Matt Denn for Lieutenant Governor 2008

Fasten Your Seatbelt

2008-02-24T23:26:00.001-05:00

And click on the all new, extraordinarily snazzy, relaunched Denn campaign web site, www.mattdenn.com. From now on, new blog entries will be found there rather than here.

Well, I'm Getting At Least 82 Votes

2008-02-22T05:36:00.002-05:00

Later today I am going to be formally announcing something that I think is pretty significant: the names of 82 people who have agreed to be honorary co-chairs of my campaign for Lieutenant Governor.

Why eighty-two? Because I wanted to have two co-chairs from each one of the 41 Representative Districts in the state. And they are not supporting me just because I am so good looking. They are supporting me because I have been up and down this state for the past three years doing my job—trying to visit every senior center in the state once a year, exhorting every civic association and business group that will hear me about the need to press their legislators for insurance reform in Dover, and helping individuals who have been treated unfairly by the insurance industry.

Some of them are people I have known most of my career. Tony Allen, one of my co-chairs from the 4th district in Wilmington, met me in 1993, the year the Phillies went to the World Series. I was so addicted to the team that I had every game on the radio in my office, something that was a little bit unusual in the high-powered law firm where Tony and I were both fairly new employees. Tony heard the game on, wandered in, and sat down. Tony went on to become the first executive director of the Metropolitan Wilmington Urban League, at the same time as I was working as legal counsel to the Governor, and we worked together on some tremendously important issues such as racial profiling and business opportunities for minority and women owned businesses. Tony is now a big shot at Bank of America, still a force in the community, and I am proud to know him and to have him as one of my co-chairs. Ironically, the other co-chair from the 4th district is Sally Coonin, a leader in the teaching and education community, who used to be Tony’s high school teacher.

I have known Senator David Sokola, one of my co-chairs from the North Star/Pike Creek area, even longer. Back in 1990, while I was still in law school but spending part of the summer and fall in Delaware, I asked former county Democratic chairman Joe Reardon which campaign needed an energetic young guy willing to roll up his sleeves and work for a Democrat. He said there was a guy running an uphill race in a Republican district who might just have a shot because he was smart, honest, and the hardest campaigner he had seen. So I went to work for David Sokola in 1990, he won, and I have never regretted it—one of the straightest shooters in the Delaware General Assembly, and someone I am proud to have on my side.

Some of them, frankly, are people who weren’t always my political allies. Kay Ryan, a Democratic activist and one of my co-chairs in the 38th district down at the beach, worked as hard as anyone to be sure I wasn’t the Democratic nominee for Insurance Commissioner in 2004. But she has watched me at work, and now she is one of my biggest advocates. I am glad she is on my side, not only because it is the ultimate form of flattery, but also because she is as tough as they come and I still have some tire treads on my back from her in 2004.

Some of them are friends of mine from organized labor. They know that I was a leader in reducing workers compensation insurance premiums, which was absolutely critical to retaining jobs here in Delaware, but also a leader in making sure that the premiums weren’t reduced by keeping injured workers from the best medical care. Others such as Darlene Battle, who is a leader of a Delaware organization that fights for housing and other rights for low-income residents of our state, and Ed Speraw, the head of an organization that fights for the residents of manufactured homes, are people who know that I have fought alongside them.

The list goes on—elected officials, businesspeople, health care providers, leaders of the African-American and Hispanic communities, leaders of the gay/lesbian community, Democratic party activists….What all of them have in common is that they have seen me at work, they know what I have done as Insurance Commissioner, and they know how important it is to apply the same energy and focus that I bring to my current job to the Lieutenant Governor’s office, so I can be a force for the welfare of children in our state.

Testify!

2008-02-19T05:46:00.002-05:00

As we get ready to launch the campaign’s new web site, one of the things that we are doing is gathering up some of the thank you letters that I have received from consumers that I went to bat for as Insurance Commissioner. You will be hearing from these consumers during the campaign, because I think that the way that I fought for people in my current job says a lot about how I view being a public servant and how I will act as Lieutenant Governor. Some of the ones that I came across yesterday (names changed until we get the families' ok to use real names):

“Without your help, Mary would have been unable to go to Sloan-Kettering hospital in New York. Sloan Kettering is the only hospital that could provide the treatment Mary required. As of November, Mary is in remission. It is highly unlikely that remission would have been possible if it were not for your help and God’s. There are so many people that fall through the cracks because they are not aware that there is help through you and your office. We cannot thank you enough for your help.”

“I don’t know what you did, but whatever happened, you certainly got results! My uncle started receiving checks within two weeks…This has been so hard on all of us, but especially my dear uncle. I hated watching him struggle without any way of helping him and you gave me that way.”

“My mom received her chemotherapy pills the next morning at 10:00 am. They must have flown the prescription, because I emailed you at 5pm the night before with the problem. Anyway mom was happy. She looked at us and said ‘What do people do, that don’t have a Matt Denn?’”

Colonmania

2008-02-15T06:54:00.001-05:00

Last Thursday, after health insurance giant Aetna announced its somewhat less than enthusiastically received plan to prevent gastroenterologists from giving their patients full anesthesia during colonoscopies, I announced that (among other things) I would ask the General Assembly to take legislative action when it returned to session next month. You can read the original article here. Yesterday, Speaker of the House Terry Spence announced…drumroll please…exactly the same thing. You can read today’s article here. I had sometimes mused out loud to colleagues about what it would take to start bringing the House Republicans around to the cause of health insurance reform, and now I guess I have my answer: having a medical instrument inserted into their colons without full sedation.

In fairness to the Speaker, by the way, he is the only House Republican sponsor of Senate Bill 6, the bill creating a statewide health insurance purchasing pool. So if I have to be plagiarized by a House Republican, I would rather it be him than almost anyone else.

The Denn Campaign Agenda for Tonight

2008-02-14T05:16:00.002-05:00

Making my wife Valentines Day dinner. I may be driven, but I ain't stupid.

The Team Expands

2008-02-13T05:24:00.001-05:00

Hiring staff people is a very tricky thing for a campaign. Do not take my word for it, look at the churning that has gone on among the senior staff ranks of the top Presidential campaigns such as John McCain and Hillary Clinton. Trying to keep a job as a campaign manager these days is like trying to cross the Bridge of Death in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Back in 2004 when I ran for Insurance Commissioner, I used an extremely scientific process to hire my one campaign staff member, Dana Rohrbough. I met Dana when I was giving a talk at a Political Science department event at the University of Delaware, saw how enthusiastic she was about Democratic politics, asked a few people about her, and then offered her a job. She ended up doing a phenomenal job—so good, in fact, that she was hired by Jack Markell for his 2006 State Treasurer campaign and is now his Deputy Campaign Manager.

Because that Zen style approach worked so well for me in 2004, I adopted it again this year, and I think we have found another star. Beginning Monday, University of Delaware junior Alyssa Koser will be working for the Denn Campaign. Alyssa hails from Lewes, and has the type of broad volunteer background that demonstrates her commitment to the Democratic Party and its causes, including stints with Voices without Borders and the presidential campaigns of some guy named Biden and more recently of Barack Obama. She is very active in a number of groups on campus, and her post-graduation plan is to become a school teacher in the Teach for America program. But most importantly of all, when I talked to her and when I talked to other people about her, my gut told me that this was someone who was going to bring incredible enthusiasm and commitment to my campaign. Of course, my gut has also told me for the last decade that the Eagles had a chance of going all the way, but I think I am on more solid ground here.

Please be nice to Alyssa when she calls—and trust me, she will be calling. And don’t forget, if you would like to contribute to the Pay Alyssa A Decent Wage fund (also known as the Denn campaign treasury), you can do so by clicking here.

Our First Scandal

2008-02-11T06:16:00.000-05:00

It was a busy campaign weekend, which started on Saturday morning at the A. Philip Randolph Institute monthly meeting at the Longshoremens Hall. I have been going to APRI meetings since I got elected, because I think it is one of the most credible, serious activist organizations in the state. However, this was the first time I had appeared as a candidate for Lieutenant Governor.

Everything went great. Adam and Zach came with me and were well behaved, I gave my standard remarks about my campaign’s focus on the welfare of children and fielded a lot of questions, and then the crowd serenaded me with “Happy Birthday.” Then I went to the back of the room to get my kids, and one of the members said “Hey, Mr. Save the Children. That kid’s shoes are on the wrong feet.” And he was right.

Video to follow.

Delaware Speaks: Obama Wins, My Ford Focus Loses

2008-02-06T07:45:00.000-05:00

I stayed up late to see the California primary results come in, for no good reason that I can articulate as I sit here this morning. Good job by Senator Obama. To come from as far behind as he did to a virtual draw in delegates in a matter of just a few weeks is remarkable. And I thought the tone Senator Clinton struck last night was very good. I am obviously for Senator Obama and am proud of how well he did here in Delaware, but we Democrats are going to be in good shape in November with either of our candidates at the top of the ticket.

I have only glanced at the Delaware numbers, but I think they are interesting in terms of what they portend for the state’s September Democratic primary. Total statewide Democratic vote yesterday was 96,341—an increase of almost exactly 200% over the number of people who turned out to vote in my primary election in 2004. But the increase in turnout accelerated dramatically as the polling places got further south. In the City of Wilmington, turnout increased over 2004 by between 83% and 98%. Some of the other suburban New Castle County RDs were up by similar amounts--RD 13 up by 93%, RD 17 up by 86%. But several other New Castle County RDs had much higher turnout bumps--RD 25 up 240%, RD 15 up 473%. And the districts that really took off were the districts in Kent and Sussex County whose primary turnout is traditionally low compared to their populations--RD 31 (Dover) was up by 320%, RD 35 (Milford) up by 570%, RD 41 (furthest south RD in the state) up by 537%, RD 14 (Rehoboth) up by 590%. The net result: turnout in Kent and Sussex County was 27% of the statewide total, as opposed to the average figure of about 20%. The message is that people in Kent and Sussex County will vote in Democratic primaries in much higher numbers if they think a lot is at stake.

I intend to make this an election where people realize that a lot is at stake. I can already hear the Ford Focus groaning as it contemplates what this means for the Denn campaign.

It's All About Obama

2008-02-04T05:23:00.000-05:00

OK folks, there is really no news in Delaware today other than Obama News, so that will be our focus.

I could not go to the rally in Rodney Square yesterday. Zach is fine now, but he had to spend a few days in the hospital starting on Friday so I was pretty much out of commission. Fortunately, the Obama folks were nice enough to make it possible for me and Adam to scoot into a very brief reception Senator Obama had before the rally to meet me and his four other Delaware statewide co-chairs. Adam and I did not realize that we were standing by the doorway that Senator Obama was going to come through, but we were, and when he came bursting in and Adam came face to face with the man he watches on television and emulates, Adam’s reaction was—not surprisingly—stunned silence. I said “Oh my goodness, Adam, it’s Barack Obama!” Senator Obama gave him a big smile and said “All right, who is this?” I said “This is your biggest fan. Adam, do you want to say hi to Senator Obama?” Adam said nothing. Senator Obama said “what’s your name, buddy?” Nothing. And then Senator Obama said “How about a high five?” Adam delivered in the clutch.

When it came to the pictures, Adam announced that he was going to make a “silly cheese face,” which is what they were taught to do in pre-school for their school pictures. It is apparently meant to elicit a smile, in Adam’s case as you can see it makes it appear that he is being poked with an electric cattle prod. Still, something that he will cherish when Barack Obama is President and he is old enough to know what it means.

Last week, of course, it was Barack Obama’s wife Michelle who was in town. Once again, Obama Fan In Chief Adam Denn tagged along. I had to listen to most of the speech off in the wings—Adam came up on stage with me for the first part, but wilted under the hot stage lights and I needed to get the heck off the stage before he became a news event—but she is a dynamite speaker. Very different from her husband, but a tremendously effective advocate for him.

Tomorrow we need to work on making sure that Senator Obama is our Democratic nominee, and then after that, back to the work of me being your next Lieutenant Governor.

Mea Culpa

2008-02-02T14:16:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the absence of new posts for the last few days. We will be back with new material Monday morning. Stay tuned. I would remind you to go see Barack Obama tomorrow if you hadn't already been reminded by a dozen other people.

Love, Dover Style

2008-01-31T07:06:00.000-05:00

I had my annual hearing before the General Assembly Joint Finance Committee yesterday. The News Journal coverage catches the gist of my pitch for funding for affordable health insurance. You can read the article here.

The preparation every year for the Joint Finance hearing is intense—it is the one time each year that the legislators get to grill you about your budget and operations, and the legislators usually have a lot of detailed questions. My hearings have gone very well each year because we have been so prepared, and I was ready to roll this time as well. But this year turned out very different.

I pointed out to the committee members that this was my last visit—I said, “A year from now, I will either be lowering the chin-up bar in the Lieutenant Governor’s office or asking a first-year lawyer at a law firm how to find the new courthouse.” And what it prompted from the legislators, instead of questions, was a series of testimonials about the job that I and my team had done over the last few years at the Insurance Department. I am a loyal Democrat and proud of it, but I have to admit that I was touched to hear some of the Republican members of the committee talk about how impressed they were with the fights I took on for consumers.

At the end of the hearing, there was applause—which is also not the standard ending for a Joint Finance Committee hearing. The visitors section was full of insurance lobbyists who had come to watch my hearing. Senator Cook, the co-chair of the committee, looked at them and said “I don’t see you guys clapping.” I said “They’re cheering on the inside, Senator.”

This job is never boring.

