The table of contents for Harry’s newly published book.

 Of course, I’d be happy to run against a traitor for Congress.  

When I was a little kid and cried to my mother about a skinned knee she would tell me. “Don’t cry Harry. Your grandfather was shot and he didn’t cry.” Even as a six year old I was pitted against her father, George Robb, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. No hockey puck who cheated to win a championship game is going to stop me from tossing my hat in his ring.  

I haven’t exactly been shy during my 50-year-stay in Duluth. I screwed up a teaching career three times but stuck to my guns. I ran repeatedly for the school board until my fourth campaign was the charm.   I brought a charter school to Duluth because I’d seen how kids failed to thrive as a teacher. In subsequent years, I never won a union endorsement and yet, almost without fail, I went to every union endorsement interview. I was mentioned on the nationally syndicated Paul Harvey news show for sticking a pin in a voodoo doll when I stepped down as Chair of the board with 500 red-shirted teachers sitting before me demanding a quick settlement of their contract.  

I stubbornly remained a Republican despite being told at one of their conventions that I was a mass murderer worse than Hitler, Stalin and Mao put together. Then I switched to the Democrats for a couple years to support Obama who’s election was my greatest political thrill. Then I switched back to the Republicans thinking I needed to challenge the disgrace Trump was bringing to my Republican ancestors who were no doubt rolling in their graves.  

For two decades I’ve exorcised my demons in the pages of this august tabloid, which never once censored me even as I took on some of Duluth’s choicest hypocrites and asses. But I usually did this with some tact, wit and self-deprecation since I had my own imperfections.  

I have often gone back to read my autobiographical columns and been pleased with them. From the day that yellow, headed, lemon-sucker cruised down his escalator, I knew the GOP was dead meat. I was in Jerusalem about that time having dinner with the Obama hating prime minister. I came back and wrote a column about the miasma in the Holy Land that only Donald Trump could make worse. The Reader didn’t publish it. I suppose the Reader was in one of its annual crises. I published it years later more than once. That column is in my book. I also made my first of three eventual  snow sculptures of Trump. He had just won the South Carolina primary where good Republicans go to die from racist robo calls.  

I’m hardly giving anything away. My book touted previously in these columns has about 75 of the 300 columns I’ve written for the Reader since “Monkeyworms” in 2002.  

They are an often TMI collection of one man’s experiences during a forty year crusade to purge every republican known for probity and common sense as its leaders created a cult for a narcissistic sociopath populated with many long-neglected democrats.  

Squint hard at my Table of Contents and, if you can read them, you will see an eclectic collection of reminiscences. I think they offer a pretty clear picture of someone true to the book’s title in that he is “not your usual Republican.”  

I have spent $7000 to publish 500 copies of this book and if I sell them all for $25 dollars - a pittance for the thousands of smiles my snow sculptures have provided this city for 37 years - I’ll double my investment and print more books to pay for a congressional campaign. And if candor isn’t your cup of tea at that price, you can download my book for a paltry $5.99 on Kindle.  

If you find reading an honest politician refreshing you could encourage your friends to buy a book as well so that there is at least one person willing to stand up to the not so useful idiots in the Republican Congress. There are a lot more of them than just Pete Stauber to skewer for treason.  

I’ll be putting up lawnsigns and passing out bookmarks and selling my unusual memoirs. I hope to go viral and you could help. $25 will buy a book but why stop there when you could buy two or four and share them with friends and family. The book tells them where other hopeful Americans can buy the book or make a donation to the Welty for Congress campaign.  

Harry Welty, now an official candidate, plans to continue writing his Reader columns during the campaign and post them on his oft mentioned blog: www.lincolndemocrat.com.   PS Should Welty become a Congressman he plans to offer weekly congressional peeks at Reader. That could be interesting.