes all the sign-unloading worthwhile.

May 14, 2008 4:40 am

Today I must undertake one of my least favorite tasks on the campaign.  No, not quite as bad as pursuing wealthy corporate lawyers through Rodney Square at lunch with a butterfly net in search of campaign donations–but close.  Today is the arrival of the lawn signs.  I am not sure if it must be this way or if the folks who have helped me with my campaigns simply tell me it must for their own amusement, but the metal portions of the lawn signs (which, cumulatively, weigh about the same as an ICBM) are delivered by a courier that requires the campaign to actually lug them from the truck into the building.  I, of course, feel a moral obligation to help my friends at the Teamsters union who have volunteered to help unload them.  So we have arranged for an early morning delivery, and while all of you are reading the paper or debating who got voted off American Idol last night, I will be stopping off on my way to work to lug giant boxes of steel bars through a parking lot.

May 12, 2008 2:42 am

I hope all of you had a good Mother’s Day weekend. It was a busy one around the Denn household—the boys and I were on the road for the campaign much of the day on Saturday, and then on Sunday we spent the morning honoring Mrs. Denn and the afternoon honoring my mom. Mrs. Denn had a relatively modest Mother’s Day request—that the boys not launch their traditional SWAT team style assault on the marital bedroom screaming “wake up mommy!” after they had finished their 6 a.m. breakfast, and instead allow her to sleep until a normal hour. We augmented that with some pancakes and some of Acme’s finest roses.

Some other important campaign news: first, I received more local representative district endorsements since my last update, so that I am now up to 15 endorsements from the 22 New Castle County local Democratic committees, with seven more still up in the air. And we finally have times and locations for the Saturday, June 7th announcement tour. They are:

Sussex County: 9:30 a.m., The Georgia House, 119 Main Street, Millsboro

Kent County: Noon, Old State House, The Green, Dover

New Castle County: 4 p.m., Old Courthouse, 112 Delaware Street, New Castle

May 9, 2008 3:21 am

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.

May 7, 2008 4:11 am

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.

May 5, 2008 4:32 am

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.

May 2, 2008 3:59 am

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.

April 30, 2008 2:30 am

Well, nothing really. But I was endorsed by the 5th Representative District and 18th Representative District Democratic Committees in Bear, adding to the growing list of local and statewide Democratic organizations that have endorsed my candidacy.

As for the number zero, it represents the number of brain cells that appear to have gone into Senator McCain’s half-baked proposal to “reform” health insurance in America that he released yesterday. As the Washington Post points out this morning, McCain’s newest proposal was generated in part by Elizabeth Edwards’ pointed observation that under his last proposal, neither she nor McCain could purchase health insurance due to their pre-existing illnesses. Hence, McCain’s newest proposal: cut off any government incentive for employers to provide health insurance, give already-cash-strapped Americans a $5,000 tax credit to purchase $12,000 worth of health insurance that their employer will no longer provide, eviscerate state regulation of health insurers, and chuck some money at the states to figure out some way to provide coverage to people who are uninsurable due to pre-existing illness. People, we really need to win this election.

April 28, 2008 1:29 am

As many of you know, something happened over the last 72 hours that has profoundly changed the playing field for me this fall—a new player has been injected into the mix, and he is going to make September and October a lot more interesting.

I am referring, of course, to DeSean Jackson, star kick returner/wide receiver from my beloved University of California, who was drafted in the second round Saturday by my equally beloved Philadelphia Eagles. For all of us who have pressed our fingers to our temples, closed our eyes, and gritted our teeth the last few years every time the Eagles were receiving a punt, salvation has arrived. DeSean Jackson is unbelievable—he will immediately be one of the top five kick returners in pro football. As an Eagles fan it hurts me to say this, but…well done, Andy Reid.

Now, back to the campaign. This was a slow weekend for me—Zach was pretty sick and wanted his daddy around, so I stuck close to home. But I was pleased to learn that I received the endorsement of the Delaware Stonewall Democrats on Saturday—they are the second statewide Democratic Party group, along with the Progressive Democrats of Delaware, to endorse my candidacy, and I am proud to have their support. And I was also very pleased to see some University of Delaware students, under the erstwhile leadership of campaign director Alyssa Koser, take some time out of their weekends to make some phone calls for the campaign. Alyssa is organizing a Meet Matt event in Newark for May 12th, if you are interested in details just e-mail Alyssa at Alyssa@mattdenn.com.