Holy cow! Shantel Krebs is coming to town! My morning paper tells me that our Secretary of State will speak at the Brown County Republicans‘ Reagan Lunch this week Thursday, November 12, at noon at Mavericks in Aberdeen.
This visit appears to be part of a concerted public relations effort by the Secretary that last week saw her sit down for extended interviews with Rick Knobe on KSOO and Cara Hetland on SDPB Radio. Secretary Krebs is working hard to re-establish the credibility of her office amidst revelations of incompetence, waste, and theft under her predecessor, Jason Gant.
That trust is all the more essential and Secretary Krebs’s time on the PR trail all the more noteworthy given the crush of ballot measures petitions that her office is receiving. At this moment, Secretary Krebs has five petitions with over 190,000 signatures to validate, and it is likely that at least three more big petitions will come in today, November 9, the deadline for submitting initiated measures for the 2016 ballot. Even under the 5% random sample rule, Team Krebs will need to validate well over 10,000 individual signatures. Secretary Krebs said last week that she intends to review and certify or reject all submitted initiative petitions by the end of December.
The GOP lunch is open to the public. Anyone eager to ask Secretary Krebs about the petition process, corruption in Pierre, and other matters of electoral import should come to Mavericks Thursday at noon.
I wish I had time to see her presentation. Shantel Krebs is the only example of integrity, courage and true public service in Pierre. I’m sure that she will probably someday do something I disagree with, because that’s the nature of politics. But I also believe she will not shatter my respect for her.
and wingnuts can’t dismiss her by saying she is some dog of a liberal woman looking to make waves. I give her due credit for making some attempts to clean up Gant’s mess,but still- let us wait and see if there will be real reform or just taking out the old trash from the SOS’office.
As a State Senator she was always helpful to me in my job as a County Commissioner. Keep in mind that while she was my constituent I was not hers. I still refer to some of her research on Mobile Home taxes when those issues come up.
the exec is not too busy at the finish line to do PR work. her nails will never get dirty. $100,000 salary? minions are hired for that. she is now elected republican royalty. politics-the short-cut to the top if one is still young and pretty (e.g. blonde/blue-eyed/lotza cosmetics/clothes/photoshopping at public expense) like shantel and frank k. (oh, sorry frank, wrong party!!). don’t let it go to your head shantel.
She has definitely reformed that office for the better in almost every way.
Was there anyway to go but up?
I certainly hope that SOS Krebs will look doubly hard at the verifying signatures as well as the Notary seal on the 18% cap initiative, as there were many nefarious sounding signature gatherers here in Sioux Falls on that ballot initiative and they were all over town and in various situations.
I saw somewhere this past week, and it may have been on this blog, that there is thought to having petition signature gatherers verified legally before they can gather signatures. I think that I would be in favor of that.
While it’s early Krebs may well be the next governor. She’s the only competent republican in the potential field. Her letter cataloging SOS office accomplishments is impressive – even given the low-bar she inherited to improve the office following it’s former miscreant.
While it is hard to say that Krebs has done anything wrong as SOS, it is worth noting that she is attacking an easy target, incompetence committed under a discredited predecessor who apparently has no political capital left with the SDGOP. She did not attack Gant in 2012, when Senator Stan Adelstein did. She waited until 2013, when she announced her campaign for his office. Attacking this corruption coincides with the availability of a position to which to aspire. In this case, political interest coincides with public interest.
When will we see the SDGOP start turning its guns on hard corruption, on misdeeds that implicate their favorites?
Well, I will say this–I think she works hard, she’s intelligent, and she has integrity. I read her letter and I was impressed. Democrats need someone like her.