I am not sure he said much, but it was 20 minutes of the best election night speech I’ve heard in a long time. I was ready to send him money until Mrs. LBC hit me up side my head.

Watch what happens in California tomorrow. The race is tightening up there — RealClearPolitics has Sen. John McCain up by 2.2 on its rolling average of polling in the state. That’s quite a swing in the numbers in just a week, which is the same thing we saw happen in Michigan where McCain lead Mitt Romney by 6 points right after winning New Hampshire only to see the numbers flop and turn into a 10-point loss. (See NR’s Byron York’s take.)

California, like Michigan, apportions its delegates by a winner-takes-all by congressional district, and there are 53 of them there. If Romney can win the state and take a majority the delegates, he might be able to fight it out for the remaining delegates post-Super-Duper Tuesday. If McCain wins CA and a majority of its delegates — coupled with anticipated wins in NY and NJ, which are winner-take-all states — he will solidify the Big Mo he’s been building these last few weeks and wrap up the nomination, most likely.

On similar note…Michael Medved says the reality of McCain’s surge is simple: conservatives are supporting him.

So says king strategist Karl Rove, who writes in his column today in The Wall Street Journal:

The 20th century’s closing decades saw the rise of the TV ad man as the most potent operator in presidential campaigns. The 21st century’s opening decade is seeing the rise of the communications director and press spokesman as the more important figures on a campaign staff. It is the age of the Internet, cable TV, YouTube, multiple news cycles in one day, and the need for really instantaneous response. Ads and ad makers are still vital — but not nearly as much as they were just a few years ago.

That’s what I’ve been trying to tell my bosses for years. Maybe “500 miles and a briefcase” will make them take note. Just kidding, guys!

Seriously, communication methods have completely changed and revolutionized how campaigns are run. When I started as a reporter, I could do my job with a notebook and a pay phone. Today, reporters are journalist generalists doing everything from news gathering to news delivery, with video editing and blogging spiced in for good measure. The same is true on campaigns.

When I made the switch to politics — when fax machines still had paper on rolls — it was what release are we sending out today, or right now. The communication shop supported the broader message of what was up on the airwaves. Today, that’s completely inverted.

Your modern, well-stocked campaign will have a communication shop that rivals anything on Madison Ave., complete with in-house video and audio production crews, writers, bloggers, Web coders, press handlers, spokespersons, researchers and more. Running the show is a person who has more in common with the executive producer of a major network news channel than the old comm. dir. who was not much more than a good writer with a fancy title.

There’s a logical reason for this shift. As communication mediums “flattened out” — meaning that more and more people were able to produce and receive content directly from a source — so did campaign communication efforts. Campaigns now can provide content directly to potential voters without having to go though an intermediary (newspaper or TV broadcast or paid advertisement.) If I can send a 30-second video message from my candidate directly to 300,000 cell phones or e-mail “boxes” in an instant, why would spend all day trying to get a reporter to cover the same issue, run it through the filer that is his or her own natural bias and the bias of three to five editors who also will “touch” the story, and then put it up on a website that — maybe — 40,000 people will visit in an average day? I wouldn’t, and don’t.

When there are no news cycles because there is always a new news cycle on the horizon, and when campaigns can communicate directly with voters in an instant, with a message targeted toward issues they car about, the role of the campaign communication director will continue to ascend.

There was so much wind and methane in Governor Granholm’s State of the State Address last night it is easy to see why people got excited about alternative energy. Yet, as we have come to learn with our governor, it better to trust what she has done than what she says she will do.

Case in point: Alternative Energy. Here’s what the governor said last night:

But let me talk for a moment about one sector that has blockbuster potential for Michigan: alternative energy. Why alternative energy? Because – to borrow a line from Wayne Gretzky – if you want to win, “don’t skate to where the puck is – skate to where the puck is going.” The puck is going to alternative energy. Any time you pick up a newspaper from here on out and see the terms “climate change” or “global warming,” just think: “jobs for Michigan.” Because of the need to reduce global warming and end our dependence on expensive foreign oil, the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries will create millions of good paying jobs.

But when the governor had chance to actually do something that would offer incentives to create some renewable energy she vetoed it.

In 2004, state Sen. Cameron Brown, from the Sturgis area, introduced Senate Bill 955, which proposed to offer tax credits to farmers as incentives to turn cow poo into usable methane or bio-mass that could be used to generate power. This bill passed the state Senate and House with strong bi-partisan support.