Making the Pitch for Health Insurance

2008-01-30T06:30:00.000-05:00

Today is my annual trip to the General Assembly Joint Finance Committee to discuss the Insurance Department budget for the upcoming fiscal year. My hearings have been fairly uneventful, since the first thing I did when I arrived in 2005 was to tell the committee that I was going to run the department without a dime of taxpayer money (we are now funded entirely by surcharges and fees imposed on national insurance companies). They like that.

What I am going to emphasize today, though, is that even in a very tight budget year, the state must seriously consider funding the health insurance purchasing pool proposal that Senator Blevins, Representative Hall-Long, and I have pending before the General Assembly. In fact, here is a blog-readers-only, exclusive preview of what I will say about that in my testimony:

While we are not asking for any additional money for our department, I do want to take the opportunity to ask for one appropriation of funds should they become available. As you all know, I have been asking the General Assembly for three years now to create a health insurance pool to provide affordable health insurance to the underinsured and uninsured in our state. As you also know, the design of the pool requires a state subsidy in order to make it work.

As I am up and down the state every day, there is no issue I hear about more than health insurance – from families or from businesses. I’m sure you hear it, too. While a period of economic downturn may not be the easiest time for you to consider spending money on a new program, it is exactly the time when the need for more affordable health coverage will become greater. I urge you to consider funding the health insurance pool should revenues improve. It would be a giant leap forward for Delaware and, I believe, would make Delaware a model for the rest of the country.

We are getting ready to start putting the Denn volunteers to work on the campaign trail, if you are willing to start putting in some time to make this state a better place for its kids, drop me a note at mattdenn@hotmail.com.

Short End of the Stick

2008-01-28T10:08:00.000-05:00

If you noticed the article in Saturday’s paper on my legislative agenda for this year (you can read it here), you were probably too dazzled by its substance to notice that it was written by Eric Ruth, who doubles as one of the News Journal’s food critics. When Mr. Ruth called me about the article, I told him that I thought he had the best job in Delaware. It reminded me that the Eric Ruth of Seattle, Washington is my little sister Becky, who is a food critic and editor for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She has her own blog, which is beautifully written but essentially consists of taunting everyone else in America about the awesome food she is eating. You can read it here. I have to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars and stand in the cold in front of supermarkets, she gets to eat at some of America’s best restaurants on someone else’s dime, and then get paid to write about how tasty it is. This is not right.

In other news, one of the many things that I like about Barack Obama is that he married a beautiful, capable woman named Michelle. So did I. His is coming to Delaware on Thursday to campaign for him, you can get more details at his campaign website http://www.barackobama.com/.

Good News, Bad News

2008-01-23T04:53:00.001-05:00

I will give you the bad news first. In spite of now being three years old and fully capable of wiping their hands before pawing at me, my children have nevertheless ruined all of my suits. Yesterday they triumphantly sullied the last one. I have had to triage my jackets with the least amount of banana smeared on them (at least, I hope it’s banana), while waiting for the local dry cleaners to struggle mightily to save the others. So if you see me on the campaign trail in the next few days and want to tell me that there is something on my suit…don’t.

The other bad news is that the House Republicans yanked yet another one of the consumer protection bills I proposed from the House agenda yesterday. This bill, which had passed the State Senate by a 20-0 bi-partisan vote, was designed to regulate “medical discount plans”--health plans that often look like health insurance but really aren’t. The plans are targeted at low income communities which have high uninsured rates, and even the Federal Trade Commission (overseen by the somewhat-less-than-consumer-friendly Bush administration) has identified these plans as an industry that needs to be watched. Thanks to the House Republicans, they will go unwatched in Delaware for at least a while longer. The Republicans’ excuse for yanking the bill yesterday was that they hadn’t realized I was going to testify in favor of it—apparently they thought we would argue for the bill through interpretive dance--and they needed to fly in special experts from the industry to testify against me. I will hold my breath. Thanks to Representative Helene Keeley for fighting to try to get this one done on behalf of consumers.

Now for the good news. First, the upside of the House Republicans selling out consumers was that I actually got out of Dover at 5:30 and unexpectedly got to see the boys before they went to bed and watch American Idol with my wife. Not a bad consolation prize. And second, yesterday was the filing deadline for 2007 campaign finance reports, so we finally found out where I stand with respect to the fundraising part of the Lieutenant Governor’s race. As the News Journal is reporting this morning (you can read it here), I now have a 5-1 fundraising advantage over my only announced opponent. That is great news, and to those of you who contributed and helped give me this advantage, thank you. To those of you who didn’t, you can fix that right now by taking out your credit card and clicking here.

Don't Believe the Hype

2008-01-22T07:32:00.000-05:00

The next time one of the Republican members of the House of Representatives Insurance Committee says “If Matt would just make a deal with the insurance companies, we would pass some of his bills,” I will give him a copy of this article from yesterday’s Washington Post. To summarize it for you, it describes how the insurance industry convinced Florida’s legislature and Republican Governor to pass a bunch of pro-insurance company legislation with the promise that it would reduce homeowners insurance rates, and—you may want to sit down for this—many of the rates have actually gone up.

Great News

2008-01-18T06:32:00.000-05:00

I promised you yesterday some big campaign news. Well, here it is. We just finished our fundraising report for 2007, and we not only broke all of the fundraising records for a Lieutenant Governor campaign, we shattered them. As best we can tell from state records, my campaign bank balance at the end of 2007 was triple that of any past candidate for Lieutenant Governor at the end of a pre-election year. Needless to say, that is great news.

What does this mean for the campaign? First of all, it means that I can spend more of my time this year talking to voters and less of my time raising money. Don’t get me wrong—there is still a lot more to raise, so you should keep checking your Caller ID. But it certainly makes things easier. More importantly, it means that I will have the ability to communicate my message about the welfare of Delaware’s children to voters. Running for a statewide office means that no matter how hard I work, I can never talk to each voter individually, so having the money to communicate with voters through the media means that voters will actually learn what I want to do if I get elected. That is huge.

Many of you who read this blog also contributed to my campaign, so to each of you a heartfelt thanks. To those of you who contributed in the last six weeks and are still waiting for your thank you note, please stop calling me an ungrateful wretch (that means you, mom)—the letters are going in the mail today. Now, with the election year upon us and the funds to at least start doing what I need to do, it is time to go out and tell the voters how I am going to help change this state. I hope you will join me.

A Musical Interlude

2008-01-17T04:38:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow, we will have some important news to announce about my campaign on the blog. For today, it is my pleasure to provide you with Adam’s favorite music video, a late 1950s live, souped-up performance of “Lonely Teardrops” by the late Jackie Wilson. Adam’s infatuation with Jackie Wilson is totally random—he saw my Jackie Wilson’s Greatest Hits CD in the front seat of the car, was intrigued with the fact that it was purple, and asked for the “Purple Music.” Now Purple Music has temporarily eclipsed The Wiggles.

The only downside of Adam loving this video is that he keeps trying to duplicate Jackie’s patented “dropping to the ground and getting back up” dance move, but so far he has only got the collapsing to the ground part down so I keep thinking he is having some sort of seizure.

Zach is currently into the Chicken Dance. As LBJ might have said, I will not look for a chicken dance video on YouTube, and if I find one, I will not post it.

Look at the Governor's Hands

2008-01-14T05:03:00.000-05:00

We had a busy weekend on the Denn Campaign, including stops at the 18th District Democratic Committee, the Interdenominational Ministers Action Council MLK Celebration, and the A. Philip Randolph Institute’s monthly meeting. One of the real highlights was a visit that Zach and I made to the second annual dinner sponsored by the PKU Families of Delaware. (For those of you asking yourselves “what does this have to do with the weird expression on your face in this picture or the title of this post,” I will get to that.)

PKU is an inherited metabolic disease that results in mental retardation and other neurological problems when not treated. Many children with PKU cannot eat foods containing protein. A synthetic formula is used as a nutritional substitute for the eliminated foods, however it is very expensive. Last year, I worked with several families who have children with PKU to get a bill passed mandating that the nutritional substitute be covered by health insurance policies. This disease does not affect a lot of families, but for the ones affected this bill was a huge deal—it will allow them to ensure that their kids get the supplements they need to avoid neurological damage, without having to lose their savings. The families did all the heavy lifting in getting the bill passed, and they should be proud of themselves.

Anyway, the families were nice enough to give me a plaque and a thank-you card at the dinner Saturday night, along with a picture of the PKU bill-signing ceremony with the Governor. And looking at my bizarre expression in the picture brought to mind a perennial problem for those of us involved in politics: what to do when the Governor is signing a bill in front of you. The bill-signing ceremony is always a great event—it is the culmination of a lot of hard work, everyone involved in the success gathers together and says nice things about each other and what the bill is going to do, the Governor speaks, and then the moment arrives for her to sign the bill. The photographers close in. The attendees are squeezed in behind the Governor.

Now what? The shocked “Oh my God, I can’t believe Jordan just hit that three-pointer” look is not appropriate—there is no surprise in what is happening. Other options—dumping a bucket of Kool-Aid on the Governor, yelling to the Governor that he has spelled his name wrong and then saying “psych!”, giving the person next to you a wet willie, all seem somehow inadequate to the occasion—and in the first case, can be a good way to get hurt. So what everyone does instead is focus intently on the Governor’s hands. Hence, the above picture, featuring a couple of adults tending to their children, and the rest of us appearing to be absolutely fascinated by the Governor’s hands.

Tomorrow, the House of Representatives is scheduled to take up a bill that I have proposed to regulate medical discount cards, which some unscrupulous companies have been using to take advantage of the uninsured in Delaware. The bill has already passed the State Senate, and I am hoping to have the chance to gaze at the Governor’s hands on this one.

Covering Kids

2008-01-10T04:34:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, a bi-partisan group of legislators, an honor roll of child advocates, and I gathered at Legislative Hall to announce the introduction of a bill I have proposed to use the free and reduced price lunch information that school districts have to locate uninsured families who might be eligible for free or lost-cost health insurance through Medicaid or the CHIP program. You can read about it in today’s News Journal here. We also announced a new program that my office will be pursuing through the state’s school nurses, to try to involve nurses more directly in signing kids up for CHIP.

This bill and the nurse partnership are both great efforts (if I do say so myself), but they aren’t enough. The statistics are grim. There are over 19,000 uninsured kids in Delaware. My optimistic goal with this bill and the nurse program is to increase enrollment by 1,000 kids. That would be a 20% increase in Delaware’s CHIP enrollment—huge by any standard—but our rolls of uninsured kids would still be unacceptable.

That is why getting every kid in Delaware health insurance by 2010 will be one of my primary goals as Lieutenant Governor. That is not a bumper sticker slogan, it is something that a couple of other states are moving towards doing, and that we in Delaware can do as well if we make it a priority. Universal health care coverage for adults and children is my ultimate goal, and I think we will get there. But covering every kid is an important, achievable interim step, and I will be putting my campaign hat on soon and talking about how we should get there.

Barack Obama

2008-01-07T12:37:00.000-05:00

Like just about everyone else who has spent any time with him, I was backing Joe Biden to be our next President of the United States. I still think that if he had the money of some of the other candidates in Iowa, he would have received enough votes to be barnstorming through New Hampshire right now. He was uniquely prepared to be the next President. But as you know, Joe gracefully bowed out of the Presidential race the night that the Iowa caucuses were over.

I am supporting Barack Obama to become our party’s nominee in 2008. All four of the remaining Democratic candidates would be great Presidents—nobody cared enough to ask me four years ago, but if they had I would have told them I was supporting John Edwards—but I think Senator Obama’s thoughtfulness, candor, charisma, and ability to bring people together will make him a great candidate and an even greater President. I thought his speech after the Iowa caucus results came in was the best I have seen a candidate give since Mario Cuomo’s speech to the Democratic Convention over 20 years ago.

My son Adam is making speeches now—he imperiously shuffles his Sesame Street cards around, announces that he is going to make a speech, clears his throat, yells out “Ladies and Gentlemen!”, and then starts proclaiming some nonsense about the Wiggles and waits for applause. But he sat with me and watched a tape of Senator Obama’s speech after the caucuses, and now he has occasionally changed his intro to “Ladies and Gentlemen, I am Barack Obama!”. When Adam turns twelve and President Obama is finishing his second term in office, I am going to tell him that story—I am not sure what it says about our country or Barack Obama, but I am pretty sure that it is something good.

And Then They Were Three

2008-01-07T03:39:00.001-05:00

A brief break from campaign news to report that the boys had their third birthday party on Saturday. As always, Mrs. Denn put together a great affair. Winnie the Pooh was this year's theme. The only time that things went off the tracks was when Zach grabbed a hunk of the chocolate chocolate chocolate cake (seriously) before it was served, and loved it so much that he was literally inconsolable when he was dragged away, so we had to move the cake eating portion of the event up on the timeline. Pictures include Adam post-cake, and Zach caught on secret video feeding potato chips to Lenny.

Taking Care of Business

2008-01-02T06:21:00.000-05:00

As the News Journal reports today (you can read it here), New Years Day marked the official start date for the new Delaware law restricting the use of credit in auto and homeowners insurance. It is not the law that I wanted when I stood with Margaret Rose Henry just three days after I took office in 2005 and announced our initiative, but it is a law that moves us from basically last in the country all the way up to being the fifth toughest state in the country when it comes to regulating credit scoring. I think that’s pretty significant.

