When I want to know if something is really important or if it is something “normal/regular” people will care about, I have what I call “The Donna Test.”

The “Donna” is my wife Donna M. Epp, Ph.D.  It’s not the Ph.D. that matters so much in these instances (though frankly, she’s a lot smarter than me and getting a Ph.D. is a lot harder than getting a law degree), it’s her common sense, her intuition, and her closeness to “the peeps” that I trust.

Donna spends her day with real people, not on the Internet worried about what PP or SDP or Sibby or even I have to say about some blogger that maybe 500 people care about.  She runs a multi-million dollar business, manages staff, and helps patients get the dialysis treatments they need to stay alive and stay healthy.  She deals with real problems in the real world. 

And in “The Donna Test,” the Chad Schuldt story is a non-story.  Donna has been around Democratic politics some and Chad a little bit and frankly, she doesn’t care.  

Which is the same point that Denise Ross makes in her always excellent blog, The Hog House Blog. 

Chad Schuldt is inside the ballpark bullshit for us political types.  For the Donnas of South Dakota and the Sioux Empire, they could care less.  And these are smart, educated, informed people.  

It simply has no impact on most people’s lives.  As Denise, the daughter of a banker notes:

In these embezzlement cases, which are - tragically - quite common, it’s typical to get the story from the cops and courts beat reporter. So-and-so has been charged with X crime for allegedly embezzling X amount from X business/organization.

To the people who know “so-and-so,” it’s titillating. To the rest of us, it’s of passing interest at best.

To bloggers whose scorn or, less often I suspect, admiration Chad Schuldt (aka Clean Cut Kid) has earned fair and square, his personal downfall is of high interest. But to read any more consequence into it than that it will profoundly affect Schuldt personally is to engage in fantasy.

I’m not excusing the Argus Leader’s lack of interest in the story after names have been named, particularly after they broke the story first.  Why they didn’t simply ask Steve Hildebrand for an on the record comment after the Roll Call story is beyond me.

One thing that unites all South Dakotans of whatever political stripe is that we all, at some level, hate the Argus Leader.  Maybe not for the same reasons, but I view it as something that helps bind us together in the Mt. Rushmore State.  It is a tradition like going out to hunt on the pheasant opener or stopping at Al’s Oasis for coffee on a trip to the Black Hills or making fun of Iowa drivers or calling Nebraskans “sand lizards.”  Hating the Argus is our birthright as South Dakotans.

But I digress. 

But on the same token, Schuldt’s problems won’t impact the Barack Obama race, Tom Daschle or much else.  It will only impact Chad and to a lesser degree, Steve Hildebrand’s company, which is probably still on the hook to pay the IRS.

Meanwhile, most of the “normal/regular” people we know have other things to worry about other than whether some snot-nosed blogger got his comeuppance via his own hands.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing comes to mind.  If anyone thinks this episode means that Democrats are somehow morally inferior to Republicans, um, I wouldn’t be throwing stones, my GOP friends.  This could just as easily happen to your operatives as well.  And, those among you with some savvy and some experience know that’s the truth.>