It’s a simple concept and a good one. Large farm operations — and there are few small farm operations anymore — produce a lot of animal waste which normally would sit in a large cement lagoons until it is pumped into trucks and hauled away, usually to be dumped on some farm field someplace. Yuck is right.

But today the technology exists that would take much of the cow pies created by a large dairy operation, say, and convert it into usable methane. That methane — which is clean-burning natural gas — would in turn be used to power electric generators or heat livestock barns on the same farms where the waste is created. Senator Brown’s tax credit bill would have made it cheaper for farmers to use this technology and to turn waste into energy. Sounds like a good source of renewable energy to me.

But the governor kowtowed the enviro whackos in her own party who saw the tax breaks as sop for large farm operations, commonly referred to a CAFOs (Commercial Animal Farm Operations), which the Left loves to hate. Never mind the fact that offering incentives to large farm operations to deal on-site with the waste they create — and create some energy in the process — just makes a whole lot more sense than trying to regulate them into oblivion.

SB 955 offered an tangible opportunity to create real alternative energy jobs, right here and right now. Not the pie-in-the-sky hopes about which the governor waxed lovingly in her address last night.

That’s the difference between Granholm Rhetoric and Granholm Action.

Now that the Michigan Presidential Primary is past, I can get back to opining and writing about local politics and political figures. I self-imposed a blogging moratorium on myself because some cranks were concerned that I would shave my reportage to favor one particular candidate over another. Because of my job at the Michigan Republican Party, it made sense to be above the fray. Now that the primary is passed, I can get back to what I do best. Sorry it’s been so long since I last posted. I promise not to let my loyal readers down.

No commentary necessary.

Given Planned Parenthood’s aversion to sidewalk picketers, we find it strange that Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan (the group’s political arm) would weigh into a yet-to-materialize campaign to establish a “right to work” law. Hat tip to Carter Wood at the National Association of Manufactures and its Shop Floor blog for alerting us to Planned Parenthood’s next political agenda item — union organizing. As if stopping a beating heart wasn’t enough.

This is only anecdotal…but judging by the number of comments — and their extreme level of vitriol — to a Detroit Free Press profile of Democrat Speaker Andy Dillon, public anger over the recently enacted income and service tax increases is higH, hiGH, HIGH.

The Freep ran the profile today, and you can read it here. I won’t go into it. It’s mostly a puff piece about Young Andy and the turmoil he endured to increase taxes in Michigan. If we were in a locker room, I would replace “puff piece” with a more appropriate epitaph.

But what is worth reading is the reader reaction to the piece. So far, there are 158 comments left on the Freep’s website — the most, by several multiples, of any other story — all but a handful are critical of Dillon, and most of them very much so. You can jump right to the comments here. I think the Democrats misread public sentiment on this one.

Two seemingly unrelated bits of information arrived in my mailbox today — one via snail mail, the other electronically. The first was a notice from the Michigan Department of Treasury informing me that “Public Act 94 of 2007 raised the income tax rate to 4.35 percent effective October 1, 2007.” Hmmm, that’s an interesting way of putting it, kind of like “mistakes were made.” Funny that the letter didn’t say “Governor Granholm, with the bipartisan support of the legislature raised the income tax rate.” Isn’t she proud of this accomplishment if says so much about who we are and what our vision is for Michigan?

The other bit was an email from do-not-reply@jennifergranholm.com. I guess that’s the governor’s email address, but it sounds kind of forbidding. Anyway, this note is all about her husband’s column on leadership, Reading for Leading. I have no idea why the governor would think I might be interested in signing up to receive the First Gentleman’s missive “free of charge” each week, but to my surprise a few lines did catch my attention. Mr. Mulhern talks about the importance of having an inspiring personal vision statement and that you really need to understand the context in order to truly appreciate it. Mulhern cites the example of two young women he recently had on his radio show whose personal vision statements inspired him and concludes with these words:

With vision and purpose of their own, they don’t have to wait for others, blame others, or even follow others. They have a direction of their own and can lead.

Obviously, Governor Granholm is proud of her husband’s work as a leadership coach, but by the standard he sets above, she doesn’t measure up. Look at the ongoing budget mess in which she waited and waited and waited and blamed and blamed and blamed. Michigan still doesn’t have a solution. This is leadership? Not in Mulhern’s book, and certainly not in mine.

Sterling Corporation, the former place of my employ, has jumped into the corporate ’sphere with its own blog that focuses on advertising, politics and stuff. Check it out for some good insight into the advertising world, what works, what doesn’t and, sometimes, just to point out the bizarre.