Credit scoring is something I promised I would fight when I ran for Insurance Commissioner in 2004, and the proof is now in that I kept that promise—not just in a way that involved posturing, but in a way that required me to roll my sleeves up and get something done in a very divided General Assembly where the insurance industry used to always get its way. This is something that I will be talking about during my 2008 campaign for Lieutenant Governor: when I say during a campaign that I am going to fight for something, my record shows that you can take that to the bank.

Now that I am done chest thumping, I can tell you that the boys turned three years old on Saturday. Their official party is this weekend, but we celebrated last weekend by taking them to our favorite kids restaurant, Jose’s Border Café. I told the waitress it was their birthday. At dessert time, the Jose’s waiters came out singing, clapping, and bearing balloons, but Zach had basically blacked out from fatigue and Adam was horrified by the spectacle of it and cried.

New Years Resolutions

2007-12-27T06:36:00.000-05:00

1. Get elected Lt. Governor. Duh
2. Go to the gym as much as my mother does. This is not as easy as it sounds.
3. Get the General Assembly to bring my health insurance reform bills up for a vote.
4. Get my son Adam to break the habit of addressing me as “The Count” and refusing to comply with my requests unless they are expressed in a Transylvanian accent.
5. Get my son Zach to stop thinking that it is funny to get in trouble, and exponentially funnier to get in trouble for thinking that it was funny to have gotten in trouble.
6. Convince Lenny that his snowman chew toy is not his girlfriend.
7. Stop watching reality t.v. shows.
8. Buy my wife flowers more often.
9. Make sure that even in the midst of the campaign, the Denn clan comes first. Of course, if I can accomplish that by dragging them around all over the state plastered with my stickers, that works too.

Denn Boy Tour '07

2007-12-21T07:12:00.000-05:00

I am out of the office today and watching the boys, who are on “vacation” from the grueling rigors of finger painting and recess. I have no idea what to do with them until Michele gets home from work in the afternoon. They love going to the library, so I have come up with the novel idea of killing a few hours by going on a barnstorming tour of three different libraries. They can read, I can get some work done, and the constant change of scenery should forestall any organized rebellion until at least lunchtime. For national security reasons, I cannot disclose which libraries we are going to.

The next couple of weeks of the campaign are tough—with the holidays going on people are busy, and there really aren’t too many events where it is appropriate to campaign. But don’t despair: as long as my cell phone is working and there are rich people who don’t recognize my phone number on their caller ID, there is still productive work to be done for the campaign. Eventually I am going to be reduced to buying disposable cell phones at 7-11 in order to make sure my fundraising calls get through.

What a Drag It Is Getting Old

2007-12-17T07:27:00.000-05:00

I am thinking of investing in some publicly traded coffee stocks, or seeking to become the U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica. Because I think I am personally supporting the demand side of the world’s coffee economy these days. I just can’t stay awake as late as I did 20 years ago.

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent Thursday night down in Rehoboth with Pete Schwartzkopf and some business owners unhappy about the legislature’s inaction on health insurance reform. What I didn’t mention was that on the way home, I began feeling kind of goofy around 11:00 and got off the road in Middletown for a large coffee and to collect myself. I also inserted a special CD in the car which is the drowsiness equivalent of breaking the glass on the fire extinguisher in a public building: it features some of the most headache inducing numbers that Led Zeppelin, The Who, the Rolling Stones, and others have produced over the years.

Friday night, Mrs. Denn and I persuaded my sister to babysit the boys, and we went out for a rare date night. We went to the Little Fish Grill near South Street in Philadelphia—our favorite Philly restaurant—and then we went over to the TLA to see Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. We got there at 9:30, when we figured the opening act would be wrapping up. They were just coming on. By 10:30, when Sharon Jones finally came on, we were struggling. At about 11:20, in spite of an awesome show from Ms. Jones that was only half over, our desire to have our children not raised as orphans took precedence, and—aided and abetted by two Little Fish coffees--we headed home. I have attached a YouTube link below for Sharon Jones, so you can see what you missed out on if you weren't at the TLA with us.

Finally, on Saturday night, Lenny and I headed down to Townsend for the 8th and 9th District Democratic Committees’ annual holiday party. This is always a great party—almost 100% turnout from the committee members, and just as importantly, the only holiday party to which Lenny is routinely invited. Stephanie Hansen and Chris Roberts have the party at their farm house, which means that Lenny can run around without his leash outside, and then come inside and mooch ham and roast beef off the buffet table from a number of pet-loving Democrats. Lenny and I hung around until near the end, and—stop me if this is getting familiar—I had to stop at the Rt. 13 Wawas for a 20 oz. coffee to keep me awake on the way home. I did not go the head-banging CD route—Lenny’s musical tastes run more along the Anita Baker line.

I am planning on kicking the caffeine habit in December, 2008. Until the election is over, I am counting on Roger Daltrey, Robert Plant, and the hard-working men and women of 24-hour coffee establishments up and down the state to get me home safely.

Twelve Angry Women. And Pete

2007-12-14T07:03:00.000-05:00

Last night in Lewes, I spoke to a group of about 20 women that Rehoboth Beach rabblerouser Fay Jacobs assembled, all of whom wanted to know how they could help me with my fight to control the cost of health insurance. I was joined by one of my favorite State Representatives, Pete Schwartzkopf of Rehoboth. The discussion was not only lively but timely, because our General Assembly is coming back into session in about three weeks, and the time will have come to once again turn up the heat on the House of Representatives to let the two health insurance reform bills I have proposed come up for a vote. These women are locked, loaded, and ready to go: they are going to form coalitions with friends and business associates in the districts of the representatives who are holding these bills up, and to use a technical term, give them the business.

After the meeting was over, Pete told me that he would show me a ‘shortcut’ back to Route 1, but I misunderstood where he told me to turn and ended up in a pitch-black field that appeared to be where Joe Pesci was made in Goodfellows. Fortunately Pete had seen me make the wrong turn, called me on my cell phone to talk me down, and waited by the side of the road to lead me to safety. I was immensely grateful to Pete until I realized that if I had just gone back to Route 1 the way I wanted to, I wouldn’t have been lost in the first place. So in honor of Patty Hearst, I have decided that the sense of gratitude that one feels after being led into a disastrous shortcut and then rescued from that same shortcut by the guy who gave it to you in the first place will be called “Pete Schwartzkopf Syndrome.”

We only tease because we love, Pete.

A Brief Commercial Break

2007-12-13T07:33:00.000-05:00

No time for an official post today, just a picture of the boys showing off their new work table, courtesy of Grandpa Denn.

Tonight I will be in Rehoboth talking to small business owners and families about health insurance reform.

Code Red in the Insurance Department

2007-12-12T06:25:00.000-05:00

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a code red situation in the Delaware Insurance Department. It isn’t homeowners insurance companies bailing out of the state; unlike many other coastal states, we have kept almost all of ours. Nor is it spiraling auto insurance rates; I have succeeded in holding average auto insurance rates almost flat since I took office. No, the problem is that the office holiday party is the day after tomorrow, and I have no jokes.

This is our third holiday party since I took office, and the first two—largely due to the efforts of my senior staff who double as joke writers—were big successes. Part of the formula for success is the Insurance Commissioner hosting the festivities while dressed in some ridiculous costume and making jokes that other, funnier, people have written for him. The first year I was kind of a bitter, angry Santa. Last year I was Karnak.

The crisis this year started with my refusal to dress as an elf, largely because I refused to wear tights. Nothing, up to and including waterboarding, will cause me to wear tights. On top of that, we have been kind of busy in the office doing, you know, insurance regulation, so there has been no joke writing time. The result: we are just over 48 hours from showtime, with no theme, no costume, no jokes.

If you care for the hard-working Delaware Insurance Department employees who have made our office a model for the nation, indeed if you love America, you will send me some jokes at mattdenn@hotmail.com for me to use this Friday. I am counting on you.

Don't Get Sick!

2007-12-10T06:36:00.000-05:00

If you are thinking about getting sick in Delaware City, you might want to do it another day. Because this afternoon and evening, I will be riding along with the Delaware City Fire Company’s ambulance crew, to get a firsthand look at the great work that they do. I am not planning on getting in the way, but earlier this year at the Delaware Volunteer Firefighters Association lunch, it was revealed that one of our Democratic candidates for Governor tossed his cookies during one of his recent ambulance ridealongs, and the other one wandered out into traffic during a evening stop along the side of the road. So my goal for the day is to present a danger only to myself—and the good news is that if I do somehow hurt myself, it will be a quick trip to the emergency room.

And on the subject of hurting yourself, I have to convey to you that the Denn campaign has shattered yet another myth. This is the myth that real men do not eat quiche. Yesterday was my mom’s birthday, and we made brunch for her at our house, which featured the usual pancakes and bagels, but also Emeril’s Smoked Salmon Quiche with a Crispy Potato Crust. It is like eating an order of spicy hash browns, eggs, and smoked salmon all at the same time. I don’t think you could eat anything more manly that wasn’t roasted on a spit over a fire. You can get the recipe from the Food Channel web site here. It tasted amazing, but I think I probably took a collective five years off my family’s life by serving it.

After brunch, Lenny and I marched in the Elsmere Christmas Parade, and then came home to click on the t.v. and watch Eagles kicker David Akers miss a desperation field goal attempt and thereby guarantee that we will see at least a little bit of the Eagles rookies before the end of the season.

Bet the House on Bill

2007-12-05T07:38:00.001-05:00

I do not make a lot of predictions in this blog, other than my routine and unerringly accurate one that our President will do something in the succeeding 72 hours to further secure his place as one of the worst in our country's history. But today I am making an exception: Bill Carson will be the next State Representative from the 28th district.

On Monday, I celebrated the gale force winds and bone chilling temperatures by spending part of the afternoon knocking on doors with Bill in Smyrna. Actually, we were right in Bruce Ennis's neighborhood--if I had wanted to, I could have bounced a rock right off his window, except that Grace was home and she would have come out and kicked my butt. Anyway, it wasn't Bill's neighborhood, but I don't think we knocked on two doors all day where the people who answered the door--Democrats, Republicans, and Independents--didn't know Bill and have great things to say about him. It really was amazing--I have knocked on doors with a lot of candidates, and I have never seen anything like it.

Tonight, I am attending a fundraiser that some friends in Philadelphia are throwing for me. If I see Billy King moping around with his pockets turned inside out, I will say "why don't you ask Chris Webber for some money, smart guy?"

A Work In Progress

2007-12-03T07:06:00.001-05:00

I am currently working on my Top 10 Best and Worst lists for 2007. Like the baseball MVP trophies, my awards will of necessity exclude from consideration any acts of greatness or outrage that occur in December. Unlike the baseball MVP trophies, I will exclude anyone whose performance has been enhanced by steroids.

In the interim, a few observations from the weekend:

1. The people of Claymont are hardy souls indeed. This was the second consecutive year that the Claymont Christmas Parade was held in sub-arctic temperatures, and yet they still lined the street. An unusual feature of the Claymont parade is that traffic actually still runs on the parade street, the street is just divided in half. What that meant for me and the boys was that after we finished the parade, we could drive the Pacifica backwards against the parade and watch it from the heated interior of the car, in sort of a fast-forwarded version.

2. I am done with the Eagles this year. Absolutely appalling.

3. This Thursday night, I am going to be participating in Senator David McBride's annual community night. If you live in or around Senator McBride's district, this is a terrific event that I am surprised more legislators do not emulate. He rents the local fire hall, and basically hauls a dozen or two of the highest-level people from state government in to answer questions from his constituents. He serves a good meal, has an awesome turnout, and it always ends up being a great experience for his constituents. Let me know if you would like to come, I am sure he can feed a few more people.

Hurray For Me

2007-11-27T06:20:00.000-05:00

I was reminded yesterday that I have neglected the two most important functions of the candidate blog. Those are patting my own back and exhorting everyone to send me money. Please consider this entry a remedial one.

First of all, I should have mentioned that earlier this month, I continued to fulfill one of my campaign promises to the Delaware business community by dramatically cutting workers compensation insurance premiums. You can read about it here. These premium cuts are good news for both the business and labor communities, and are part of my overarching goal of controlling the cost of insurance in Delaware.

Second, you can send my campaign money through a credit card donation by going to our donation site here. Think of it as your way of protesting the commercialization of Christmas and Hanukah: instead of buying your kids gifts, just send me the money.

Jack, John...I Am Sorry

2007-11-23T04:26:00.000-05:00

As you know, both of our candidates for Governor are firm advocates of living a healthy lifestyle. They both believe that we should eat better and exercise more, in order to improve our health and the state's overall well-being. They are right about that. It is therefore with a mixed sense of pride, remorse, and lingering indigestion that I report to you that I emerged victorious in the Churchillean struggle within the Denn family over whether I would be permitted to prepare Paula Deen's Fried Stuffing on a Stick at this year's Thanksgiving. My niece Julia is modeling the results of my work in this photo.

The good news: no one was injured during the preparation of the Fried Stuffing, and it actually tasted awesome. The bad news: no one except me and my brother in law would do anything other than taste it, and after I consumed a full serving and some of the boys', I not only was unable to eat anything else on my plate, I also felt for about an hour like I did in Little League after I had the wind knocked out of me by a collision at home plate.

I hope that you had a great Thanksgiving. Mrs. Denn has to work today, so depending on how cold it is, the boys and I will be in the Wilmington Christmas parade in the morning and then visiting the Delaware State/UD tailgate in the early afternoon.

University of Delaware Democrats Rock

2007-11-19T04:12:00.000-05:00

Or whatever the appropriate 2007 term is, if that one is now out.

