The Rake Magazine

Tag: politics

  • Church and State

    Every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. during the legislative session, Chaplain Dan Hall hosts a two-hour prayer meeting. It is held around a long wooden table in Room 118 of the State Capitol building, just around the corner from the governor’s office. Attendance varies, averaging about twenty people who know Hall from his work as a voluntary chaplain to state legislators and staff. “Welcome, welcome,” he said one recent Wednesday, gesturing to the overstuffed chairs that surrounded the table.


    Among the attendees were four middle-aged women from a Cannon Falls prayer group, a handicapped man who said he had “left the gay lifestyle” twenty-six years ago, and Myrna Howes, the wife of Republican Representative Larry Howes. It was the group from Cannon Falls, however, that commanded Hall’s attention. They were intercessors—individuals who pray for specific goals or people, sometimes for years. “We’re praying for the churches and the union,” said a puckish member in a pink sweater.

    “Good,” Hall said, nodding, his wide smile casting sincere and fatherly approval on the older woman. “Good!” In his mid-fifties, Hall is a powerfully built man, with wide shoulders and a broad chest. Yet his toothy enthusiasm for faith and the faithful softens that potentially intimidating physical presence into warm charisma. “That’s just great,” he exclaimed.

    “We’ve also prayed for some barren women and had some success,” the woman in the pink sweater continued. “My forty-year-old daughter had a baby.”

    “I remember praying in the early eighties for the Berlin Wall to fall,” said Charlotte Herzog, the group’s leader. “Thinking that maybe it would happen in our children’s lifetime. But it only took six years!”

    Hall checked his Palm Pilot and then announced the order of business. “We’re going to have some legislators stop by and talk about their passions. Then we’ll pray for them.”

    Chaplain Dan Hall is not a state official, nor does he serve in any official capacity. Nevertheless, his voluntary ministry at the state Capitol, which is funded by tax-exempt contributions, is enormously influential with legislators motivated by conservative Christian theologies and teachings on social issues such as abortion and gay rights. According to Lonnie Titus, the full-time official chaplain to Minnesota’s House of Representatives, who was elected by its members, “Dan serves as an issues person on the Christian side at the Legislature. He has been a rallying force for the conservative Christians, and he’s done a great job at it, too.” Titus added, carefully, “I can’t do that because I’m a chaplain to the entire House. But I’m glad Dan is here because it’s a growing need.” Indeed. According to Titus, fully one-third of Minnesota’s legislators “allow religion to play the important role in their life—Jesus in particular,” and their numbers grow with each election.

    Steve Sviggum, the speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, entered Room 118 with long steps and an enthusiastic smile. Hall greeted him with a handshake. Though shorter than the lanky Sviggum, Hall has a gregarious presence that gives up nothing in stature next to power. “Mister Speaker, I was hoping that you could tell us about your passions.”

    Sviggum crossed his arms and stood at the head of the table. “First of all, I want to thank you for your thoughts and prayers,” he enthused. “You are so important to legislators.” For the next several minutes he delivered an innocuous lecture on the role of the speaker. When he was nearly finished, a striking blond woman entered the room. “Hi, Jackie,” Sviggum said. “I bet you’re here to talk about Fetal Pain, the Taxpayer’s Protection Act, and Positive Alternatives.”

    Jackie laughed. “Why don’t you do it, Mister Speaker?”

    Sviggum winked at the group and explained, “Jackie and I see each other almost every day.”

    Dan Hall paused to introduce her as Jackie Moen, legislative associate and occasional spokeswoman for Minnesotan Citizens Concerned for Life, the state’s leading anti-abortion organization. “Anyway, the speaker’s time is very limited.” Hall said. “Are there any questions?”

    The man who identified himself as formerly gay raised his hand. “I know we lost some seats this year,” he began. “So what can we pray to get more Republicans in the House and Senate?”

    “I’m not one to be so bold as to say my party’s always right, and God is always on my side,” Sviggum answered. “But I fight to be on his side!” There were approving nods around the table and Sviggum continued with renewed enthusiasm. “I think we should pray for wisdom, principles, and ideas. Of course, we want like-minded people to stand with us.” Slowly, he warmed to the question, and finally ended with the hard numbers: “If you look at demographics, we should probably have seventy-four, seventy-five seats in the House.”

    With that, Hall stood again. “Who wants to pray for the speaker?” Two women from the Cannon Falls group reached out and grasped Sviggum’s hands. Hall maneuvered behind him and rested a hand on Sviggum’s shoulder. All closed their eyes. “Lord, anoint Steve’s words with your wisdom,” the woman on his right prayed. “Anoint him with strength to make your will known and real.” In response, the room was filled with spontaneous whispers. “Yes, yes, yessss!” The prayer lasted five minutes, and included blessings for the speaker, his family, his issues, and the Republican agenda. After the final “amen,” Sviggum smiled broadly. “I—I feel stronger,” he said breathlessly. “And more comforted.”

    Hall stepped forward to get Sviggum on his way. “I know the speaker has a busy schedule,” he said again.

    Sviggum nodded. “I sure wish I could spend my whole day with you,” he said. As he departed, he gave the room a big thumbs-up.

    ***

    The Town Talk Cafe and Coffee Bar is located around the corner from Main Street in the central Minnesota town of Willmar. It is a crowded, stifling place, where the coffee tastes like burnt water, the ceiling is yellowed from smoke, and dice tumble across Formica. The Town Talk is also where, for the last thirty-one years, Dean Johnson, the Democratic majority leader of the Minnesota Senate, has enjoyed his Saturday morning breakfast with friends that range from a bison farmer to the guy who plows his driveway (the latter refers to Johnson as “numb nuts” to visiting reporters). On a Saturday in March, the mood is jovial and a little raw. Everyone is the subject of a joke, and Johnson usually joins with a giggle totally at odds with his otherwise rich, stentorian voice and his fifty-seven years. Yet despite Johnson’s obvious affection for the venue and its patrons, he is not entirely present. In between ribbings about, say, some guy named Taco Olson, he surreptitiously checks his cell phone beneath the table. Nobody seems to mind, though, because it’s a wonder that Johnson has time for the Town Talk at all. In addition to being the majority leader of the Minnesota Senate, Dean Johnson is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, a brigadier general in the United States National Guard, and the National Guard’s top-ranking chaplain.

    Yet there is an ironic twist to Johnson’s accomplished career as a minister. In the Minnesota Legislature, his moderate Lutheranism, which he defines as “a religion of devotion and tolerance,” is the exception among religiously motivated Christian legislators. And so Senator Dean Johnson, once a self-described “Eisenhower Republican” and a long-serving Senate Republican leader, is now the most unlikely of Democratic leaders: a rural pro-life minister with an esteemed military career.

    “The divisions really started in 1993 with the gay rights amendment to the state’s Human Rights Act,” Speaker Steve Sviggum told me. “I think what happened was that Johnson had told his Senate [Republican] caucus one thing, and then proceeded to the Senate floor and did another.” In 1993, Johnson was in his eleventh year as a state senator, but only a year into his tenure as the Senate Republican leader, a post he obtained as a moderate, consensus candidate. Meanwhile, Minnesota’s Republican Party had just elected a number of social conservatives to the Legislature, including current Senator Steve Dille and Senator Linda Runbeck (since retired). The clash was not long in coming. Early in the session that year, Democrats in the House and Senate introduced legislation amending Minnesota’s Human Rights Act to include gays and lesbians as a class protected from discrimination in housing and employment. As the Republican Senate leader, Johnson was widely expected to oppose it.

