I just got back from an evening of canvassing in Weld County Colorado.  Recent polls have shown the race here to be extremely close so I thought I'd share a few personal stories to help alleviate any jitters fellow Kossacks may be feeling because of the poll numbers.   We canvassed for one hour and every experience was a positive one with voters who are committed downticket to our candidates.

I have lived in Colorado all my life and on August 1st of this year my beloved home state will turn 132 years old and I will turn 51.  My family comes from upstate New York, Missouri, Massachusetts and points up and down the eastern coast of America.  In 1914 my paternal grandfather ran away from home in Easton, New York and came west to join the Army, when World War I ended and his enlistment was up he returned to the high dry plains of Colorado,  My grandmother's father travelled from Nebraska to eastern Colorado in 1902 riding in a covered wagon to find a piece of earth to call his own and homestead.  Although the conditions were harsh, they stayed, and lived and scraped and survived through the dustbowl and the Great Depression.  Grandma said the worst thing about the drylands was the wind and the lack of trees, but when she went east to visit relatives she found she missed the wide open skies and the air filled with the smell of sagebrush.

Watching Bush 43 the other night it came to me in a flash who he reminded me of, his soft voice, his guilty face,... he reminded me of my children whenever I'd caught them dead to rights when they'd done something wrong.  It then struck me how pathetic that was, that a sixty year old man was resorting to the same tactics my children had used when they claimed they hadn't: flushed a carrot down the toilet, stuck an electric charcoal starter around a door knob (Home Alone)or eaten two full bags of Halloween candy and then thrown it up in the garbage compactor.  In retrospect some of my children's escapades have been funny, but nothing this man has done is. Jacqueline Kennedy once said  

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters much.