As I have said before, I would not have been elected in 2004 without the help of an incredibly motivated, smart group of college and high school students. Well, I am glad to report that while most of the 2004 team has graduated, it has been replaced by new young people who are just as enthusiastic and capable. Yesterday, eleven members of the University of Delaware Young Democrats stuffed 3,000 mailings for me in just over an hour. While we were stuffing the envelopes, I got a chance to talk to some of them about what they are doing in school and planning to do with their lives. They are an impressive group, serious about what they believe in and about their futures. The quiet desperation that broke out when our Dunkin Donuts Box O’Joe malfunctioned leads me to believe that they are also, um, studying very late on Saturday nights. I am hoping that some of them will stick with me through the upcoming election year. To all the College Dems: thanks again for the help, and have a great Thanksgiving.

Over the weekend, I also stopped by Joe Biden’s picnic in Banning Park and and the Jewish Federation’s “Mitzvah Day” at the Jewish Community Center. Meanwhile, back at the Denn house, controversy continues to rage. Two Fridays ago, during a commercial break in one of our favorite tv shows (Friday Night Lights), I switched over to the Food Network and saw Paula Deen making Deep Fried Stuffing on a Stick as part of her deep-fried Thanksgiving. I said to Mrs. Denn, “that looks like the best thing I have ever seen, I am going to make it this year for Thanksgiving.” She said something to the effect of “I would prefer that you not do that,” except that her statement contained references to a table-side defibrillator and my needing psychiatric treatment, and ran about 400 words. I only heard part of it, because I was watching Paula’s studio guest William “The Refrigerator” Perry appear to have a religious experience as he bit into his Deep Fried Stuffing on a Stick. So I am not backing down. We are having fried stuffing, and Mrs. Denn can try her "looking gorgeous and batting her eyes" thing on me, but it is not going to work this time.

Jefferson, Jackson, and...Denn?

2007-11-12T08:00:00.000-05:00

I am running late to get the boys to school this morning, so I don't have time to print my usual self-conscious and defensive commentary on the latest video we are posting. If you are just starting your day, grab a cup of coffee and a George W. Bush voodoo doll, and enjoy Six Minutes of Matt from last month's Jefferson Jackson dinner. (For my out of town friends, the presumptive Republican candidate for Governor used to run a chain of pharmacies--if you don't know that, the Viagra joke doesn't make much sense.)

Curse You Ben Franklin!

2007-11-08T08:06:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I started knocking on doors in connection with my campaign for Lt. Governor. It was going very well. Lots of people recognized me and were very supportive of my campaign, others who didn’t were very receptive to what I had to say. Then came my arch-foe: daylight savings time. Since I don’t start knocking on doors until I am done with my work day, and since that now roughly coincides with the state being plunged into darkness, I can no longer knock on people’s doors without them thinking that it is either a SWAT team or wayward trick or treaters.

Possible solutions:

1. Have myself followed by adoring volunteers who bathe me in floodlights when I knock on doors. Pursuant to admonitions from candidates for Governor, floodlights should be lit with energy conserving bulbs.
2. Stand on well-lit street corners and proselytize.
3. Go home and make phone calls while boys scream like lunatics in the background.

So far I am going with #3.

They're Not Booing

2007-11-05T06:30:00.000-05:00

Well, in the parking lot of the Eagles game they are booing. And it is well deserved. I shut the game off when it was 35 to 10 last night, but I still want those two hours of my life back.

But they are not booing in the 14th Senate District. They are saying "Bruuuuuce, Bruuuuuce." Congratulations to Bruce Ennis on a job well done last Saturday in winning the special election. The boys and I helped out in the afternoon while Mrs. Denn was working, and even by the lofty standards that the Democratic Party has set in terms of turning out volunteers for these special elections, it was a mob scene at headquarters. Well done, everyone involved.

Assorted Tricks and Treats

2007-11-01T05:38:00.001-04:00

First, let us cover the intentionally scary: the Denn boys finished their first official night of trick or treating last night. Grandma Denn kicked off the night by presenting the boys with, believe it or not, the first actual chocolate bars they had ever eaten. I followed up with bags of official Cookie Monster cookies that I had found at Wawa. After they had wolfed all of those down and were delirious from the sugar rush, we hit the streets. While Mrs. Denn handled the trick or treaters at our house, I pulled the boys from house to house in their wagon, and at the foot of each porch they would pile out and seek out their treats. We only went to about ten houses, the primary challenge was that the sugar had set off some sort of Wild Kingdom type feeding frenzy in Zach and I not only had to keep yelling at him to stop opening his candy in the wagon, he also started to try to steal his brother’s.

And yet Zach’s behavior was mature when compared to that of President Bush in dealing with children’s health insurance. Any limited credibility the President may have had when he listed his reasons for vetoing the last children’s health insurance bill was dashed when he said this week that he would also veto a new bill being negotiated by Republicans because it contained a tobacco tax increase. You can read about it here. So the President’s new position is that he will oppose any bill providing health insurance for children if it costs money. I am amazed that there has not been more public outrage at the President’s latest “Lucy and the Football” move.

On the same subject, don’t forget to sign our new petition to have the health insurance reform bills being held up in the Delaware House of Representatives released for a vote. You can read the petition by clicking here.

This weekend you will find the boys and me, as you have for two of the past three weekends, helping Bruce Ennis in his special election for the Delaware State Senate. I will also be stopping by the University of Delaware tailgate, attending the NAACP’s annual dinner, knocking on some voters’ doors, and watching an awful lot of football.

Boo

2007-10-29T05:43:00.001-04:00

Nothing is easy on the Denn campaign. Yesterday was the Newark Halloween Parade. As previously noted, Adam was Winnie the Pooh and Zach was Tigger. So far, so good. At about 2:00 yesterday, Winnie and Tigger piled into the Ford Focus, and we embarked on the 15 minute drive to the parade site.

By 2:02, both were fast asleep.

We got to the parade at 2:15, and then sat in the Focus for almost 45 minutes while the boys snored away. I preoccupied myself by curling up in the fetal position in the front seat of the car, turning on the radio, and waiting for Merrill Reese to announce the next insane Eagles blunder that would finally drop us out of playoff contention. (As you probably know, the Eagles were able to pull it out. Now I am convinced that a victory against Dallas next week will turn the entire season around. Do not call me after 8:00 this Sunday.)

I finally rousted Pooh and Tigger, loaded them into their wagon, and we hustled to our spot in the parade. And from there on, it was great. The boys had an absolute blast. If you haven’t been to the Newark parade before, there are thousands of people jammed onto Main Street to watch it, and to the boys’ delight a lot of them are other kids in costume. We saw several Elmos, a couple of Piglets and Eeyores, at least a dozen Spidermans, and of course, a few other Poohs and Tiggers. We also saw my mother, who panicked some of Delaware’s finest (we were marching right behind the police cars) by racing into the street to kiss the boys. We were a few spots behind a high school marching band, so we had music, and were initially lined up in front of local Brownie troop, giving the boys several dozen little girls to flirt with. All in all, a perfect afternoon.

Thanks to the Jack Markell campaign, who let the parade organizers know that we were on the way & not to give up our spot, and to John Carney, who snapped this picture of Pooh, Tigger, and dad as the parade was kicking off.

OK, Let's Go People

2007-10-23T07:33:00.000-04:00

We have had the perfect storm on the Denn campaign in the last few days, of a busy candidate and a lazy blogger. So let’s get started.

First let’s dispense with the mandatory travelogue portion of the candidate blog, where the political candidate breathlessly tells you about where he has been over the last several days as you ponder whether to clean out the vegetable bin in your refrigerator. I just can’t help myself. Last Saturday I started at 8 in the morning with the Interdenominational Ministers Action Council in Wilmington, asking them to help my office sign more kids up for the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program. The good news is that the ministers are eager to help; the bad news is that Reverend Greer, the hard-working chair of IMAC, had no coffee for his colleagues who he had hauled out of bed early on a Saturday morning, and they all stared mournfully at the Starbucks cup I had brought with me. I thought there was something in the bible about providing coffee for any weekend meeting before 10 a.m. At noon, with the boys in tow (and after a trip to the library), I spoke to a group of child care providers about my efforts to get the Delaware House of Representatives to pass legislation I have proposed to control the cost of health insurance for families and small businesses. (If you haven’t yet signed the new on-line petition to get these bills heard in the House, please sign it today by clicking here.) And then at 3:30 I embarked on the type of statewide jaunt that has earned my Ford Focus gold card status at the Winner Ford service department: to Gumboro to visit with the 41st District Democratic Committee’s annual Charlie West dinner, then on to Smyrna to visit with Smyrna area Democrats for their annual dinner, and finally on to the Greenville Country Club for the Delaware Autism Society’s annual dinner.

Sunday, after visiting the inaugural 5K run for Variety—the Delaware Children’s Charity (chaired by the IBEW’s own Doug Drummond), the boys and I had bagels at Dunkin Donuts and then played at home and settled in with Mrs. Denn to watch the Eagles pathetically self-destruct against the Chicago Bears. I am pretty sure I heard Adam tossing and turning after he went to bed saying “don’t give them the pass over the middle!”.

Now, on to this week. Among various other campaign events, we have two Halloween Parades scheduled this week. They each present special challenges. First is the Milford Halloween Parade (which I believe has been given a name other than “Halloween Parade” this year to satisfy some Halloween Objectors). My first and only time in this parade was in 2004 (it has been cancelled the last two years). In 2004, Lenny was still a puppy, the parade was much longer than I thought it was, and it was so big that it took us 90 minutes just to get to the starting line. So Lenny was dragging, and because a good 2 ½ hours had passed from the beginning of the parade to the time that we got to the reviewing stand, many of the children watching the parade had gone home and a small number of the remaining adults (all of them, I am sure, from Maryland) had been warming themselves with pints of Jack Daniels. The end result was a gauntlet of people screaming “pick up your dog!” This year, Lenny is bigger and stronger, the parade is supposedly smaller, and I am supposedly closer to the beginning than the end. But I am still working on a snappy comeback for “pick up your dog.” Suggestions are welcome (“Pick up your mother” has already been rejected).

The second parade is the Newark Halloween Parade this weekend. This is a great parade, most of the marchers are in costume and it isn’t too long. The distinguishing feature of the Newark parade is that everyone tosses hard candy at the kids watching the parade and the kids frantically run into the street to retrieve the candy. I am lobbying to have parade participants next year throw whole wheat toast. Look for us in the parade: Adam will be dressed as Winnie the Pooh, Zach will be Tigger, and I will be Christopher Robin of the Future (i.e. with less hair and long pants).

Sign the Petition for Affordable Health Care in Delaware

2007-10-20T07:04:00.001-04:00

As we get ready for the General Assembly's return in January, we are trying to let the House Insurance Committee know that we want a fair, up or down vote on the two bills to help make health insurance more affordable that I proposed and that the State Senate passed by an overwhelming bi-partisan majority. Click http://www.thepetitionsite.com/3/health-care-for-delaware to sign the petition today!

In Memory of My Friend Christine McDermott

2007-10-18T07:28:00.000-04:00

My first boss Christine McDermott passed away this year from breast cancer. It was in honor of her that the boys and I joined “Team McDermott” at the breast cancer walk last weekend.

Christine was the director of Delaware Volunteer Legal Services when I came back to Delaware after law school in 1991. My job was to travel around to churches, senior centers, homeless shelters, and state service centers and offer free legal services to Delawareans who couldn’t afford lawyers. Christine was my supervisor.

I had a sense of what I was in for even before the job started. Christine came up to my law school in early 1991 for a national conference on Women and the Law, and she saw posters in the law school advertising a birthday party that my friends were throwing for me. She came to the party, and promptly took it over—reprimanding my friends on the quality of the “punch” and teaching them how to fix it, volunteering to stair dive if it would help liven the party up, and ultimately teaching my then-girlfriend how to do some type of ‘60s style dance. I wasn’t aware of the dancing—for the good of all Americans, I avoid it—but some time around 11:00 one of my friends came up to me and said “Matt, your boss is doing the Batusi with your girlfriend. You have kind of lost control of the social situation here.”

Christine was a great boss. She taught by example, and what I respected most about her was her unmitigated passion for the people and causes she believed in. A lot of what we did at Volunteer Legal Services was domestic law—protecting children or spouses who were stuck in bad home situations. It was emotionally draining work, and although I always did my very best legal work for my clients, it was sometimes hard for me to get as upset about the 30th domestic abuse case of the month as I had about the first. Christine would have none of it—any time someone was treated unfairly, she was outraged and wanted it fixed.

Christine also inspired me by the confidence she had in me as a brand new lawyer. Normally first year lawyers are kept on a very short leash. Christine told me that she knew I could handle myself and to go out and do some good. One day in my first couple of months in the office I had been up most of the night working on a brief for a group of tenants who were being unfairly evicted, and I accidentally overslept and missed a meeting that was scheduled first thing the next morning. My first major screw-up as a new lawyer, for which I deserved to get dressed down. I came into the office at 9:30 frantically looking for Christine to tell her what had happened, and pulled up short outside her office because I heard her yelling over the phone at the man with whom I had missed the meeting. By the time the conversation—which I shamelessly eavesdropped on—was over, I could tell from Christine’s end of it that the guy was somehow apologizing for having had the audacity to complain about my standing him up. Then she came down to my office, asked me what had happened, and laughed about it. A small thing, but I never forgot how she stood up for me.