    “At the time, I really didn’t know what I’d do,” Johnson recalls as he drives through Willmar after breakfast. “But I kept hearing from people who were saying things like,”—here, Johnson’s voice drops—“‘My daughter … y’know?’” So, just before the speech, he jotted some notes based on personal experience onto a napkin. “As a Norwegian Lutheran,” he began, directly addressing the gay and lesbian community, “I simply do not understand what you do in your quiet times, in your moments of privacy.” Then, very quickly he shifted to a reflection on his role as a National Guard chaplain, and the 180 religious denominations recognized by the U.S. military. “I will tell you that some of these denominations I do not understand. I do not begin to understand their theology,” he continued. “But the fact remains that I took an oath of office that, as a member of the Chaplain Corps, it is my job and responsibility to ensure everyone—Protestant, Catholic, Jew, atheist—the free exercise of religion.” Concluding, Johnson returned to his service as a senator. “Even though I don’t fully understand the … homosexual lifestyle, I think it is prudent … that we vote as a majority to give rights to the minority.”

    The last frustrated minute of Johnson’s speech presaged the course of his split, seven years later, with the Republicans. As Republican leader, he found himself catering to a caucus whose agenda increasingly was devoted to social conservative issues, rather than the practical and pragmatic quality-of-life issues—such as transportation, housing, and education—that Johnson found more pressing. “We deal more with moral issues in the Senate than I did as a full-time parish pastor in Willmar,” he concluded. “I want you to think about that. I want the people of Minnesota to think about that.” Then, as now, he blamed some legislators for obsessing over social issues, distracting Minnesotans from more urgent needs.

    Johnson managed to remain the Republican Senate leader for most of the 1990s, but his unwillingness to legislate conservative social issues placed him at odds with the growing influence of social conservatives in the Republican Party. “Eventually, Dean wasn’t even welcome to walk in the parade with the [Kandiyohi County] Republican party unit,” recalled Democratic Representative Al Juhnke of Willmar. “They wouldn’t even hang his banners.” As the 2000 election approached, Johnson and other political observers in Willmar thought it likely that he would be challenged in the Republican primary. “And I just wasn’t going to subject myself to that,” Johnson told me.

    Even five years after his party switch, the bitterness toward Johnson has persisted among social conservatives. They view him as a traitor not only to his party, but also to the Lutheran church. In 2004, when Johnson single-handedly prevented legislation prohibiting gay marriage from reaching the floor of the Minnesota Senate, the sense of betrayal again became personal. “What’s so amazing is that Senator Dean Johnson, an ordained Lutheran minister, would actually be leading the charge against protecting the civil institution of marriage,” proclaimed Tom Prichard, president of the influential and conservative Minnesota Family Council. “What Lutheran and other Christian traditions say about the importance of marriage to society would lead one to think he’d be leading the charge to protect marriage from attacks.” Prichard’s comments are representative of the feelings that many legislators on the right have for Johnson. However, of twenty Republican legislators contacted for this article, only one—Speaker Steve Sviggum—would comment on Johnson for the record.

    Chaplain Dan Hall’s Wednesday prayer meeting attracts a range of high-powered guests, including lobbyists, but the group is most animated when legislators stop in to visit and pray. Thus, when Republican Representative Larry Howes of Walker was introduced, everyone straightened in their seats. “What you’re doing makes a difference here at the Capitol,” Howes began. “It may not always seem that way, but I can assure you that your prayers are heard.”

    “What’s your passion?” Hall asked.

    “Politics,” Howes answered, before transitioning into a detailed policy discussion about what’s really on his mind—namely, a nursing home in his district that is in danger of losing its state funding. “It’s a big payroll, and the loss of that would devastate our local economy,” he said.

    The formerly gay man raised his hand. “Should we pray that the governor will sign the bill for the nursing home?”

    “Sure,” Howes replied. “Yeah.”

    He then launched into another passion, concerning a letter someone had sent to Republican Representative Paul Gazelka, which disapproved of his support for a measure that would ban gay marriage. According to Howes, the author works for the Crow Wing County Human Services Department. “And I want you to know that I’ve already looked into de-funding that agency,” he announced with a pointed look at Hall.

    According to an online resume, Dan Hall has no formal religious training nor even a formal ordination, despite serving as an assistant pastor, administrative pastor, associate pastor, and senior pastor to four congregations dating back to 1982. This is not unusual. Among some Pentecostals and members of other independent, evangelical denominations, there is an institutional suspicion of formal religious training, and many of their church leaders are not ordained, at least not in accredited seminaries or divinity schools. Instead, they are accepted as spiritual leaders on the basis of their faith, leadership, and charisma. Hall, a married father of eight, seems to have established himself in that tradition and done quite well. In addition to being founder and executive director of Midwest Chaplains and its Capitol Prayer Network, he is city chaplain of Burnsville, where he ministers to police and emergency services personnel.

    Hall claims his voluntary ministry at the Capitol began after House Chaplain Lonnie Titus told him “he couldn’t handle it all on his own.” In contrast, Titus claims that Hall approached him about getting involved at the Capitol. Regardless of whose idea it was, nobody disputes that Hall’s Capitol ministry began in the fall of 2001, when he stationed himself outside the Senate chambers and introduced himself to members. Four years later, his routine hasn’t changed much. “I come down to the Capitol after the traffic,” Hall explains. “And I begin my route.” He starts on the top floor of the State Office Building. “I peek my head into offices, say hello to staff and legislators and just see where that goes. I see what I can do to help, and I always try to bring God into it.” When he is not busy with the individual needs of legislators and staff, Hall conducts “prayer tours” of the Capitol for groups interested in praying at the usual tour stops, such as the Senate chambers.

    Hall also maintains an email list of “Capitol intercessors” whom he contacts with specific prayer requests when a “moral or spiritual issue” such as abortion, gay rights, or methamphetamine use arises. “I’ve been told that because I’m a chaplain I must be a Republican,” Hall admitted. “I’m more conservative, yes, but really what I’m doing is based on Biblical truth. I call it ‘political evangelism,’ but it’s not politics.”

    Lonnie Titus disputes Hall’s depiction of his ministry. “I serve as a chaplain to all of the people [at the House of Representatives],” Titus explained. “But Dan, he’s the front guy if you’re pro-life, pro-marriage.” The distinction is important and legal. For Dan Hall’s ministry to be granted federal 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status as a nonprofit organization it must meet several criteria, one of the most important being that it “may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities”—even, presumably, if that means influencing God to influence legislation. Bluntly, the regulations prohibiting religious organizations from explicit political advocacy do not allow for much interpretation, and Hall—otherwise a literalist in Scriptural matters—knows it. “A lot of pastors don’t stand up for issues and that’s how we got into the mess that we’re in today,” Hall said. “They’re all worried about losing their ‘tax-exempt.’” Intentionally or not, Chaplain Dan Hall and his supporters at the Legislature may be redefining the boundaries of religious political advocacy in Minnesota.

    ***

    Calvary Lutheran Church in Willmar is a yellow brick building topped by a rounded copper roof and a single spire. For thirty-one years Dean Johnson has served as a pastor to its congregants. “It’s really been a sanctuary for me,” he explains as he opens the church’s back door, which has a fallout shelter sign posted on it. “From politics and the military.” Inside, a narrow, short corridor ends with doors that offer a glimpse into the church’s sanctuary. On the left, an American flag poster with “God Bless America” printed across the bottom is taped to a wooden door, which also bears an engraved plastic nameplate reading “Pastor Dean E. Johnson.”

    The walls of Johnson’s office are covered with certificates, awards, news clippings, and photos of Johnson with a range of political luminaries. A highboy is piled with Bibles, prayer books, condolence cards, and a board game called The Amen Game! Opposite, two desks are crammed with paperwork, more Bibles, more prayer books, photos from confirmation classes, an open can of Mountain Dew, and an unopened bag of Fritos. “In the spirit of the separation of church and state, I maintain two phones,” Johnson says. “One for the business of the state, and one for the business of the Lord.” They sit on the edge of a desk, one black, one white.

