Mike Ciresi announced today that he is officially a candidate for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Norm Coleman.
Ciresi is an affluent attorney who briefly ran in 2000 and came in second place in the primary, loosing to Mark Dayton whom went on to take out incumbent Rod Grams.
Ciresi v Franken endorsement battle to come......
Both said they will abide by the party endorsement likely in June 2008, avoiding a late and costly September primary. This could change as time goes by but I hope it doesn’t.
I don’t want to be redundant, but because it has been a while since I wrote on of these I will do it again anyway: I think we could have another Hackett vs. Brown type of event.
Months away from the Ohio primary supporters of both candidates were bitterly debating the pros and cons of the candidates. Sometimes "if not most of the time" these debates were not talked out in a constructive way. People like me in Minnesota said "Get Hackett in there, Brown just can’t win! He couldn’t even make up his mind if he wanted to run or not, Ohio folks wont like that!" kind of rhetoric. Brown went on to win in a land slide and was key to taking the senate.
The reason I didn’t support Brown "whom I love now" is because my admiration for Paul Hackett was so strong. I didn’t even want to hear about other candidates. I can tell already from the response from folks in the netroots that Franken could be the next Hackett. People backing him without taking a fair look at the other candidates.
People here already know about Al Franken. So I ask that you take a look at Mike Ciresi as well. Al has a lot of love nationally but the Minnesota Dems are not 100% on him yet, many want a more traditional candidate hence my above reference to the Brown v Hackett race. I have not chosen a candidate but definitely have my work cut out picking between the two.
http://www.ciresiforsenate.com/ new official site
http://www.mikeciresi.org A wiki page
http://news.minnesota.publicradio.or... Profile links to ads and debates from the 2000 campaign.
One cool fun fact about Ciresi is that he used Bill Hillsman as his ad guy in 2000. Bill Hillsman is given a lot of credit from Kos and Jerome in Crashing the Gate and an outside ad man that gets results.
Check him out and let me know your thoughts.