After I left DVLS, I would see Christine from time to time at bar association events or when I just happened to be around the law school and dropped in on her. She never changed. She loved her students, she loved her clients, and she would crawl through glass for either one of them. She finally retired and moved down to North Carolina with some of her family for some much-deserved peace and quiet, and instead somehow ended up running a battered women’s shelter in rural North Carolina because no one else was doing it and it needed to be done.

I am not sure how Christine is going to deal with heaven—she seemed happiest when she was fighting against injustice, and my limited understanding is that there isn’t supposed to be too much of that there. One thing I do know is that here on earth, better than anyone I have known, she lived out Micah’s edict to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God.

Happy Birthday Mrs. Denn

2007-10-15T07:04:00.000-04:00

Today is Michele's birthday. Happy birthday, honey! To celebrate, I will be making her dinner tonight. With apologies to the Governor, Lt. Governor, Treasurer, Oprah, and everyone else who scolds me for leading an insufficiently healthy lifestyle, the menu for tonight is Sear Roasted Rib Steak with Garlic Butter, Vegetable Penne with Pesto, and Key Lime Pie, with a glass of red wine recommended by my friend Ciro Poppiti.

Under normal circumstances, I would go run frantically on the treadmill at lunchtime to prepare my heart for the onslaught planned for this evening. But instead I am going to be running the gauntlet at Carl Schnee's class at the Academy of Lifelong Learning. I have been to his class three or four times now--it is 250 or 300 people, many of them retirees, all of them news junkies, and they ask the toughest questions of any audience I face. I will file a report later, along with an update on the past weekend's trips to the Ennis campaign in Middletown, the breast cancer walk, and the Pulaski Day Parade. For now, I need to get this key lime pie out of the oven. How am I supposed to know if the center has "just gelled" without sticking my finger in it?

Taking It To The Streets

2007-10-11T06:27:00.001-04:00

Over the last week, the Denn campaign has been working it on both ends. First, I have started knocking on doors to reintroduce myself one-on-one to voters. That is something that statewide candidates traditionally haven’t done, but I did it the last time I ran and I believe that it made a difference in those parts of the state where I focused my efforts. So I am doing it again, handing out the campaign’s first flier that you can see my son Adam examining in this picture. So far, the response has been great—unlike the last time I ran, more than half of the people whose doors I am knocking on have some idea who I am, and they seem to think I am doing a pretty good job. One request for people whose neighborhoods I haven’t yet walked, based on my experience this week: if you are in the shower when I knock, please feel free to fully dress yourself before answering the door.

On the other end of the spectrum, we had another spectacularly successful fundraiser on Tuesday night at the home of Dr. Bruce Rudin. I lost track of how many people came—over 80 bought tickets, and more showed up at the door—but we have netted about $23,000 from the night and checks are still coming in. Combined with the $20,000 we netted from our event last week, the campaign has raised over $43,000 in a week. That, my friends, is awesome. Thanks to everyone who has helped with this fundraising effort—we have one more next week in Rehoboth, and of course anyone who wants to donate at any time online can do so by clicking here.

Of course, the job still comes first. As you can see by clicking here, a fine that I imposed against a Delaware health insurance carrier actually made the national news in USA Today this morning.

This Ain't No Party, This Ain't No Disco

2007-10-05T04:43:00.000-04:00

Last night, I had to keep reminding myself that I was attending to the serious business of campaign fundraising, because my former law partner Larry Tarabicos and his wife Joni threw me not just one of the best political fundraisers ever, but the best party of any kind that I have been to in a long time.

Larry and Joni invited a bunch of Larry's law partners, clients, and friends from the Greek community to their beautiful house, and decided to step it up further by having Wilmington's famous Moro restaurant come in and make some amazing food and drinks. Once Michele heard that Moro was involved, she decided that she wasn't going to miss it either--in fact she, the boys, and my mom were all in attendance, making it the first Denn fundraiser to have three generations of Denns present.

At a lot of fundraisers, people stop in, say hi, and go on their way. Not at the Tarabicos'. Nobody left until the Moro people muscled them away from the table and started packing things up. The party started at 5:30, and I didn't get home until the "coming next week" epilogue to Grey's Anatomy. (In case you are wondering, it involves several doctors running around and screaming to do things "stat," and some other doctors looking soulfully at each other and discussing the future of their relationships.)

(Some of you have asked--well ok, one of you asked--what television shows I do watch since I incessantly mock Grey's Anatomy. As of today, not much: 30 Rock, The Contender (ESPN's reality boxing show), and Friday Night Lights (season premiere tonight, don't miss it)).

Here are a few pictures of the event. The guy with me and Michele is Tony Matula, a friend of Larry's who owns Five Points pizza and who I refer to as the Mayor of the Greek Festival because he took me around this year and was treated as such.

Great, great food, and wonderful people--many of whom I hadn't met before, and who came only because Larry asked them to. Oh, and they also brought a lot of dough--we raised almost $17,000 and some checks are still coming in. Larry and Joni: thank you!!!

Leading the Fight Against Cancer in Delaware

2007-10-03T05:32:00.000-04:00

Last night, the boys and I attended a celebration at the Riverfront for my friend and former law partner Bill Bowser, who was being presented with an award from the National Governors Association for his work in fighting cancer incidence and mortality in Delaware. Bill would be the first to tell you that we have a long, long way to go in the fight against cancer in Delaware, but since being appointed chair of the Governor's cancer task force when it was created in 2001, Bill has been a leader on a variety of fronts, from improved screening for colorectal cancer to helping 'navigate' new cancer patients through the maze of services they encounter, to some issues that I have been directly involved in such as cancer care for the uninsured and trying to track environmental causes of cancer.

The event was not just nice for honoring Bill, but it was also a chance for me to catch up with some of my colleagues on the cancer task force and with a lot of my former law firm colleagues. Unfortunately I did not get much of a chance to talk to them, as Michele had to work last night and the boys therefore needed to accompany me. Goaded on by Delaware Superior Court Judge Jan Jurden, the boys decided to remove several hundred paper napkins from the dessert table, rip them into shreds, toss them into the air, and dance wildly among the napkin shrapnel as it floated down. I would have stopped them, but it did keep them quiet during the program--it was kind of like an '80s music video with the sound turned off. This also allowed me an opportunity to crawl around on the floor scooping up paper so that the Riverfront staff wouldn't have to do it. Just another day in the life of a would-be Lieutenant Governor.

I Call You Out New York!

2007-09-30T07:36:00.001-04:00

I have arrived in Washington D.C. a little early for today's meeting of the 50 State Insurance Commissioners, where I will be trying to rally them behind support for the federal children's health insurance program reauthorization and a federal bill creating universal health coverage. So I am going to use the time to seek out the New York Insurance Commissioner and tell him that today will be a day that will live in infamy in New York sports, as the Phillies close out the biggest September comeback in baseball history this afternoon (at the expense of the Mets) and the Eagles cause the NY Giants to engage in the first coach firing of the NFL season by crushing them tonight. I will let you know what his response is--he is a pretty reasonable guy, so my guess is that his response will be to tell me to leave him alone.

Commissioner By Day, Candidate By Night

2007-09-28T07:43:00.000-04:00

Things continue to hum along in the Insurance Commissioner's office and on the campaign trail to be Delaware's next Lieutenant Governor.

In the office, I issued an order on Wednesday requiring one of our largest health insurance companies to start complying with the state's rules regarding prompt payment of doctors and other health care providers. You can read about it here. As you can see from reading a press release from just my second day in office in 2005 here, this issue has been a priority for me from the very start as Insurance Commissioner. We are going to be looking at the conduct of other companies as well, to be sure that everyone is complying with the law so that our health care providers can focus on caring for patients instead of dealing with red tape.

On Wednesday night I stopped in to visit with fellow Democrats at regional meetings for Brandwyine Hundred and the Pike Creek area, and also ran into our outstanding candidate for the 14th District State Senate seat, Representative Bruce Ennis. I have known Bruce for a long time, he is a good man and I am going to do what I can to help him get elected and then make sure that his seat stays Democratic.

Finally, we had a fundraiser on Thursday night at the Lobby House in Dover. It was a fun event, almost more of a reunion for a lot of us who have worked on and off in state government. In the picture I have posted here, noted Sussex County auctioneer and Democratic activist Richard Lindale attempts to convince me that he actually owns the tableclothes at the Lobby House, but that I can continue to use them for the rest of the event if I pay him $50.

This weekend: a Young Democrats event (Tim McBride has sent me approximately six reminders about it in the last twelve hours, I think he needs to lay off the coffee), an Alzheimers Memory Walk (Michele is one of the organizers), some canvassing for future State Senator Bruce Ennis, a visit to a dinosaur museum with the boys, and then I leave for Washington D.C. at 6:00 Sunday morning to spend the morning trying to convince the other 49 State Insurance Commissioners to rally enough votes in their home states to override the President's upcoming veto of the children's health insurance bill. And if you have to ask what I am doing on Sunday evening, you need know only six letters. E-A-G-L-E-S.

Busy Busy Busy

2007-09-21T07:18:00.000-04:00

It has been quite a week, both in the office and on the campaign trail.

On Tuesday, I went to visit the Committee of 100 in Wilmington as its monthly speaker. The Committee of 100 is a group made up primarily of Delaware businesspeople with an interest in economic development and land use. (My friend Leo Strine Sr. has jokingly suggested that the group’s motto should be “For One To Join, One Must Die”—I think they have substantially more than 100 people at this point). I had last been before them in May, 2005, when the boys were only five months old and not sleeping much. As I explained to them on Tuesday, I had planned to follow up on my remarks from May, 2005, but realized that thanks to my insomniac children, I don’t remember anything from May, 2005. So I talked about my office’s active involvement in the state’s economic development efforts, from our work on controlling workers compensation insurance rates to our efforts to make Delaware a national home for captive insurance companies. Not only did I get a great reception, but the group’s leader Beverly Baxter sent me home with two pieces of key lime pie for Michele. (Michele was at home putting the boys to sleep, and then resuming her Gray’s Anatomy Third Season DVD Marathon, during which she is doggedly plowing through episode after episode from last season so that she can be fully briefed before the new season premiere next week. Personally, I could do without McBeefy or whatever his name is and his whining colleagues, but she thinks it is a great show.)

On Wednesday night, I was the guest speaker at the first 2007 meeting of the University of Delaware College Democrats. The College Dems at Delaware are a fantastic group—they, probably more than any other group, were responsible for my getting elected in 2004, and I went on Wednesday night to audition for them in the hope that some of them would bring that same energy and enthusiasm to my 2008 campaign. They started off the meeting with an icebreaker exercise where they introduced themselves to each other by answering some political questions and some less serious questions about their favorite bands and who they thought was the sexiest politician in America. (I did not receive any votes—my theory is that they did not want to embarrass me by announcing their votes for me publicly, but that on a secret ballot I would have edged out Obama and Edwards.) Then I got to talk about why I was in politics and why I was running for Lt. Governor. Julie Blevins actually taped my remarks on our digital camera, but aside from the issue of whether the video is worth posting on its merits, I am also informed that I was standing in front of the words “Sexiest Politician” left over on the classroom blackboard from the icebreaker session while speaking, and that it creates a sense of cognitive dissonance on the video. The good news is that almost every single student there signed up as a campaign volunteer, and we are going to put them to work.

Finally on Thursday, I traveled down to the Bethany Beach Fire Hall to speak to a group of Sussex County Democrats at a candidate’s forum put on by the Southeastern Sussex Democratic Club. It was a great chance to talk before a friendly group about some of the issues such as education and health care that are going to be the focus of my campaign.

Oh, and in case you were wondering what I was doing at my actual day job, one of the things we were up to was taking action against CIGNA for overcharging its policyholders for prescription drug copayments. You can read about it at http://www.delawareinsurance.gov/departments/news/092007-Press-CIGNAfined.shtml.

Why Is This Man Smiling?

2007-09-18T05:48:00.000-04:00

On Saturday, the boys and I went down to Dover to march in the annual Delaware Volunteer Firefighters Association parade. For us, the best part of the parade is before it starts, when we walk up and down the streets of Dover and the boys can check out all of the fire engines lining up. The boys brought their own plastic fire hats from the Hockessin fire company to wear during the parade, but Adam ended up using his as a receptacle for his lunch and Zach figured out that he could get a rise out of me by tossing his out of the wagon during the parade and making me chase it down as it swirled around in the wind. Here is a picture of me and Attorney General Beau Biden, who had his own baby with him, marching in the parade. We are laughing because I finally revealed to him after months of his nagging what hair products I use to achieve the look I have.

At the national level, there is some real activity with respect to health insurance. Yesterday, Hillary Clinton became the third Democratic presidential candidate to announce a plan to try to achieve universal health insurance coverage. You can read about it here. I support The Other Biden for President, but I am encouraged to see that across the board, our potential Democratic presidential nominees are offering specific, concrete plans to deal with the nation’s uninsured problem. It also appears that Congress is nearing a compromise on reauthorization of the CHIP program, which provides subsidized health insurance for children in families between 100% and 200% of poverty. You can read about that here. The President is threatening to veto the compromise bill, and if he does, we are going to have one heck of a fight on our hands.

Driving Downstate and Serving Booze

2007-09-12T04:12:00.000-04:00

I have been driving downstate so much the last week or so that I think I should be an honorary citizen of Sussex County. Fortunately, I have finally figured out how to use the Ipod that I got for Father’s Day, so I have been able to listen to ESPN podcasts in the car.