    Dean Johnson was born in Lanesboro, Minnesota, and grew up on the Johnson family farm, homesteaded in 1858. “You worked hard,” Johnson recalls, “from five a.m. until eight at night.” For grades one through six, he went to a one-room schoolhouse, and then graduated from Lanesboro’s public high school. Along with education and work, religion played a central role in Johnson family life. “I wouldn’t say we wore our faith on our sleeve,” Johnson explains. “We attended church every Sunday, and as children we’d have evening devotional time.” Johnson vividly remembers his mother hanging plaques with religious verses on the walls. “The religion was one of devotion and not of judgment,” he says. “It was one of grace, one of forgiveness.”

    After earning a business degree from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, in 1969, Johnson attended Luther Theological Seminary in St. Paul and graduated with a Master of Divinity degree in 1973. During an internship at a parish in Seattle, he was seriously thinking about military life, particularly due to the Vietnam War. Fortuitously, he met a former Army chaplain who introduced him to the Chaplain Candidate Program. The requirements were straightforward: good grades, a successful physical, a background check, and the endorsement of a denomination (in Johnson’s case, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America). The duties of a chaplain, meanwhile, were complicated: “First and foremost, you ensure the free exercise of religion for all men and women in uniform,” he explains. “As a practical matter, you console members of the military and their families, officiate at memorials and funerals, officiate at weddings, teach courses.”
    Today, Johnson is a brigadier general in charge of all 752 National Guard chaplains. He reports directly to Major General David Hicks, chief of chaplains to the United States Army. “I work on doctrine, deployments, strategies,” Johnson explains. “I also work on reunion issues for returning soldiers, and chemical dependency issues, too.” Above all, Johnson is responsible for ensuring that every National Guard soldier has access to a spiritual advisor of his or her creed. “It’s our role to be accessible to every religious group,” explains Hicks in a phone call from Fort Jackson, South Carolina. “Dean’s a Protestant, not a Muslim, but he would doggedly pursue the Muslim chaplain if the circumstances demanded it.”

    Johnson spent more than one hundred days on military business in 2004; in addition, he spent five months in St. Paul fulfilling his duties as a state senator. Yet he still relishes his part-time role at Calvary Church, where he performs a range of duties, including baptisms, pre-nuptial counseling, weddings, and occasionally serving as preacher and liturgist. “Also, I speak to the Adult Education Forum,” he says.

    The forum is held after services in a large basement meeting room. On one end is a darkened chapel; on the other is a room where elderly congregants receive blood pressure checks. In the middle, about fifty elderly congregants are seated with coffee, bread, and jam. Pastor Johnson steps to the pulpit. Today’s topic is the grieving process, something Johnson has come to know intimately, all too recently. Avonelle, his wife of twenty-one years, died just three weeks before the forum, after a five-year struggle with breast cancer. Johnson stands with his hands crossed on the lectern and talks to the congregants—his congregants of thirty-one years—without notes. He speaks with a steady, riveting cadence. The cooks in the kitchen emerge and stand against door posts; the blood pressure technician emerges and takes a seat at a corner table. Johnson talks of “bringing emotions into sync with thoughts,” and then he opens Janis Amatuzio’s book, Forever Yours, and reads an account of a woman’s near-death ascent to the “dazzling light” of heaven. As he does, tears slip down his otherwise implacable face.

    “Now, the hard part.”

    Avonelle Johnson spent her last days in a hospice across the street from Calvary Lutheran Church. Eight days before she died, her husband was seated beside her bed when she suddenly told him, “It’ll be OK.”

    “‘What’ll be OK?’ I asked,” Johnson recalls. “And Avonelle said to me, ‘You know.’”

    Johnson didn’t, and so Avonelle continued. “I saw the bright lights. I saw my mom and dad.”

    Johnson, looking out at his congregants through tears, admits, “About that time, I start to look around. I’d only been drinking coffee!” He pauses, his posture rigid. “I start to look around and outside the white snow is soft and gentle. I looked outside and everything was OK.” He takes a deep breath and credits Amatuzio’s book with giving him the courage to talk about his conversation with Avonelle. Then his voice chokes, but he says with determination, “One day we will see the face of God and we will be reunited with our loved ones. That is the faith we live with.”

    Bishop Jon Anderson oversees the Southwestern Regional Synod for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, including Calvary Lutheran Church. “I personally have found Dean’s journey—this journey of losing his wife—to be inspiring as I’ve walked it with him,” Anderson said to me. “Lutherans like to talk about callings. Well, I saw a man caring for his wife at a very difficult time and carrying on his other vocations.”

    After the forum, Johnson returns to his office and gathers his belongings. “You’ll never hear a political opinion from me on Sunday morning,” he says. “That’s for Monday morning.” Likewise, it is rare that Johnson will invoke faith at the Capitol; there, as a legislator, his primary passion is transportation funding. When I ask him to describe what he believes is the proper role of religion in public life, he lays out his priorities without a moment’s hesitation: “OK, first, what is in the best interests of the people of Minnesota? Second, what is in the best interest of my district? And thirdly, and most difficult, what do you or I think about it, in regard to policy, policy change, and what are the moral and ethical considerations that surround it?” He smiles and reverts to politics. “If you can justify to your bosses—namely, your constituents—why you think the way you do, and vote the way you do, you’ll be all right.” He has no further thoughts on the subject.

    I ask Johnson if he knows Chaplain Dan Hall, and his answer is a clipped, two-syllable slap: “Oh, yeah.” Though Johnson is not aware of Hall’s prayer meetings, he does know of a weekly Bible study gathering attended by roughly twenty conservative legislators, staff, and Hall in a third-floor State Office Building committee room. I mention to Johnson that I’d attended two of those meetings. In both cases, it included the reading of two New Testament chapters and a discussion that very much took it as given that the Scriptures were literally the word of God. “I went once,” Johnson says. “And the room was filled with judgment and an errant interpretation of the Scriptures.” When I suggest that the people in the room wouldn’t exactly agree with such sentiments, Johnson shrugs. “No one person, no one theologian, no one pastor has the corner on the market to suggest that they are all right and everybody else is a bunch of sinful suckers. I just don’t see theology and religion playing out that way, as evidenced by the 180 denominations I deal with in the military.” Johnson espouses tolerance as a philosophy, but he has a difficult time extending it in this instance. “I try to be accepting and respectful of those folks, but it’s when they cross the line and portray that they’re better than the rest of us, that their little corner of religious practice is better than the rest of us, that’s when I become—” Johnson catches himself. “Well, we’re going to live in a pluralistic society, and we do have freedoms and the Constitution.”

    ***

    The last guest at Chaplain Dan Hall’s Wednesday prayer meeting was Duane Coleman, vice president for Development at the Colin Powell Youth Leadership Center in South Minneapolis. Supported by organizations like Best Buy, ADC, and General Mills, the center is a $12.6 million South Minneapolis project designed to help inner-city youth acquire secondary-school educations. Duane Coleman has been a repeat guest at Dan Hall’s prayer gatherings, and when he arrived on this day, Hall encouraged him to describe the results of the prayers he’d received the week before.

    Coleman said that, before last week, only the Senate version of the new bonding bill included cash for the Colin Powell Youth Leadership Center. “So I came last week and we prayed over this,” Coleman explained. “And somehow, through divine favor, the money ended up in the House bill, too.”
    A late arrival, a woman in the back of the room, raised her hand. “Is your group Christian?”

    Coleman nodded vigorously. “Yes.”

    “So what are we praying for today?”

    “Success in conference committee!” Coleman replied.

