Could someone please let the pols and talking heads on Capitol Hill know that we here on Main Street are sick and tired of the Main Street/Wall Street comparison?

It was cute the first 3,276 times.

Leave it to Washington to take clever and beat it into rhetorical submission.

Stop. Please.

If you want to tell your friends about this site, but you have trouble remembering the address, fear not: You can now go to www.capitolwatchblog.com (or www.capitalwatchblog.com, if you prefer), and you’ll wind up right back here.

The Internets are so neat.

Now, go tell your friends that they need to check out the only political blog hosted by a local television station where you get updated commentary more than once per day — and you can actually interact with the authors.

Survey USA is reporting Governor Mitch Daniels with a 16-point lead over Democratic challenger Jill Long Thompson.  The survey of 687 likely voters showed Daniels leading  53-37.   The poll was taken Sunday and Monday of this week.

What’s interesting about this poll is that Daniels is leading in all areas of the state.

• Northern IN, 46-42.
• Central IN, 56-32.
• Indianapolis, 59-34.
• Southern IN, 56-38.

Love local politics? You won’t want to miss Will Higgins’ story in this morning’s Indianapolis Star about the fading power of precinct committeefolk in Marion County.

The once-coveted positions, drained of their influence in this post-patronage era, today go begging in Marion County and across the country. Even as a historic presidential election looms, local Republican and Democratic parties each have about 50 precinct openings. They have had vacancies for more than a decade, but the waning interest is especially startling because in January the number of precincts in the county was reduced from 914 to 590.

The job used to mean constant door-to-door canvassing, voter-registering and sometimes front-porch debating.

These days, not so much. For a variety of reasons — personal safety, increasing reliance on political advertising, expanded voter registration methods — it’s no longer common for precinct committeemen to walk their neighborhoods.

I’d argue that there are still a small handful of powerful PCs in the county, but Higgins is right: They’re a dying breed.

Personally, I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. It just means the parties have to be smarter about recruiting talented, involved people who can carry the message back to their neighborhoods. It’s not enough to rely on yard signs, slate cards and the string-laced field maps of yesteryear. There are new technologies and strategies out there that can make party organization a lot easier; we just have to embrace them instead of clinging to the way we’ve always done things.

Though I’ve got Barack Obama’s groundbreaking, impeccably executed campaign in mind, the lessons learned apply to folks on both sides of the aisle.

I need to make a point of clarification in yesterday’s post.  I talked about Jill Long Thompson’s campaign’s criticism of Governor Mitch Daniels’ travel on the day the stock market lost nearly 800 points.  First, I think her staff should have waited to make a big deal out of this on another news day. more importantly, JLT’s campaign is basically saying the Governor used taxpayer money to attend non-governmental functions.

However, the rules on travel are not as clear as JLT would probably like for them to be.  In JLT’s news release she cites the following statute…

“According to state law (IAC 1-5-12), a state officer, employee or special state appointee shall not make use of state materials, funds, property, personnel, facilities or equipment for any purpose other than for official state business unless the use is expressly permitted by a general written agency, departmental or institutional policy or regulation.”

When I asked JLT’s staff if they got a copy of the administrative rules to see if any of the Governor’s non-state travel might fall into an exemption they told me “no.”  It would have made more sense to have a copy of the rules ready and just to have all the bases covered.  Because if the Governor’s non-state business travel is covered by the exemption, someone is going to be looking real silly.