On Friday, I traveled down to Trap Pond in Laurel to meet hundreds of senior citizens at the annual Sussex County CHEER center senior outing. Normally the CHEER picnic is crawling with elected officials and candidates, but there were just a few present this year—Sheriff Eric Swanson, Senator Bob Venables, and County Councilman Dale Dukes. I pretty much had the seniors all to myself, but it was a little tricky because I was competing with a fried chicken lunch and a show. Some comments I received:

1. “You are doing a good job.”
2. “Get out of the way, I can’t see the stage.”
3. “You are a good kid, you came to my senior center last year.”
4. “I don’t want to buy any insurance.”
5. “How are your boys”
6. “You look like Gary Sinise”
7. “Where is my chicken?”
8. “I live in Maryland” (this comment occurred after I had been talking to the senior for about 20 minutes, I resisted the urge to shake my fists in the air and shriek “why? why?”)

Saturday, Michele and I packed the boys into the Pacifica and headed down to Bridgeville for the 35th District Democratic Committee’s annual dinner in Bridgeville. The boys love fire hall dinners—there is lots of room to run around, everyone dotes on them, and they get to poke through the auction items. For myself, I have three major priorities at these dinners. First, make sure I say hi to everyone. Second, make sure the boys don’t break any auction items (you can see them sizing some of them up in this picture). And third, get on the road before auctioneer Richard Lindale berates me into paying $50 for a box of fudge.

Sunday, it was back to Sussex yet again. I was honored to be the guest speaker at the annual meeting of the Delaware chapter of the St. Vincent DePaul Society—a volunteer organization operated by the Catholic Church which ministers to the poor. Its members are people who put their faith into action, and I really admire what they do. I made a big deal out of the fact that I had sacrificed seeing the second half of the Eagles game in order to be their speaker, but after hearing what happened in the second half my blood pressure is probably better for it.

And, after a brief respite in Dover on Monday, it was back to Lewes yesterday for the annual UAW retirees picnic. Sussex County, I love you, but you are killing the Denn family cars.

If you are around Catherine Rooney’s in Wilmington tonight, stop by and have a drink at the Delaware Alzheimer’s Association annual celebrity bartender night. I am a celebrity bartender, which gives you some idea of the relatively low threshold, but the Alzheimers Association is a great organization that deserves your support. The advantage of using me as your bartender is that I do not know what I am doing, so however much liquor you tell me is supposed to be in your drink, I will take you at your word.

Chocolate Donuts and the Big Apple

2007-09-06T06:32:00.000-04:00

First, let’s cover Labor Day. The Labor Day Parade in downtown Wilmington on Monday was a lot of fun. Adam, Zach and I marched with our friends from the Delaware State Education Association (well, technically I marched and dragged them along in their official red parade wagon), and before the parade had even started they had loaded up the wagon with apples from DSEA, balloons from the electrical workers, and frisbees from the sheet metal workers.

After the parade was over, things got dicey. I wanted to stop by the picnic that AFSCME puts on for its public sector union members every year in Banning Park. The boys had visited with me in 2005 and 2006, everyone loved seeing them, and I wanted to bring them back this year. But we had 45 minutes to kill, and they both looked like they were getting sleepy. I had a plan: I would get them to the Dunkin Donuts near Banning Park, let them each have a donut and a glass of milk, and that would sustain them for at least half an hour at the park until they were ready for their naps. My plan may not have been endorsed by the American Pediatric Association, but I was a desperate man. As we closed in on Dunkin Donuts, though, I could see Adam starting to nod off in the back seat. I tried everything. I turned up the Wiggles. I tried to start sing-alongs. I stooped so low as to actually tell him that if he stayed awake for another five minutes, he would get a chocolate donut. Nothing worked. He nodded off, muttering "chocolate donut" to himself. Zach was five minutes behind him, and I took them home to Mrs. Denn and attended the AFSCME picnic sans Denn boys. And yes, everyone wanted to know where they were.

Today, I am off to New York for most of the day along with some of the top members of the Delaware bar and the Delaware financial services community, to talk to New York businesspeople about Delaware’s efforts to become the nation’s home to captive insurance companies. Captive insurance companies are, generally speaking, insurance companies that are set up and owned by private companies as an alternative to buying their insurance from traditional insurance companies. They are a very good idea for lots of businesses for lots of different reasons, and when I took office in 2005 I worked with our business community and legislators to transform Delaware into the most attractive state in America for captive insurance companies to locate. We succeeded, and now we are trying to spread the word—you can read about our trip in today’s News Journal here.

Down the road, this captive insurance effort could be a real economic boost for our state, and I am very proud to have worked closely with the private sector in Delaware to make it happen. It is a good example of how I intend to work with our business sector as Lieutenant Governor to encourage business growth across the board.

Happy Labor Day

2007-09-03T05:51:00.000-04:00

The Denn family has had a largely politics-free weekend. Saturday was my fifth wedding anniversary, so my mom, sister, and nieces came over to watch the boys while Michele and I went out to dinner to celebrate. And the boys spent a lot of time yesterday sleeping off the hangover that we believe we have traced back to my mother and sister feeding them cookies for dinner and letting them stay up long past their bedtimes. (We did find some time to stop by the playground yesterday, as you can see from the pictures.)

Today the boys and I will be marching in the annual Labor Day parade in downtown Wilmington, and then stopping by the annual AFSCME family picnic in the afternoon. And as always, I will have a full report.

Dealing With Cancer

2007-08-31T08:05:00.000-04:00

People are very skeptical of politicians these days, and I don’t blame them. Between “Read My Lips, No New Taxes,” “Mission Accomplished,” “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” and “I Was Just Trying To Be A Good Mentor To Those Pages,” it has become hard for the public to know who to believe.

That is why I plan to spend a lot of time during my campaign talking about real, concrete things that I have already done during my relatively short career in politics. I think that people take your campaign promises a lot more seriously when you can point to a record of accomplishment. Today’s New York Times points out the importance of the work I am very proud to have done on cancer care for the uninsured in Delaware.

Today’s Times points out that cancer care for the uninsured has become such a problem that the American Cancer Society is dedicating its entire advertising budget for the year to highlighting it. You can read the article here. Well, Delaware has been way out in front of the nation in addressing this problem. Back in March of 2001, the Delaware Advisory Council on Cancer Incidence and Mortality was formed. I was a member of the council. When we issued our report in April, 2002, one of our most prominent recommendations was for Delaware to become the first state in America to pay for cancer treatment for the uninsured. The reason was simple: there are plenty of statistics showing that the quality of care for cancer patients with insurance is superior to treatment for those without.

We didn’t just stop with the report, we lobbied the Governor and General Assembly to implement and fund its recommendations. In 2003, our efforts paid off: the Governor and General Assembly implemented our recommendation by funding cancer treatment for any uninsured Delawareans who are at or below 650% of the federal poverty level—about $130,000/year for a family of four.

There is still an awful lot of work to be done. As the Times noted today, cancer detection—which is key to keeping mortality rates down—is directly related to whether people have health insurance. Uninsured breast cancer patients, for example, are twice as likely to have their cancer diagnosed in a late stage (when it is much harder to treat) as those who have insurance. So the ultimate goal must be to get people insured. And there is also a lot more to do in investigating the environmental causes of cancer. All that said, the Cancer Consortium’s program to treat uninsured cancer victims is groundbreaking. And so are some of our other recommendations that were implemented, including the indoor smoking ban, a high-profile colorectal cancer screening program, and the creation of a top-rate “patient navigator” program to assist cancer victims in getting the best possible treatment.

I am proud of the work that I did with the Cancer Consortium, not just in coming up with its recommendations but in being a leader in the effort to get them implemented. It is something I am going to talk about during the campaign, so that when I talk about my agenda as Lt. Governor, people will know that they can take what I say to the bank.

I Am Busy, Read the Paper

2007-08-29T08:39:00.000-04:00

I do not have time for an official post this morning (I wish I could say that I was doing something important-sounding, but my boys have become obsessed with a book about Corduroy—a stuffed bear who I find a little creepy because he mysteriously comes to life and then goes back to being a stuffed animal—so my morning blogging time has been consumed by mind-numbing re-readings of the book), but check out this morning’s News Journal story on the uninsured, which highlights the persistent problem of over 100,000 uninsured Delawareans, some of the efforts I am making to at least make some headway on the number of uninsured children, and the failure of the House of Representatives to pass the health insurance reform bills I have proposed. You can read it at http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070829/NEWS/708290345/1006/NEWS.

Sussex Jamboree, Blair Witch Style

2007-08-28T08:06:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned yesterday, the Jamboree is a once-a-year get-together for Democrats in Lewes, Delaware. Aside from the annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner, it is the largest single gathering of Democrats of the year. That always makes it an important event, but when there are primary elections—including, probabably, one for the Lieutenant Governor’s office—it becomes even more important to make a good impression on the party’s most faithful.

There are really only a couple of ways to do that. One is by making the rounds and talking to people. I tried to do that this year, but no one would talk to me because my son Zach was making the rounds with me and all they wanted to do was coo over him. (For the record, he supports me in the primary and, along with his brother, was wearing a custom-designed Denn for Lt. Governor t-shirt.) A second way of making an impression is by having people wear your campaign t-shirt. I don’t know when this became important at the Jamboree, but it has spiraled a little out of control, to the point where I am pretty sure we had a few t-shirt wearers at the Jamboree this year who, shall we say, may have gotten a little something for their efforts in addition to the traditional plate of fried chicken and bracing sea breeze. Nevertheless, my informal count indicates that the Denn campaign carried the day over every other campaign on volume, style (Mrs. Denn also sported a custom designed t-shirt), and ‘authenticity’ points.

Finally, if you are lucky, you get five minutes to talk. Five minutes only—they were quite clear about that. You can see my five minutes by clicking here

After going through the agonizing process of watching myself speak on film, let me answer the following questions in advance:
1. No, I do not know why I appear to launch into a strange jazz-style dance at one point when discussing the Republican party. I guess health insurance reform brings out the Mario Lopez in me.
2. Yes, I know I am talking really fast. I am talking so fast because (a) they really were emphatic that some sort of trap door would open at the five minute mark, and (b) although my kids were not eating sand, as I joked at the beginning, they were wilting in the heat and Michele was in the midst of a Quest for Fire style foraging expedition for suddenly-scarce drinking water that I needed to aid.
3. Yes, I am available for small childrens’ birthday parties, but I will not dress as a clown. Well, I will for $1,200, but that is non-negotiable.

Jamboree Review Preview

2007-08-27T08:26:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday was the annual Democratic Party Jamboree, a big event at Cape Henlopen Park for diehard Democrats statewide. We had actually planned to have a video of my remarks at the Jamboree posted today, but my videographer friend Greg Patterson has taken to YouTube about as well as Britney Spears has taken to non-alcoholic beverages. Or parenthood. Or hair. It will be posted soon, along with an insider’s account of the Jamboree that you won’t read anywhere else. I do want to say thanks to all of the Sussex County Democrats and Young Democrats (in particular ringleaders Jenifer Boles and Samantha Smith) who showed up wearing my t-shirts on Saturday--that was great to see.

In the meantime, we are back from the beach, and as you can see, the boys had a good time during the few times that the sun broke through.

Summer Reading

2007-08-23T07:39:00.001-04:00

The reason that the posts have been somewhat light this week is that Michele, the boys and I are spending a few days at the beach. It has given me time to read a couple of books.

First is Robert Shrum's No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner. If you are interested in politics (and if you're not, I am not sure why you read this blog unless you are my mother), this is a fascinating book by a guy who has been involved in managing Democratic campaigns from George McGovern all the way through John Kerry. I am sure that many of the people about whom he dishes will disagree with the stories--I have seen press accounts where John Edwards flatly denies some of them--and I am sure that others will dispute Schrum's claim to have single-handedly written many of the most memorable speeches and one-liners in modern political history. But all that said, it was a lot of fun to read. Highlights for me include Shrum marching around Teddy Kennedy's hotel room with Kennedy in 1980 pretending to be President Jimmy Carter so that Kennedy could get comfortable with lifting Carter's hand in the air on stage at the 1980 Democratic Convention after Kennedy lost the nomination (Kennedy eventually couldn't bring himself to do it on stage), and his recounting of a disastrous one-on-one meeting between John Kerry and John Edwards that nearly resulted in Dick Gephardt becoming the party's vice presidential candidate in 2004.

The other book I am working on is Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas. As you might expect, it is written by Chuck Klosterman. The book is a collection of columns that Klosterman has written for GQ, Spin, The New York Times Magazine, and others. Some of them are a little rough--this book will not be bedtime reading for the Denn Boys, and for purposes of my campaign I denounce any potentially offensive portions and call for that portion of the book to be burned--but he writes about everything, most often music and sports. I am only about halfway through the book, and he has already covered Britney Spears, Bono, Val Kilmer, McDonalds food, Phoenix Suns point guard Steve Nash, a boat cruise with reunited '70s bands, Robert Plant, Metallica, Wilco, the White Stripes, Billy Joel, and Johnny Carson. He is very funny, and gets great interviews with a lot of these people.

I promise, I will return to the Lieutenant Governor's race in my next post.

George W. Bush is Really, Really Bad, Part 362

2007-08-21T05:24:00.000-04:00

President Bush has done so many things wrong, it is hard to believe that he is still able to come up with a steady stream of new, crummy ideas. Yet, he has done it again—this time on an issue that is the centerpiece of my campaign for Lt. Governor, the welfare of Delaware’s children.