    Like many before him, Coleman stood before the group with his eyes closed as the Cannon Falls ladies and Myrna Howes prayed for him. “Lord, my husband is a legislator and I know he received a lot of letters on behalf of this saying it won’t do anything,” Howes intoned. “Well, I hope those letters to turn to dust.”
    With that, the meeting was over. The group quickly dispersed into dimly lit Capitol hallways filled with legislators on their way to lunch. Charlotte Herzog, however, stopped to tell me how much she appreciates Dan Hall’s ministry at the Capitol. “You know,” she said. “Prayer is just so much more effective than all those committee hearings and meetings.”

     

  • Can the Public Library (and Democracy) Survive?

    On the third floor of the temporary library in downtown Minneapolis—a retrofitted office building that once housed the Federal Reserve Bank—a skinny man with a shock of white hair paced hurriedly up and down the aisles carrying a bouquet of roses wrapped in a wad of shredded newspaper. He looked disheveled, a little like Sam Shepard on a bad day or, maybe, Hume Cronyn on a good day. Though I hadn’t set foot inside the main library for years, I recognized the man immediately as one of the usual cast of unusual characters that inhabit the downtown branch.

    What the man was doing with the roses was a source of speculation, as was his reason for walking back and forth, over and over, past the same aisles of books. And then, finally, he darted right and disappeared. The man, it turned out, had been waiting for an open seat along the floor’s west wall, where large windows overlook Cancer Survivors Park, with its pathways and small grove of birch trees. Along the wall, apparently cherished among library regulars, there is a row of tables and chairs where mostly men sit and read newspapers or books about collecting baseball cards or negotiating real estate contracts. Everyone with their passions and projects and secret missions. Two mustachioed friends, maybe brothers, spoke Spanish over a vocabulary book. At another station, a would-be professor with white paint splattered on his jeans worked feverishly on a series of handwritten documents, a dense manifesto. Beside a stack of yellow legal pads, there were a packet of Kleenex, a driver’s license, and a Social Security card aligned perfectly with the edge of the table. A few places down, the man with the roses sat erect and gazed outside, flowers in hand. He watched as working men lowered windows from the roof of the new Cesar Pelli-designed main library across the park, just a block away. He leaned in slightly for a sniff.

    As I looked down the line, at the faces gazing out the window or nosing through books, it struck me that none of these people would have been sitting here, would never have enjoyed such a pleasant view, when the temporary library was still the Federal Reserve Bank. The opportunity to gaze down at birch trees, to watch myriad passersby, would have been reserved for managers and executives. Higher-ups. Bureaucrats. But at the library, things are more democratic.

    In fact, the library is the ultimate democratic institution. A person, with or without a library card, can hang around all day long, assuming her beverage has a lid on it, without buying anything or being subjected to a single ad. There are no greeters at the door to acknowledge and assess incoming patrons. On the contrary, library staffers understand that this is your place as much as it is theirs, and you may go about your business fully ignored, which ought to be every person’s right. Unless, of course, you need assistance in finding a book about kite-building, or the ownership tentacles of General Electric. Then, you will have at your disposal a dozen experts, better versed than Google in locating what you need from an enormous store of books, magazines, newspapers, DVDs, videos, CDs, pictures, government documents, pamphlets, websites, and even microfiche. If you don’t remember microfiche, it’s the silent film of information technology, crooked photographs of documents that existed before electronic databases and must be viewed through a special, old-timey machine. There is no keyword search in a microfiche document, no clicking down. Just a reel that sends the pages scrolling by at various speeds.

    Libraries are the face of government as it existed before we started hating government and, therefore, ourselves. It is munificent in the way public agencies simply aren’t anymore. A librarian isn’t going to arrest you. Nor is she or he going to tell you, thumb driving back like an umpire’s, two years and you’re off welfare! There is no punitive or moralistic aspect to the library, only trust and goodwill. The library says, Here, please take any of our millions of volumes for free. We trust you to make good use of them. We trust you to bring them back. All you need is an ID and maybe a phone bill and you’re in.

    These are places for people who want to know; libraries nationwide have seen a steady increase in patronage since at least 1990. They hold a special and sentimental place in the minds of the citizenry and are widely regarded as institutions where browsing and borrowing lead to meaningful knowledge. According to a 2003 study from the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, ninety-four percent of Americans rate their local public library as “very valuable” or “valuable.” The majority even said they’d pay more taxes to support libraries—an average of forty-nine dollars more per year. Currently, taxpayers spend around twenty-five dollars per person, the approximate cost of one new, hardcover book.

    Despite that kind of passionate support, libraries everywhere are falling on hard times. The American Library Association (co-founded back in 1876 by Melville Dewey, namesake of the venerable Dewey decimal system) reports budget cuts of up to fifty percent in at least forty-one states. That means reduced staff and operating hours, and fewer new books on the shelves. In John Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas, California, the city’s three libraries will soon close their doors altogether. Minnesota, long a state that prioritized education and literacy, has hardly taken an enlightened view. Across the state, libraries are paring back essential services, thanks to reductions in state funds to cities and counties.

    In 2003, Governor Tim Pawlenty dramatically reduced local government aid in response to a projected state budget deficit. This, rather than violate a no-new-taxes promise he made during his gubernatorial campaign. Those cuts directly impacted libraries, in some cases brutally. When local governments are forced to cut services, libraries seem like an easy target; people get a lot more exercised about police and firefighters and schools. It’s a pattern in nearly all fifty states, and throughout Minnesota. St. Paul, to secure future funding, created a library board and a dedicated city property tax. Ramsey County closed its North St. Paul branch and, in 2003, saw a forty percent reduction in its book budget. Hennepin County, until recently, kept six of its libraries closed on Fridays.

    Minneapolis was hit especially hard. Because the city’s library board operates independently of the City Council, its budget is less flexible than, say, that of the Public Works Department. Up until the cuts, more than forty percent of the library system’s $20 million budget came from local government aid. Now, some branches are open only three days a week. Money for new books was reduced dramatically: from $2.6 million in 2000 to $1.9 million in 2004. Minneapolis must now rely more heavily on less predictable private funding sources, along with the determined efforts of Friends of the Library organizations.

    “I think libraries are very invisible,” said Minneapolis Library Director Kit Hadley. “I think they have been taken for granted. There have been people who support libraries, but it’s nobody’s big cause.” Yet, she continued, sounding more ardent than your stereotypical librarian, “Libraries are fundamental institutions in a democracy. We talk about the value and importance of libraries in promoting the information necessary to active self-governance, the notion that this kind of availability and discourse is necessary for democracy to be alive. And all of us on the staff feel very strongly about that.”

    It’s easy to be discouraged by the notion that nobody seems to read anymore. There is a distinctly anti-intellectual atmosphere circulating in a country that has a tradition of skepticism toward high-minded ideas. These days, more than ever, being American means making decisions with our guts, not our heads. It has culminated in a president who brags about not reading newspapers and is referred to in international circles as the “Texas twit.” In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts produced a study that showed a dramatic decline in the reading of literature, with fewer than half of American adults bothering to pick up a novel. NEA Chairman Dana Gioia, sounding a little like Kit Hadley, said, “This report documents a national crisis. Reading develops a capacity for focused attention and imaginative growth that enriches both private and public life. As more Americans lose this capability, our nation becomes less informed, active, and independent minded.”

    No doubt there is a relationship between the decline in reading and the increase in societal fear and jingoism. As a person learns more about the rest of the world, enlightenment and tolerance tend to follow. Higher levels of education mitigate prejudice and increase the support for civil liberties. “These are not qualities that a free, innovative, or productive society can afford to lose,” said Gioia.

  • Wrestling Matt

    It’s a bitterly cold Tuesday evening in mid-January, the kind of subzero, dangerously low windchill night when Minnesotans are apt to crank up the boiler and hunker down in front of “American Idol” and “Law & Order,” so it’s a little surprising to find more than fifty constituents gathered in the living room of a foursquare house in St. Paul’s Merriam Park neighborhood for a pre-legislative session chat with state Sen. Dick Cohen and House Minority Leader Matt Entenza.

