Pardon the tardiness of this column, dear readers ?I am still getting over the shock of being asked to help the Wisconsin Union organize key elements of this fall’s Go Big Read common book program. After my positively-acidic condemnation last week of our campus’ common book program, the invitation was — needless to say — a minor mind fuck.? Imagine Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being asked to lead an election protest in Iran. Yeah.”

Readers, paragraphs like that — fluffy, smarmy polemical jabs — are the life-blood of the summer publishing season. I am very, very bored with them. This morning (I kid you not) I got 500 words into my column before realizing I had written about the same thing two weeks ago (just as smarmily). The doldrums have officially gotten me, and there is nobody?left?in Madison to sacrifice to the sea gods. The city has emptied, but people like me and (the enviable) Sean Kittridge are left here pretending that campus politicos are still grinding away like clockwork. (Hint: they’re not.)?

Sure, there are modest kerfuffles going on in the State Legislature, where Majority Leader Russ Decker is staging an unsurprisingly-misguided opposition to a fundraising ban during budget consideration. Yes, there is room for a few more easy laughs at our administrators’ expense; note the bizarrely-cheery slide show of campus construction projects just uploaded to the wisc.edu website. If I really wanted to, I’m sure I could provoke another blogosphere feud with the reigning kings and queens of the campus far-left. And somewhere, someplace, there has probably been a small or ironic or otherwise-relevant victory for LGBT rights. (I must have missed it; I was too busy dating men.) Oh, and there was a thunderstorm last night. Woke me up at 3:00 AM.?

So what did?you?do this week?? Don’t be shy.

You know it’s a dull period when even the Critical Badger — who has castigated Herald readers for recycling old news — just?today?linked to an overrated Slate article almost two months old.??Oy vey.? You know what this campus needs more than anything?? (No, silly, we’re already?getting?a new Union South building!)? We need some good old-fashioned local political drama.? With Brenda Konkel off the Common Council, there is nearly nothing to work with.? (Our two new student councilmembers, Bryon Eagon and Bridget Maniaci, have the indecency here to be decidedly more boring and less dramatic than Brenda.)

And yet there remains one relatively-impending student district election: the April 2010 contest for Wyndham Manning’s District 5 seat on the Dane County Board of Supervisors.? It seems like only yesterday that dear Wyndham and Conor O’Hagan were running for District 5.? (For that matter, it seems like yesterday that Ashok Kumar and David Lapidus were squaring off lopsidedly for that very seat.)? Since the 2008 election is over, the City Council student district elections are over, and the U.S. congressional midterms aren’t for another 18 months, the District 5 brouhaha might be our only source of real political excitement in the upcoming year.?

As of today, we still have not heard an announcement from Wyndham Manning whether he intends to run for a second term. My intuition is that, the jabs of this newspaper notwithstanding, Wyndham is the overwhelming odds-on favorite for reelection if he tries again.? People like Wyndham, policy criticisms aside, are tailor-made for spending their peak years as young entrenched incumbents in local government.? In the event Wyndham doesn’t run, I am very curious to see who takes up the mantle of Progressive Dane. PD is a zephyr of the Dane County political machine it once was, but District 5 is one of their most reliable seats.?

Yet what District 5 hasn’t seen in several election cycles is a liberal Democrat with a strong chance of victory; Suchita Shah, since departed for medical school at Columbia, could have cleaned Wyndham’s clock in 2008. I know a few College Democrats who could be great contendors (they know who they are.)? And given the lessons of the previous cycle, it cannot be the case that the C-Dems have no idea who they plan to run, or at least who they plan to approach. (I say this only half-sarcastically.)? There also remains the possibility of a moderate conservative challenger, ala David Lapidus, with enough personal popularity to at least survive the primary election. My intuition is that this will be a very jammed contest with at least five (maybe six) student candidates; 2008 woke up a shit-ton of students to politics, including many talented underclassmen. ??

(Elephant-in-the-room alert: There has been some speculation, not entirely unwarranted, that I might run for the position myself. This indeed was something I had considered.? So let this be my Al Gore moment: After much thought, there is no way in hell I am still seriously considering this possibility. It will be much more fun, and less intellectually-taxing, to be the polemicist observing the shit-storm from outside.)?

So with that said, if you?are?thinking about running for District 5 in 2010, speak up.? In the world of campus politics, where roughly 300 people pay close attention anyways, there is no such thing as ‘peaking too early.’? So come out with it!? Send me an announcement of your candidacy. I don’t bite. We’re all fairly bored at the Herald, and there is a political vacuum just waiting to be filled by your early announcements. This is the era of the permanent campaign, after all. Give us something to write about.??Please.??