John Choi is a smart, tough and compassionate Ramsey County will be a better place to live because of John Choi.

With all due respect to their long histories of professional accomplishments, it does look like both Mr. Choi and Ms. Gaertner are trying to emulate Mr. Pawlenty's hopes to fail upwards.

Mr. Choi or Ms. Gaertner could have put a stop to the RNC debacle last year.
Neither chose to.

Ms. Gaertner dodged, rather than stood up to, the hundreds of specious cases brought on by Sheriff Fletcher. Declining to prosecute rather than dismissing them, she dumped them off to Mr. Choi.

Mr. Choi chose to put literally hundreds of people through hours and days of wasted time and grief, cooperating with Bob Fletcher's and Karl Rove's insistence that Americans be punished for acting like free citizens in an American city.

I strongly suspect Mr. Choi would not be re-elected in St. Paul. Presumably he is hoping to have pleased the county's white suburbanites by his disregard for our Constitution. One can only hope the majority of the county's electorate will remember his likely continuing disregard for their rights in the event his ambition leads him any further along Mr. Pawlenty's path.