Yesterday, the Bush administration imposed new regulatory burdens on states that participate in the CHIP program—the federal/state health insurance program that covers children whose parents earn just enough money to lose Medicaid eligibility, but not enough to buy health insurance. The new burdens will effectively make it impossible for families that earn more than 200% of the federal poverty level to get coverage for their children in the CHIP program—so, for example, a single mother with two kids who works full time but makes between $32,000 and $40,000 a year at a job with no health insurance will not be able to get coverage for her kids. I won’t go into the details—the New York Times article is here. But the result of the new policy is that many children across America will lose health insurance coverage. No families currently on the CHIP program in Delaware would be affected, but one of my priorities as Lieutenant Governor is to expand the CHIP program to enroll uninsured kids with families at higher income levels (an idea already proposed in the General Assembly by Representative Terry Schooley). Under the Bush plan, unless it is changed by Congress or a new President, this part of my plan to cover Delaware kids would be forbidden, and it would become that much more difficult to ensure that Delaware children have health insurance.

The morals of the story are:
1. President Bush is an astonishingly bad president who keeps getting worse.
2. We need our Congressional delegation to pass a federal CHIP bill that properly funds the CHIP program and allows states like Delaware the flexibility to cover more uninsured kids.
3. We need to elect a Democratic president in 2008.
4. And, of course, we need to elect me as Delaware’s next Lieutenant Governor, so we can make coverage of all kids a priority.

Inside the Denn Campaign, Part 1

2007-08-18T05:01:00.000-04:00

Well, I spent some time last week raising money for my campaign. For those of you who have never had the pleasure of doing fundraising for a statewide campaign, which will ultimately cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, here is a brief look inside.

[PHONE RINGS]
Matt’s Friend: Hello?
Matt: Hey, [fill in name of person who is Matt’s friend but rolls eyes and hides under desk when Matt’s name shows up on Caller ID within twelve months of an election]
Matt’s Friend: What’s going on?
Matt: Well, a little of this and a little of that. Hey, that reminds me, can I have a thousand dollars?
Matt’s Friend: No.
Matt: OK, how about nine hundred dollars?
Matt’s Friend: No.
[Continue until answer is “yes”]

The traditional wisdom is that once I receive a “yes,” I should slam the phone down and dispatch a youthful, earnest intern to drive at 60 miles per hour to my friend’s place of business to secure his funds before he has a chance to change his mind. But there are a few problems with this. First, my youthful, earnest interns don't have cars. Second, because I rarely get to talk to my friends on the phone, once I have finished begging for money I usually end up talking to them on the phone at length about other, less painful subjects. Like how completely overrated the last three Bruce Springsteen albums were. (I apologize, I put in the last sentence to antagonize one friend in particular.)

The good news is that the fundraising is going very well, agonizing though it may be. In my race for Insurance Commissioner in 2004, I raised almost half a million dollars. I think that this race will be much more expensive than that, perhaps twice as much. But I am on pace to raise the money, and we have four in-state and two out-of-state fundraisers scheduled in September and October. You can always do your part by clicking on http://www.mattdenn.com/contribute.htm.

The Disappearing Lt. Governor Candidate

2007-08-17T11:16:00.000-04:00

One of the ironies of this blog is that the more that is going on in the Insurance Commissioner’s office and on the campaign trail, the less time I have to tell you about it. So check in over the weekend for an update on the last few days’ activities.

Another Saturday Night

2007-08-14T08:29:00.000-04:00

As promised, a summary of the Denn family’s busy Saturday up and down the State of Delaware.

Zach, Adam and I started the day at the A Philip Randolph Institute meeting at the Longshoreman’s Hall in Wilmington. Zach and Adam have been to more than their share of APRI meetings with me, and they come prepared: we had a bag full of books and two glasses of milk, which kept them happy and occupied for the duration of our stay. My friend Peaches Whalen, the head of APRI in Delaware, let me get up and give my report early, and while I did John Flaherty, noted public interest lobbyist, kept an eye on the boys for me. John later said that they were better behaved than 90% of the members of the Delaware General Assembly.

After another stop in Wilmington, we headed home to pick up Mrs. Denn (who spent part of the morning at the salon, to ensure that she continues to look fabulous) (which she does) (hi, honey), and headed south. I had prepared a special set of CD’s for the boys to listen to in the car, containing a combination of Wiggles, Sesame Street, and Signing Time songs. I refer to it as the “Hara-Kiri Mix Tape.” Unfortunately, because Adam is consumed by the Wiggles, all it did was cause wild emotional swings in the back seat as the Wiggles brought Adam to the pinnacle of ecstacy, and then Grover and Ernie would send him crashing back to earth.

We made a brief stop at the AFRAM festival in Seaford, and then headed east (stopping only to look at some cows and pigs) to the Stonewall Democrats annual fundraiser at Jim D’Orta’s beautiful house in Rehoboth. As always, the Stonewall Dems put on a great event. The boys did everything they could to disrupt it. While speeches were being given, Adam picked up a stick off the ground, announced that he was a conductor, and proceeded to sing various nursery rhymes and use his conductor’s baton to command others to sing along. And that was actually less obtrusive than Zach, who ran through the entire crowd searching for Jim’s dog and yelling “doggie!”, then strode onto the stage where Lt. Governor Carney was speaking, and began spinning in circles behind him and exposing his belly button.

As the party was winding down, I was talking to Pete Keenan, the tough-as-nails, hard-working chairman of the 38th Representative District. Adam came up and handed him a balled-up Winnie the Pooh placemat, and said “can you hold Pooh?” Pete said “sure.” As we were both getting ready to leave (the Denns en route to the boardwalk), Pete said “is there somewhere to throw this”? I said, “it’s just a placemat, you can throw it in the garbage.” He said “no, there’s poo in it.” And it then occurred to me that Pete had been calmly standing there talking to me for at least a couple of minutes believing that he was holding a handful of human waste wrapped up in a plastic placemat. In the dictionary next to the word “unflappable,” you will find a picture of Pete Keenan.

Weekend Review Preview

2007-08-13T05:53:00.000-04:00

No time this morning to report on the Denn family's barnstorming tour through New Castle and Sussex Counties over the weekend, but as you can tell from these pictures, we had a great time. These were taken by my friend Greg Patterson at Rodney Square in Wilmington. A full report is forthcoming, including:

1. Uberlobbyist John Flaherty babysitting my children

2. 38th District Democratic Chairman Pete Keenan holding a bag of poo, and

3. My son Zach doing a strip tease behind the Lt. Governor as he speaks

Another Lazy Saturday with the Denns

2007-08-10T07:54:00.000-04:00

Some children have memories of lazy Saturday mornings eating cereal, watching cartoons, and lounging around in their pajamas.

For better or worse, that will not be my children. Oh, don’t worry, they watch more than enough t.v.—I think I’d rather be hit in the head with a mallet than watch The Wiggles Live one more time—but Saturdays as the children of a political candidate with a working wife are a different cup of tea. This Saturday, we have a full agenda. First, we will be visiting with our friends at the A. Philip Randolph Institute at the Longshoreman’s Hall in Wilmington. The APRI is a national organization of black trade unionists, and I have been attending its meetings pretty regularly for years. I will be briefing them on our new credit scoring bill, and trying to enlist their help in our campaign to enroll more children in the CHIP health insurance program. Then the boys and I will head up to Rodney Square, where the boys will eat lunch and I will be the guest of honor at the 2007 Family Safety and Health Fair, a daylong event dedicated to promoting safety and crime prevention in the City of Wilmington. As guest of honor, I will be demonstrating my techniques for disarming a potential mugger through karate blows to nerve centers.

Next will come a nap. For most of us, this would be a welcome interlude. For Adam, that is also the case. But for Zach, the declaration of naptime is the initiation of a long twilight struggle. We have, over the last two and a half years, employed a variety of tactics to induce drowsiness: driving in circles, getting in bed with him and holding him down, and the infamous “up down” where I literally hold him and squat up and down until I am going to collapse. Unless he is too tired to resist, nothing works—and come 6:00 or 6:30, when he is so exhausted he can’t see straight, we all pay a heavy price. So if you are at either event on Saturday morning, I encourage you to chase him in circles.

Following the nap, we will pick up Mrs. Denn and it is off to Seaford for the AFRAM festival, and then over to Rehoboth for the annual Stonewall Democrats fundraiser at Dr. Jim D’Orta’s house. And then, like all other kids in America, the boys will have their diapers changed and get into their pajamas in the back of the Pacifica parked along Silver Lake in Rehoboth, fall asleep in their car seats on the way home, and get carried up to bed. Fifteen or twenty years from now, we will find out how this all worked out.

My Love Letter to Wawa

2007-08-09T08:28:00.000-04:00

First, my report on the Delaware Electrical Co-op dinner Tuesday night will be mercifully short: it was great. A big part of the reason was the absence of politicians—only John Carney and I were shaking hands with people, while State Auditor Tom Wagner, our outstanding new Sussex County Sheriff Eric Swanson, and equally outstanding new State Representative Bob Walls served food. I got to say hi to a few thousand people, almost all of them from Delaware, and actually got to talk to people for a few minutes which was nice. Everyone who talked to me told me I was doing a good job; those who thought otherwise were intimidated into silence by my menacing physical presence.

Another big plus to the Electrical Co-op dinner: as of a couple of years ago, there is now a Wawa on the way from Western Sussex back to Route 1 heading north. Sure, there are lots of gas stations and Quicki-Marts along the way, but someone who is constantly on the road, there is something very comforting about finding a Wawa. It is one of the best-run retail businesses of any type I have encountered—they always have the type of coffee I want, just about any type of food, and it is clean and fast. I’m sure I will now receive an e-mail from someone telling me that the company is secretly propping up the dictator of a repressive government overseas or putting something in my food that will melt my intestines, but I’m not buying it.

Tomorrow, a preview of the Denn Weekend Itinerary, which includes two stops in Wilmington, one each in Seaford, Rehoboth, and Greenwood, and our regular stops at Acme, Target, and the Kirkwood Highway Library. I know the wait will be agonizing, but try to endure.

We Interrupt This Blog...

2007-08-08T08:05:00.000-04:00

I had planned to provide a report on the Delaware Electrical Co-op this morning, but instead had to spend 10 minutes dragging Lenny out into the rain to do his business—he apparently thought he was going to the gallows—and another 15 minutes trying to arbitrate a dispute between Zach and Adam over their new Noah’s Ark toy. You would think that a toy that literally has two of everything would lend itself to a relatively obvious détente, but that is not happening.

No, they do not know the actual story behind Noah and the Ark, other than the fact that it was going to rain a lot and Noah took two of each animal onto the ark. I am not quite ready to subject them to mass drowning yet, especially when they are getting used to being in a swimming pool.

I promise to provide a report on the Electrical Co-op meeting tomorrow morning.

If You Want Your Chicken, You Have To Go Through Me

2007-08-07T07:54:00.000-04:00

Other than hounding fabulously rich people for money, one of the most time-honored traditions in Delaware politics is campaigning at the Delaware Electrical Cooperative’s annual meeting, which is today in Harrington. Actually, it is the politicians who refer to it as a “time honored tradition”; I believe many of the attendees refer to it as “the horrific obstacle course I need to navigate to get to my free chicken dinner.”

As I learned when I was a first-time statewide candidate in 2004, the Electrical Cooperative dinner presents some logistical challenges. Most of the attendees take trolleys from the parking lot to the building where the dinner is held, so instead of a slow stream of people coming into the building, they arrive thirty or forty at a time. It won’t be so bad this year because it’s not an election year, but next year a scrum of one or two dozen candidates and their supporters will be stalking the stairway leading into the dinner—increasingly ornery from being out in the August heat all afternoon—and will then descend like locusts on the poor unsuspecting dinner attendees as they exit their trolleys. All things considered, the folks attending the dinner are very gracious, and some of them may even like it—the phenomenon is kind of like Lindsey Lohan arriving at a dance club. Except that they are sober. And wearing all their clothes.

I will report in tomorrow.

Mickey Mouse, Sit-Ups, and Additional Cool Kids

2007-08-03T08:03:00.000-04:00

I know what you are wondering: where did your boys get those George W. Bush dolls? Well apparently while I was at work yesterday, my wife & mom took them to the mall, and Zach said “Micky Mouse” while they were walking past a Disney store. He hasn’t said “Micky Mouse” before, so my mom interpreted it as “I must own every Micky Mouse doll that is offered for sale at the adjacent store” and bought them all. My wife is now trying to drill him to say “necklace.”

While my mom was fulfilling the Bush administration’s economic agenda of “um, get people to buy stuff,” yesterday was the one day a year when I parade around the Insurance Department office in my gym shorts and endure the silent mockery of department employees. It was my now-annual pilgrimage to have my health evaluated by Cardio-Kinetics, as part of a program I started last year for Insurance Department employees to choose healthier lifestyles. Using some money that we saved by cutting other costs, we contracted with Cardio-Kinetics to come into the office once a year to allow our employees to undergo a pretty complete fitness evaluation—cardio, strength, body fat, cholesterol, blood pressure, flexibility, and so on. The folks who do the evaluations give recommendations to improve personal health down the road, and obviously if they spot a problem such as high blood pressure they can let the employee know about it so it can be taken care of. It is a good program and very popular with the department staff.

My evaluation is pretty entertaining, since the trainer who is doing it—apparently aware that I have something to do with whether they come back next year—professes amazement at my Olympian-level physical skills while simultaneously scribbling down the sober truth to review with me later. When I did one more sit-up in 60 seconds than I did last year, he reacted like he had won the lottery.