    For the first hour or so, Entenza, who, at six-foot-five, towers over his fellow DFLer, defers to Cohen in the give-and-take. There are questions about property taxes—the state’s formula for limiting increases is going to expire in a couple of years and in some older cities, property taxes could rise by as much as twenty to twenty-five percent—health insurance, the budget, education, conceal-and-carry, and gay marriage. But when a young constituent, a former Paul Wellstone student at Carleton College, launches into a Howard Dean-like critique of Democrats for talking too much about what can’t be accomplished rather than what can be achieved, Entenza steps to the fore.

    Speaking with the pinched vowels of his hometown of Worthington, Entenza (the name is Catalonian) is relaxed, collected, and articulate: what you’d expect from an old high school debater. He’s no Wellstone—too low-key for that—but in this season of growing liberal discontent and swelling fury at George W. Bush, his message this evening is a hit with the crowd.

    In media appearances, Entenza tends to come across with a lawyerly air (he is an attorney by training): a man who thinks the truth is so obvious that anyone who disagrees with him is either disingenuous or dim. But in a one-on-one setting like this, he seems more reflective than righteous, picking and choosing his words methodically. In fact, “methodical” is probably the best way to describe him, an approach he honed as a white-collar prosecutor combing through the dry barrens of financial documentation and tax filings to nab scam artists. It’s a praxis he has also applied as a legislative watchdog in unsexy but nevertheless critical areas like charter school accountability. Entenza is one of those rare figures who combines a high level of idealism with the tenacity to master the details of issues that are superficially boring yet have a huge bearing on the commonweal. He is capable of speaking in sound bites, and can put a sarcastic edge to his comments when he’s talking about things he doesn’t like—Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota Taxpayers League—but for the most part, he refrains from rhetorical flourishes.

    Unlike the Republicans and Governor Pawlenty who, Entenza declares, retail nothing but fear and the message that “all that Minnesotans can do is buy a gun and hole up inside a moat,” the DFL stands for the “Minnesota way” of doing things, helping build community and making sure the most vulnerable of the state’s residents “don’t get shortchanged just so the members of the Minnesota Taxpayers League can save money on their taxes.”

    “One of the things that distinguished Minnesota was that there used to be consensus that there would be an opportunity for everyone to climb up,” Entenza says. “Now that consensus has been challenged and they are pulling out the rungs on the ladder. We plan to change that.”

    In the House, the DFL is down by fourteen seats. But Minnesota is known for sudden seismic shifts in the political landscape. Twice in the past fifteen years there have been double-digit swings in House membership following an election. Riding a wave of anti-Bush sentiment, it is conceivable that the DFL could retake the House. If so, Entenza would most likely end up speaker of the House, making him the second most powerful person in state government after Tim Pawlenty, a man with whom he has clashed with growing frequency since Pawlenty was elected governor.

  • Al Franken : The Rakish Interview

    Fresh from the flap over his new book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, our favorite local boy Franken (he’s from St. Louis Park, you know) has never been better—even when he won five Emmys for his work on the original cast and writing staff of Saturday Night Live, or when he won a Grammy for best comedy album in the 1980s, or when he starred as ersatz new-age twelve-stepper Stuart Smalley in the nineties. Perhaps he reestablished himself as a household name by cleverly arranging to be sued by Fox TV, who objected to the subtitle of his book (“A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right”). Fox wisely dropped their suit last month, recognizing that they’d done nothing other than make themselves look ridiculous and guarantee Franken’s place at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. They crowed that Franken could now “return to the obscurity that he is normally accustomed to.” Which only confirmed just how clueless they are. As one wag wrote in a media insider’s prayer, “Dear Lord, please let me some day achieve the level of obscurity currently enjoyed by Al Franken.” Indeed, for three decades, Franken has never been far from primetime TV or the bestseller list. For his latest act, he has taken on the role of a prophet in the wilderness. At a time when the political left is demoralized and exhausted and just about humorless, Franken has become a one-man crusade defending the good name, high ideals, and biting humor of old-fashioned bleeding-heart liberalism. Lies is a delightful deflation of the monopoly conservative pundits have established in broadcast “journalism” in recent years. It also hits close to home, with a deft analysis of what exactly went wrong in the days and weeks after Paul Wellstone died, one year ago.—Editors

    The Rake: For Minnesotans, your chapter on how the right-wing punditocracy spun the Wellstone memorial was chilling.

    Al Franken: Well, that’s what the chapter is really about. The Republicans’ idea was to take this memorial and use it for political purposes. That by sorting through what was there on the videotape and taking a couple moments that were inappropriate and showing them over and over again, they lied about what the rest of the memorial was about.

    You were at the memorial. What did you think?

    At a wake you tell funny stories about people, and laugh and celebrate their life. There was a lot of that, and there was also a lot of weeping and sobbing, and cheering. And it was interesting to see that someone like Joe Klein in the New Yorker wrote a piece about it, and his was a more straight-ahead understanding of what happened, what it was. And it was a reflection of Paul. Paul was an advocate for the dispossessed and the poor, and that’s what this thing was about. It looked like a campaign thing, but it was just really, “Carry forward what Paul believed in.” The only actual campaigning—“We’re gonna win,” that kind of thing—came from Rick Kahn and from Mark Wellstone. And Mark Wellstone lost his dad. Lost his mom, and lost his sister.

    What was disgusting was that the Republicans kept saying this had been planned to fool everyone. “It was advertised as a memorial but it was just a political rally.” And that they had planned it. Limbaugh was doing a whole thing like this had been planned. Like it wasn’t what it was—which was an event that the kids had a huge part in planning, an event that the speakers who spoke eloquently about all the people who were lost in the crash, the closest people to Paul, his surviving sons—who had just gone through this trauma—had basically organized, approved of everything, and it was a spontaneous thing. Twenty thousand people came to this thing because they wanted to express their grief, and their joy about his life, and celebrate their lives, and that’s what it was. And people like Limbaugh literally said that people had been bused in. That the audience had been planted. He literally said this. “This was a planted crowd.” And what happens is, there is a right-wing media, Fox and Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Times and the New York Post, and they report this horrible outrage. And especially talk radio.

    They get people to complain, and that becomes the story, the complaining. And you know, you have someone in Minnesota, Sarah Janecek, who added to the distortion, saying that it was all scripted, and that the proof was that it was on the Jumbotron, what everyone was saying, and that the people were even cued to laugh and applaud. And of course she was referring to the simulcast. She either didn’t understand what a simulcast was, or she didn’t understand what closed-captioning was, which I think is hard to believe, or she was presenting it as something that it wasn’t. Which is sort of in keeping with all the kinds of distortions I heard in the aftermath of the memorial. There’s something very unspiritual about that kind of taking a tragedy and exploiting it. And that’s what they accused the Democrats of doing, but the only way they could accuse the Democrats of doing that was by distorting what happened.

    Let me say something positive. There are definitely people of good conscience on both sides who do try to talk to each other. I have a number of friends who are on what I consider the religious right. One of my best friends might say he’s a Christian conservative or a cultural conservative. He and I probably disagree on almost every social issue. But we’re friends. And I’ve been trying, with not a great deal of success, to get him together with people, for example, from the gay and lesbian community, to get him just to see them more as human beings. And I think he would say that gays and lesbians should have basic rights—not be discriminated against in employment and things like that. But you know, he won’t go that far on things like adoption, and that kind of thing, and that’s because of his deeply felt religious views. I disagree with him. But we can have a civil conversation. And I think he’s a sincere and serious person.

