Aaron and Grant deleted scenes

Aaron Johnson, left, and Grant Robertson.

My story about mayoral candidate Aaron Johnson and City Council candidate Grant Robertson ran Saturday. If you missed it, click here to read it.

Aaron and Grant are filmmakers, so in the grand tradition of DVD releases, here are a few deleted scenes from the story:

Aaron Johnson on political fundraising:

“We run two very, very small businesses (here and here — and also this one) that have been struggling a log with this economy, and you know how to count every single dollar. There’s not a dollar I spend without thinking very hard about it. And I’ve  learned those habits of being careful with money.

“I don’t take it lightly at all when someone gives me five bucks, because five bucks is a lot of money to me. … I’ve had to very seriously consider whether I should go to Arby’s or McDonald’s because Arby’s is an extra $2 and pay-roll is tomorrow.

“And then the other candidates, if you just look at the money they’ve already spent, they are spending thousands of dollars on out-of-state web designers, when there are web designers in town who will do it. I’m not even talking about my company, you’ve got Mad Monkey, got Period Three, got some of the best web developers in the country right in your backyard who would do it for half the price.”

Johnson on his and Robertson’s campaign style:

“We’re pooling our resources because we’re so small, and we can’t play the same game they play because first of all I find a lot of those strategies to be disingenuous, not that the candidates themselves are disingenuous, they’re working in the parameters of the system they’ve been told to work in by their advisers.

“I know I have to work harder as a candidate to earn people’s trust because of that. I recognize that. I recognize because we are having to use these non traditional methods it’s going to make a lot of people wonder about us.

“We have to prove ourselves.”

Johnson on his style:

“I was a big Sherlock Holmes fan when I was a kid, so I was really into Victorian and I’m a big history buff, so that may have something to do with it. But there’s not really like a message behind it. I think that we’ve kind of been adopting the tuxedos and the top hat kind of thing to kind of like beckon back to the whistlestop days when people would stand up on the stumps and speak, because that has a lot to do with what we are trying to do. Back in those days, you didn’t have sound bites and pull quotes and stuff like that. The way that you reached your audience was by writing extensively long newspaper articles that they would print in full or you would literally stand up in front of a group of people and give a long speech and they would listen to what you  were saying and they would have a long debate with people you know and it wouldn’t be on television, it would be  right there in the room with them.”

Johnson and Robertson exchange on their Internet talk show, Drinking in the Morning:

JOHNSON: Grant, we forgot to change our clothes

ROBERTSON: Dammit

JOHNSON: Hey, watch your language (slaps Robertson with a bow tie)

ROBERTSON: We can edit it out

JOHNSON: You can’t edit it out of your filing cabinet in heaven.