Finally, in identifying a couple of “cool kids” from Delaware Democratic campaigns yesterday, I obviously offended other cool kids who were not identified. I would like, therefore, to officially dub Kristin Dwyer, Dana Rohrbough, and Molly Jurusik as cool kids. I am not sure how old Erik Schramm is, he may need to be a Cool Kid Emeritus. I am happy to accept other nominations for cool kids at mattdenn@hotmail.com. You may also purchase the right to be a cool kid for $1,200 at this web site.

Signing on the Dotted Line

2007-08-02T05:11:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I was present to see the Governor sign two bills that were major priorities for me.

The first bill was Senate Bill 31, a landmark bill making Delaware the fourth toughest state in America on the practice of using credit in the setting of insurance rates. As I told the supporters present for the bill signing, this bill has been a long time coming. When Senator Margaret Rose Henry and I unveiled it on January 7, 2005, I had been in office for all of three days. The Denn boys had been born for only seven days. I hadn’t even had time to have my formal swearing-in ceremony: my friend Joe Schoell came over to the house on the morning I took office and administered the oath in my living room before I even had time to put my socks and shoes on. Michele was at the hospital, so our pug Lenny was the only witness. (Yes, there is a picture of this event taken with an automatic timer, including Lenny, and no, it will never be publicly displayed.)

But I digress. The reason this bill took so long to get passed was that the insurance industry fought it, as they do every credit scoring bill introduced in every state. The bill that was ultimately passed wasn’t the outright ban on credit scoring that Senator Henry and I had sought, but it did move Delaware from having no law and a toothless regulation all the way to having the fourth toughest law in America. Not bad. The other folks in the picture are Representative Helene Keeley, who was the sponsor of the bill in the House of Representatives and did great work to get it through, and Reverend H. Ward Greer, the senior pastor at Ezion Mt. Carmel United Methodist Church and president of the Interdenominational Ministers Action Council. In short, a man of God who you do not want to mess with—and a vocal supporter of the bill.

The second bill signing was for Senate Bill 78, which requires insurance companies in Delaware to cover medically necessary nutritional supplements for Delawareans who suffer from a rare metabolic disorder known as PKU. If people who have PKU don’t maintain a strict diet that eliminates almost all forms of protein, they can suffer mental retardation and other serious neurological problems—but the nutritional supplements they must take are extremely expensive. This bill is going to dramatically change the lives of some Delaware families. I had the opportunity to meet a lot of these families while the bill was making its way through the General Assembly. They are great people, and their personal lobbying for the bill is what got it passed.

I finished off the day at a meeting of the Progressive Democrats of Delaware, an outstanding group whose members have always been very supportive of my efforts. When I got up to speak, three people yelled “where’s Lenny?”. I have never taken a Toastmasters class, but even I could figure out that if the crowd is shouting for my dog before I have even said anything, that’s a sign to keep the remarks brief, so I did. Among the attendees was Jason Scott, who is the overseer of the Delawareliberal blog. I chastised Jason for failing to acknowledge my blog, and he admitted that he feared that once people know about mine, his readers would desert him. OK, that isn’t true; he actually just said that he hadn’t gotten around to it—but I could sense a tremor in his voice. [Update: he has now given me a shout-out.] I also got a chance to catch up with some of the remarkably talented young people who we have working for our state party and for various political campaigns. Both Sheila Grant of the Markell campaign and Erin Kernan of the Carney campaign said that they were regular readers of this blog, and asked for me to acknowledge that they are “cool kids.” They are.

Today some guy is coming to my office and making me do sit-ups, push-ups, and run on a treadmill while I am hooked up to a bunch of electrodes. Sometimes my job is very strange. I will explain later.

Rocky! Rocky! Rocky!

2007-07-30T03:28:00.000-04:00

The boys and I had a busy Saturday. We stopped by to say hi to Senator Dave Sokola and other Democratic Party volunteers who were sprucing up the gardens around the Judge Morris Estate in White Clay Creek State Park, went to the library to pick up our weekly book and DVD stash, and then the boys went home to nap while I visited with the rejuvenated 27th Representative District Democratic Committee at a picnic near Lums Pond. All of which was a lead-up to….

The Denn Boys’ First Blue Rocks Baseball Game. It was a huge hit. Our seats were next to the tunnel where Rocky Bluewinkle, Celery Man, and the other mascots emerge. Zach is now obsessed with Rocky—for most of the game, rather than watching the action on the field, Zach pressed his face up against the fence alongside Rocky’s tunnel and yelled “Rocky! Rocky!” down the tunnel. Some of Rocky’s handlers were kind enough to bring Rocky up the ramp a few minutes early so Adam and Zach could meet him in person before he sprinted out onto the field. That didn’t go quite as well—the boys love Rocky, but they also love for him to stay about five feet away. Anyway, my mom bought Adam and Zach stuffed Rocky dolls on the way out, and the Rocky dolls now sit at the breakfast table with Adam and Zach and have their own place settings.

This week, the Governor is planning on signing two bills that my office helped pass in the General Assembly this year. One is Senate Bill 31, our landmark legislation restricting the use of credit in setting Delawareans’ auto and homeowners insurance rates. The second is Senate Bill 78, requiring insurance carriers to provide medically prescribed nutritional supplements for persons suffering from a metabolic disorder known as PKU. I hope to bring you some pictures from the bill signing ceremonies.

Introducing Lenny Denn

2007-07-27T04:46:00.000-04:00

New visitors to my web site have met my boys Adam and Zach and my wife Michele, but I have not yet introduced Lenny, our three year old pug. We bought Lenny when we found out that Michele was pregnant with the twins--we thought the addition of a needy puppy to the household would make her forget the morning sickness. No seriously, we wanted the boys and Lenny to grow up together, since I had a pug when I was little.

Now you know the whole household, and I can return in my next post on Sunday to defending myself against vicious personal attacks from my opponents. Oh, that hasn't happened yet? OK, then I will write about the Delaware Democratic Party's big community clean-up tomorrow, and the boys first trip to a Wilmington Blue Rocks game tomorrow night.

From Harrington to New York and Home Again

2007-07-25T11:03:00.000-04:00

On Monday, I went back to the State Fair, this time on a solo mission. And I did the two things that I always do when I go to the State Fair: I bought a corn dog, and I went to serve drinks at The Grange.

Why do I buy corn dogs? If you must ask this question, you either don’t eat meat, have never eaten a corn dog, or should be under strong suspicion of hating America. Corn dogs are about the best food that American ingenuity has developed in the last century, and because I can only get them at the State Fair, I try to stock up. (Any of you with web access who are tempted to fire up Google to try to discover that corn dogs were in fact invented in some other country, please don’t bother—I won’t believe you.)

Why do I work at The Grange? Because I really like the good people making dinners there who permit me to help, and because it gives me a chance to say hi to fairgoers without getting in their faces too much. If you decide to buy your dinner at The Grange (which I encourage you to do, because the food is really good even though they don’t make corn dogs), I have only a couple of requests:
1. Please ask for a soda instead of iced tea. Much less work for me.
2. Please don’t ask for more ice in your iced tea. You have as much ice as you need, and if I run out some poor guy has to carry a zillion pound bag of ice out from the freezer.
3. Please don’t complain about having to pay 50 cents for a cup of ice to go with your soda. You are visiting an event that charges you a dollar to see the World’s Smallest Horse. Rational pricing is really not a realistic request at the State Fair.

Yesterday morning, I went to New York to visit some campaign donors. (Don't worry, I put in my time at work, too.) My father, who lives in New York, had told me on my last visit that “only suckers take taxis in New York, everyone else takes the subway.” Well I took the subway, and I would add to suckers “people who don’t know their way around the subway system and almost end up in Brooklyn,” and “people who have issues with being sneezed on.” My subway experience made the gridlock on Kirkwood Highway when I got home seem a little more bearable.

Denn Boys Hit the Triple Crown

2007-07-23T11:11:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday, the Denn Boys (Adam and Zach, age 2, for those of you new to this web site) hit all three counties of the state. They were so asleep when they got home that they didn’t even wake up while we were changing them into their pajamas.

Stop #1: the Delaware Day parade in Delaware City. I pulled Zach and Adam in a wagon, while Mrs. Denn drove the mini-van in front of us (hey, she said she wanted us to spend a family day together). The parade went pretty smoothly, except that Zach has developed a habit of simply chucking his empty sippy cups over his shoulder when he has finished them. This is rude and inconvenient at the dinner table, somewhat treacherous when he is hurling them out of a wagon during a moving parade and I have to run in front of an impending baton twirling team to retrieve them.

Stop #2: the 38th Democratic District picnic in Ocean City. Yes, you read that correctly: a picnic in Ocean City in the middle of the day on Saturday, when all the beach houses flip over. Let’s just say it took us a while to get there, including one diaper change stop and one stop at Best Buy because I promised the boys we could watch a show in the car and then we forgot to bring any. We pulled up just as all the politicians’ speeches were ending, the boys stuffed their faces and then played on the playground until it was time to depart for….

Stop #3: the Delaware State Fair. Clearly the highlight of the day for the boys. We visited all the animals. Zach came face to face for the first time with a cow, his favorite animal (other than his dog). Adam was entranced by the baby chickens, which kids are allowed to hold. This led to the following exchange:
ME: Adam, do you want to hold a baby chicken?
ADAM: Yes.
ME: You remember that you have to be gentle with the chicken, right?
ADAM: Yes.
ME: You just put your hand out and I will put it on your hand, but you don’t squeeze it, right?
ADAM: Right.
[I take chicken and place it in Adam’s outstretched left hand. Adam yells “chicken!” and gleefully grabs it so hard with his right hand that the poor chicken’s eyes bulge]
ME: Adam, let go of the chicken!
ADAM: [Cries]

The crying was soon stemmed by the appearance of the Delaware State Parade. The boys dined on a nutritious dinner of French fries and funnel cake while they watched the parade, Adam fell asleep in the stroller before we even left the fair, and Zach was right behind him. (By the way, the baby chicken is just fine.)

Just another relaxing family outing for the Denns.

Country Roads, Take Me Home

2007-07-20T07:35:00.000-04:00

After putting in a full day at the office on Wednesday, I said to myself “nothing would cap this off like a mad dash back and forth across Sussex County to try to visit as many of my Democratic Party friends as I can.”

Stop number one was at the Eastern Sussex Democratic Club’s annual picnic in Rehoboth. Virginia Harmon and her group have sponsored this event for the last few years, and it is a great tradition. While I was driving out of Rehoboth, I called Michele at the house to check in on the boys. Important lesson learned: if you hear children screaming and the sound of plates clattering to the ground over the phone, “how’s it going honey” is not a good conversation starter.

Stop number two was an hour northwest at a restaurant in Greenwood, where District Chair Pat Ewing and the 35th district Democratic Committee were holding a meeting. All the stars come out for the 35th district: by the time I arrived, Jack Markell and John Carney were already there. There is a reason everyone comes to the 35th: looking around the room, some of the most storied behind-the-scenes names in Sussex County politics were at the table. George and Gladys Adams, Dudley and Pat Ewing, Joe and Joanne Conaway…these are quality people who have been the lifeblood of the Sussex County Democratic Party for years. Pat Ewing and I go back an especially long way. She was one of my very first supporters when I ran for Insurance Commissioner in 2004, and when I needed someone to introduce me at my swearing-in ceremony in January of 2005, I asked Pat to drive up to Wilmington to do it.

The final stop of the night was back in Ellendale, at the 36th Democratic Committee Meeting. And again, a lot of history: the 36th District was one of the first representative districts to endorse me in 2004. As I like to say, they were for Denn before it was popular to be for Denn. Chairman George Strick gave me one of the nicest introductions I have ever received—I can’t remember everything he said, but one thing that stuck in my mind was “this guy does not quit, if you knock him down he just keeps coming at you.” I guess out of context it makes me sound like a rabid bull in Pamplona, but the way he said it, it was about the biggest compliment I could earn.

Michele and I are taking the boys to the Delaware State Fair on Saturday. Livestock beware.

Good Reviews for Child Health Insurance Program

2007-07-18T21:25:00.000-04:00

The News Journal had good things to say today about the children's health insurance signup project we announced Monday (see previous post). But don't take my word for it -- you can read it for yourself here.

One reason that I think this program will be a success is that we are working closely with the community to pull it off. For example, we will be working with organized labor. When I spoke to the executive committee of the AFL-CIO several weeks ago about our effort, I was thrilled with the response. These union leaders, whose members all have health insurance, could not wait to help other families have the same peace of mind as their members. And we will be working with the clergy. I started my career working in the basements and meeting rooms of Delaware churches, offering free legal advice to people who couldn’t afford to pay for it, so I am well aware of the function that churches can serve as a place where families can center their lives and get the help they need.

Tonight, I am attending three political events in Sussex County—the Eastern Sussex Democratic Party picnic, the 35th District Democratic Committee monthly meeting, and the 36th District Democratic Committee monthly meeting. It should all add up to about 200 miles on the Ford Focus, which is overdue for an oil change, so if you see a tan Focus wagon with smoke billowing from it on the side of the road, there is a good chance it is me. Please stop and give me a lift.

Matt To Help Kids Get Health Coverage

2007-07-17T21:15:00.000-04:00

On Monday, Matt announced his latest initiative in the Insurance Commissioner's Office: increasing the number of low-income children who receive low-cost health coverage through the Delaware Healthy Children Program. Delaware receives federal government money to pay for kids in this program, but millions of dollars go unused because not enough children are enrolled in the program. Meanwhile, the percentage of uninsured children in Delaware has been going up. That's where Matt and the new, innovative effort come in.

Read the complete coverage from either the News Journal or the Delaware State News.