    I think that there are sincere and serious people on all sides. Like Paul Wellstone went together with Senator Pete Domenici on certain things. There are people on both sides of the political spectrum who can get together and seriously come to a consensus on things and not do the kind of things that Limbaugh does.

  • Burning Down the Firehouse

    To look at the tidy little house at 48th and York, you’d think the fire that killed Pearl Gallagher on June 14 didn’t really amount to much. Sheets of plywood cover the windows, but there are no flame-scarred walls, no singed rafters. The flower garden just beyond the front door blooms as if nothing happened. The perky impatiens nestled in a ceramic lamb at the bottom of the steps wait to be watered.

    This fire, like most of the 200-odd blazes the Minneapolis Fire Department puts out each year, was pretty routine. The dispatcher downtown got the call at 8:21 p.m., and by 8:24, Engine 28 was on the scene from the station six blocks away. Engine 25 arrived a minute later. The house was already engulfed in smoke, and Gallagher’s son was there telling firefighters that his mother was in the living room. Two firefighters went inside. A third engine, number 22, pulled up at 8:27, just as the first ladder truck showed up. Five minutes later, a heavy rescue crew arrived.

    Meanwhile, inside the house, firefighters couldn’t find Pearl Gallagher. She wasn’t in the living room at the front of the house as her son had thought. Fighting through thick smoke, they finally found her in the rear of the house, where she had collapsed from smoke inhalation. At 8:38, firefighters pulled the 70-year-old woman from the house and began efforts to revive her. Soon she was hustled off to the hospital.

    Four days later, Pearl Gallagher was dead.

    To a civilian reading through an official incident report, a tragedy like this is both instructive and provocative. Firefighting is romanticized all the time—never more than in the past two years—but it is a highly technical and tactical profession. Every second counts, and every firefighter has a specialized job to do. When you lose time or have the wrong equipment or not enough firefighters, the results can go from bad to worse in a hurry.

    An expert looking dispassionately at the circumstances surrounding Gallagher’s death would say that our fire department did its job. Four firefighters were at the scene in less than five minutes. That is within standards established by the National Fire Protection Association. Fifteen firefighters were there within eight minutes—another NFPA standard.

    It’s certainly true that people sometimes die in fires even when the department is firing on all cylinders. Still, in firehouses around the city, Gallagher’s death added fuel to a smoldering controversy. Budget cuts at the Minneapolis Fire Department have resulted in layoffs and ladder-company closings—including a ladder company at Station 27, less than three miles from Gallagher’s house. Ladder trucks and crews are key to ventilating a burning building—cutting holes in the roof to help clear the air inside. Could Pearl Gallagher have been saved if the ladder crew from Station 27 had answered the alarm, rather than the one at Station Eight at 28th and Blaisdell, a mile and a half farther away? Would it have made a difference if there had been four firefighters on those three engines, instead of three? Nobody will say for sure. But one firefighter told me, “Four minutes less in that atmosphere, would her chances be better? Yes.”

    Many people, some of them in positions of authority, have no idea what a Minneapolis firefighter actually does. They don’t know that firefighters are the city’s first responders, and that they make tens of thousands of runs to “medicals” all over the city, including shut-ins who have no contact with the outside world other than with whoever responds to a 911 call. People don’t know that it usually takes more than one firefighter to lay down “charged” hose, because one firefighter can’t pull hose past more than two 90-degree turns. And people don’t realize that one of the most important things firefighters do is knock holes in things, to provide lifesaving air.

    Contrary to conventional wisdom, fire stations are no bastions of card-playing, truck-washing layabouts, shuffling around the station until some opportunity for heroism beckons. At least once every half-hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, a crew is being dispatched somewhere in the city on an emergency medical call. They are the first to arrive when somebody’s suffering a heart attack or a gunshot wound. Crews also responded to more than 9,000 calls last year to handle various other “hazardous conditions.”

    There are fires, of course. The numbers have declined steadily over the past 30 years, especially as older commercial properties have either burned down or come up to code, with sprinklers and the like. There were 724 structural fires in 1970, compared to 261 last year. Still, the number of people needed to battle even a routine blaze hasn’t really changed.

    The crew of the first engine to arrive on the scene usually sends two people in—one with a charged hose—for search and rescue. With a four-person crew, one starts the pump and another provides support for the “attack line” (the first hose in)—helping to feed hose if it gets stuck rounding more than two corners or if it gets lodged beneath the wheel of a car. As a result of budget cuts, that fourth person now often comes from the crew in the second engine to arrive on the scene, which can cost the first crew valuable time in its search-and-rescue efforts.

    Equally vital is the arrival of the ladder company, which is called upon to ventilate the structure by chopping holes in the roof to let out the smoke. Inside a burning house, firefighters generally cannot see more than a few inches in front them; they navigate by feeling along the walls. Also, without proper ventilation, volatile gases can accumulate and explode.

  • The Real Pat Awada

    It’s late afternoon and State Auditor Pat Awada is negotiating southbound traffic on 35E in her white Jeep Cherokee, one hand on the wheel, the other occupied with a Marlboro Light that she ashes out her open window. She brushes a length of long blonde hair from her deep blue eyes and considers the impact that a fast rise through Republican politics has had on her family. “I haven’t tried to protect my kids from politics. I never tried.” She speaks with an even, calm tone. But her pitch drops noticeably when she describes the reception her children occasionally received during her tenure as mayor of Eagan. “They’ve suffered negative things because some parents don’t like me.”

    Pat Awada is 36 years old. She is the mother of four children. During the last four years she has become the most controversial woman in Minnesota political history (with the possible exception of Coya “Come Home” Knutson). Her epic battles with the Metropolitan Council over the development of low-income high-density housing in the suburbs earned her the everlasting enmity of suburb-hating urban liberals. Her activist approach to the state auditor’s office has positively unnerved Minnesota’s local government establishment. The Star Tribune’s editorial board has yet to find an Awada position with which it agrees, and when they are not busy attacking the policies themselves, they provide an astonishing amount of space to anti-Awada letters to the editor, many of which verge on the personal.

    Shrill. Aggressive. Inflexible. Tough. Awada smiles when presented with the list of adjectives opponents apply to her. “The bitch factor,” she summarizes, matter-of-factly. “I can’t worry about that. A lot of executive women get that. Maybe not from liberal Democrats, but they get it.” A moment later she smiles and softens, but her voice tightens defensively: “I’m certainly not shrill. Am I tough? Yes. Opinionated? Absolutely.” She pauses, thinks it over. “Maybe some women are less likely to be that way than men? I don’t know.”

    Despite its name and status as a state constitutional office, the Minnesota Office of the State Auditor has very little to do with the $26 billion that the state of Minnesota will spend during the 2002-2003 biennium. The job is actually much larger than that: Minnesota’s state auditor monitors the spending of 4,300 units of local government, including school districts, municipalities, counties, port authorities, redevelopment authorities, even police and fire relief associations. That’s $17 billion of oversight this year alone—a significantly larger amount of money than the state spends itself.

    The auditor supervises a staff of 150, including 90 auditors who perform approximately 250 audits each year. Most are housed in a diamond-shaped brick building a block from the Capitol. On the fourth floor, surveying the Capitol itself, is the chief auditor’s spacious corner office. When Pat Awada took her new job in January, she ceded that desk to one of her deputies and chose instead a small, first-floor room near a door and reception area used by rank-and-file staff. “That way I get a better sense of what’s going on,” she explains as she wheels back and forth in her office chair, sitting on one leg and rowing herself around with the other, a file folder tamping down her skirt. It’s a spartan space: There’s a desk, a small table, some bookcases. The few items that might hint at her personal or past professional life are either in unpacked boxes or scattered on the cluttered bookshelves. “If you really want to know about me, learn about my family,” she says with enthusiasm, as if recommending a good read. “They’re crazy.”

    Awada’s mother, Betty Anderson, is a self-described “adventurer” and former parks administrator. On family camping trips, “She was always the first one to jump off the bridge into the river,” Awada remembers. “That was our role model.” Awada’s father, Henry, is a trained forester who retired as a machinist at Northwest Airlines. Both parents enjoyed the outdoors, and it’s a passion they instilled in their children; with a shudder, Awada remembers childhood camping trips in the Boundary Waters—in the middle of the winter. Still, the outdoor adventures seem to have made an impression on the whole family. One of Awada’s three brothers runs the Iditarod, the world’s most famous dog-sled race, in Alaska. Another jumps out of airplanes for fun. Awada reflects that her mother’s adventurous streak instilled in her not only a confidence that she could handle challenges, but that she should seek them out.

  • Too quick on the draw

    May 28, 2003

    I wrote a column last November about a Democrat fund raiser I’d attended with Al Gore. At the time, I noted that I thought we were in for a long period of Republican rule, because the Dems were such inept marketers. Well, the Republicans, at least in the Minnesota Legislature, (who, unlike big shots Coleman and Pawlenty, don’t benefit from the direct intervention of Karl Rove,) have recently proven to be just as inept.

    When the Republicans ran their very effective campaign of 2002, they hammered on their “No New Tax” pledge over and over, until all of us who don’t like paying tax, (and that’s all of us,) put them in control of state government. What they didn’t mention much was their insidious plans to limit abortion rights, put more guns on the streets, and put the true burden of the state’s financial squeeze fully on the Democratic strongholds of northern and urban Minnesota. The word insidious comes from the Latin word meaning ambush, and that’s just what the Republicans pulled off.

    If you don’t believe it, just remember how the “Personal Protection Act” was passed–through a parliamentary maneuver that had to be voted up or down with little debate. And, if you’ve ever heard Senate sponsor Pat Pariseau, Republican of Farmington, you’ll know it was also passed so quickly she didn’t have much time to read it herself.

    The Dems couldn’t have wished for a better poster child for the gun bill than Senator Pariseau. Pat Pariseau is about as articulate as a domestic turkey, and she backs that up by being irresponsible enough to sponsor a bill that she hadn’t read, or by being so bold as to lie about what was in it. (If you listened to her on MPR last week, you could only come to one of those two conclusions. On Katherine Lanpher’s show, she denied that there was a provision which required “personal notification” of potential gun-toters, and denied that the bill prohibited cities from banning guns from public buildings. So, she was either lying when she said she had read the bill, or lying about what’s in it. There is a third possibility, which we shouldn’t discount, is that she’s not bright enough to understand what was in it. Actually, on further consideration, I’m going with the “not very bright” explanation.)

    (Further evidence on the liar vs. dimwit question can be examined with even a perfunctory Google search. Pariseau said last week that she’d reconsider her stance if she could be shown "even two" instances of permit holders who violated their permit responsibilities. We came up with over 5000 in about 10 minutes. The links to some of those stats are below this article.)

    Thank God, Pariseau’s now a state senator, instead of a nurse, like she used to be. How would you like to have her reading a doctor’s instructions and administering medicine to one of your family? You’d probably want to have a Beretta under the hospital pillow to protect yourself from that.

    So, today we have Governor Pawlenty backtracking on the gun bill as fast as he can. He signed the bill in record speed after it was passed, in an attempt to leave no time for public reaction. But he, too, now admits to a less than careful reading. His staff says Pawlenty’s current attempt to rush through an amendment during the special session is only to correct a “drafting error” which requires the personal notice.

    But let’s not forget that Pawlenty is a lawyer, and that he undoubtedly has several of the same working for him, so the “drafting error” explanation doesn’t hold much water.

    What Pawlenty really missed in his perfunctory reading of the bill was the implication of having thousands of "No Guns here" signs and thousands of “personal notices” all over the state reminding people every day that he, Pariseau, and their ilk have wrought another fundamental change in Minnesota.

    And what the Dems didn’t miss is that, finally, the Republicans have miscalculated and shot themselves in the foot with their quick draw gun bill. How ironic is it that business owners and fervent church goers, those natural Republican constituencies, are today putting up what amount to DFL campaign signs all over their shops, restaurants and sanctuaries?

    Now that’s marketing.

  • The Minnesota Model—Unglued

    After more than 50 years at center stage in American politics and government, Minnesota has been relegated to the supporting cast in the nation’s capitol at the beginning of the 21st century. The North Star State’s once-impressive Washington presence has dwindled. A host of nationally prominent figures of both parties who have played leading roles in all three branches of government pass from the scene.

    Consider: Since 1948, Minnesota has given the nation two vice presidents and two Democratic presidential nominees; two other serious presidential hopefuls, including the standard bearer of the Vietnam anti-war movement; two secretaries of Agriculture, a secretary of Commerce and a secretary of Labor; a Chief Justice of the United States and an Associate Justice; a Director of Central Intelligence; a White House economic adviser, an executive editor of the Washington Post who became U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; a host of powerful Congressmen and top federal bureaucrats; and, more recently, the nation’s most visible governor.

    Minnesota’s disproportionate influence on American politics and government is a thing of the past, and not likely to be restored soon. This realization was underscored by several events in recent months: Paul Wellstone’s death, Walter Mondale’s defeat, and the passing of two other legends of Minnesota politics.

    For Mondale, who followed his mentor Hubert Humphrey into the vice presidency in 1976, eight years after Humphrey had left it, his failed attempt to return to the Senate in 2002 was a stinging defeat that marked not only the end of his long and distinguished political career, but the end of an era for the once-dominant Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

    It all began with Humphrey’s electrifying civil rights speech at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, in which he urged his party “to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” Humphrey’s speech helped Harry Truman achieve one of the greatest upsets in American political history in the 1948 presidential election, and launched Humphrey on a path that took him from the Senate to the vice presidency and ultimately to an agonizingly narrow loss to Richard Nixon 20 years later.

    If Humphrey’s defeat and Mondale’s landslide loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential campaign, and again to Coleman last year, were signs of Minnesota’s declining influence in national Democratic politics, other recent events show that it’s not just Minnesota’s Democrats whose national influence has declined in recent years: Witness the retirement in January of iconoclastic Independent Gov. Jesse Ventura; the deaths in February of former Governor and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, and Republican Congressman Clark MacGregor; and the outbreak of public protests against the war in Iraq in March without the open support of a single elected official. (Never mind Wellstone as the sole opponent of the Gulf War in ’91. Anyone remember Eugene McCarthy? In fact, when McCarthy returned in late March to his alma mater, Saint John’s University in Collegeville, most students had no idea who he was.)

    The names of those who held Minnesota’s banner high and helped shape contemporary American history are legion. In addition to Humphrey, Mondale, McCarthy, Freeman, MacGregor, and Wellstone, they include Congressman and Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland; House Public Works Committee Chairman John Blatnik, Congressman and Gov. Albert Quie; House Ways and Means Committee member William Frenzel, and Congressman and Minneapolis Mayor Donald Fraser; U.S. Chief Justice Warren Burger and Associate Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the landmark 1973 abortion decision that still roils the political waters; White House economic adviser Walter Heller; CIA Director William Colby; Assistant Secretary of State and Carnegie Endowment President Thomas Hughes; State Department Inspector General Howard Haugerud; U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (and former executive editor of the Washington Post) Russell Wiggins. Each of these political giants is either dead, or fully retired from public service.

    No other state, except perhaps California, Texas, and Massachusetts, had a higher profile during this period. Can Minnesota regain its national prominence? Not likely. I offer that judgment from the perspective of a native son who has reported on all these Minnesotans, and worked for one of them—Vice President Mondale—during 38 years in Washington. In October 1965, the St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press assigned me to its Washington bureau. Since then, I have served as a Washington correspondent for the St. Paul and Duluth newspapers, press secretary for Vice President Mondale, adviser to the founder of Control Data Corporation, William C. Norris, and as founding editor of The Hill, a newspaper that has covered Congress since 1994.

    Although it is tempting to focus on the contributions of Minnesota’s name-brand DFL power brokers, the state has had its fair share of influential Republicans and Independents. In fact, getting past party affiliations helps explain what, exactly, made Minnesota the player it was for half a century.

    Although each of our great public servants was vastly different from the others in political outlook and personal style, all embodied the essential elements of what has been called “the Minnesota model,” a kind of political franchise that has played well on the national stage and has served to reinforce the positive image of Minnesota’s political system in the minds of many Americans dating back to at least 1947.

    That’s the year author and historian John Gunther, in his classic book Inside USA, devoted an entire chapter to former Governor Harold Stassen and described the origins of Minnesota’s social, political, and economic system. Stassen, a moderate Republican who was only 31 when elected in 1938, wasn’t destined for the White House as Gunther anticipated (in a chapter entitled “Stassen—Young Man Going Somewhere”). Instead, “the boy governor” resigned in 1943 to join the Navy, then served on the U.S. delegation to the 1945 San Francisco conference that created the United Nations.

    Hoping to parlay that prestigious appointment into even greater things, Stassen undertook a series of futile campaigns for the presidency in 1948 and 1952—and well into the 1980s—that made his name synonymous with unbridled and unrealistic political ambition. Stassen turned out to be too liberal for the party that would soon be dominated by Southern and Western conservatives. Nevertheless, the reform-minded politician left a legacy of good government and corruption-free politics with which Minnesota is still widely identified. In 1947, Gunther knew something was going on here. “Minnesota is a state spectacularly varied, proud, handsome and progressive,” he wrote. “It is a state pulled toward East and West both, and one always eager to turn the world upside down.”

  • Forgiving Rick Kahn

    Fritz Mondale said Wednesday that the effect of the tragedy on those closest to Wellstone didn’t justify the tone of his memorial service, “But we’ve all made mistakes. Can’t we find it in our hearts to forgive?”

    I certainly hope so—for a couple of reasons. First, how do we blame Rick Kahn for an electorate that gives Norm Coleman only 30 percent of the vote when he’s running against Jesse Ventura but 50 percent when running against Fritz Mondale? And second, if the Democrats are in a situation where one speech by one person that nobody had ever heard of can kill their election chances, their problems undoubtedly run deeper.

    So, whom can we blame? I think Ventura gets a heaping share for making such a big deal out of Kahn’s speech that he walked out of the memorial, appointed Barkley to the senate seat, and ordered the flags which had been lowered for Wellstone back to the top of the staff. (Of course, if you believe the disingenuous Pioneer Press editorialist D. J. Tice, we should praise Governor Dimwit’s swift assessment of Kahn’s speech, for if not for Jesse, response to the memorial faux pas “would have hardened along partisan lines, producing mostly confusion and still more bitterness.” Yup, thank God for Jesse helping to mitigate the bitterness so voters could get back to considering the real issues.)

    Some blame should accrue to Jim Ramstad, the Republican singled out by Kahn that night, who immediately said, "People get carried away sometimes with emotions. We all get carried away sometimes with emotions. Just let it be." The stark contrast between the class Ramstad and the crass Ventura not only benefited the Republicans, but helped sink Ventura’s party mate Tim Penny.

    Don’t forget Norm Coleman, who was facing certain drowning under a tidal wave of Wellstone sympathy, and yet never complained, nor showed anything less than regret at the loss of an honorable opponent, even when he knew he would now have to go up against the second most popular politician in Minnesota history.

    President Bush deserves particular blame, too. The son of the man who once called Paul Wellstone a “chicken shit” praised Wellstone’s principles, even though he agrees with not a one.

    Yeah, I’m blaming the Republicans for their victory, in Minnesota and in every other state where they kicked Demo butt. They are better actors, better marketers and much better politicians. If you don’t believe that, ask yourself if you do believe, had the shoe been on the other foot, that the Republicans would have let the family send some overwrought accountant without a script to deliver Jesse Helms’ eulogy.

    It reminds me of the line in The Untouchables when Sean Connery accuses his opponent of “bringing a knife to a gun fight.” Well, the Democrats brought a pea shooter. They have the best orator that’s been in the White House in my lifetime in the audience and they let the admitted drudge Tom Harkin rattle off the same old Democrat doxology? We should be glad these guys lost, because if you can screw up a funeral that bad, imagine what they’d do to the country.

    Which, come to think of it, is what you have to do–imagine what the Dems would do, because I’ll be damned if I can remember if they told me in the past several months. One thing you can say about the Republicans is they’ll sure tell you what they are going to do. In case you have forgotten, it’s destroy Iraq, give you a prescription drug plan, fix social security, make sure your neighbor is not Al Qaeda, police up the corporate villains, fix the schools, and get tough on crime while keeping it easy for a 17-year-old undocumented alien to get a sniper rifle. Best of all, you won’t have to pay for any of this because they are not going to raise taxes. What makes it even cooler is that each one of these messages fits neatly into a 30 second voice over of pictures of a good looking young man in an open collar shirt shaking hands and kissing babies.

    That is how politics is done. And as long as the Democrats believe that a man like Fritz Mondale, whose thoughts on complex issues don’t fit neatly between the sports and weather on the 10 p.m. news, can win against this kind of expertise and execution, I don’t see much hope.

    As for me, tonight I’m going to start acting like a Republican. I’m going out for a very expensive dinner, and I’m going to charge it to my kids.

  • Wellstone the Teacher

    My son Matt, who is a freshman at Carleton College, called me early last Friday afternoon to tell me that he’d just heard that Paul Wellstone had been killed in a plane crash. He’d got the news right after getting out of his freshman political science class, the same class I’d taken at Carleton 32 years ago from Paul Wellstone.

    By then I’d been at Carleton for two terms and had encountered, I thought, all the typical types of college teacher. The calculus teacher had a beard and wore a peace medallion over his turtleneck and smoked dope with students. The Latin teacher was 70 years old and chain smoked Pall Malls while quizzing you on Virgil’s grammar. The English teacher lost his collection of tweed jackets and Hemingway when his house went up in smoke.

    Wellstone breathed fire.

    He was the first teacher who reminded me of me—short stature, long hair, loud voice. Like me, he wore t-shirts and jeans to class and seemed to pay scant attention to the reading list he’d assigned, except that he had an amazing command of facts that he used to support his lectures, which actually were more like speeches. His brilliance was manifest. He was a first year teacher, so he couldn’t have memorized his lectures, but he spoke without notes for an hour. He wasn’t constrained by a podium, but he was predictable. Every lecture he’d start with his fingers jammed into his jeans with the thumbs hooked over the edge of the pocket, as if he were trying to restrain himself from what he must have known was coming–the inevitable rising volume, quickening cadence, and karate chopping of knowledge into our small freshman brains.


    Sometimes you’d come out of class feeling as if you’d been assaulted by an intellect and energy so far superior to yours that you’d never measure up. But more often, you felt smarter for having spent an hour with him. That was his power, and he used it to great effect on people who had yet to fully develop their own critical abilities.

    Wellstone didn’t fit the Carleton mode. Then, Carleton was the ivory tower, and the presumption was that most of what you’d ever have to know could be learned within the confines of campus. Students were not permitted to have cars. All students lived in the dorms. And the work load was so ferocious and academic standards so high that every moment spent other than in class or the library was regarded as lost. Carleton’s stature among the best liberal arts colleges seemed a justification of its insular attitudes. Whenever we had a large snowfall, I imagined the college news bureau coming up with a press release headline: “Highway 19 Closed, World Cut Off.”

    Wellstone wasn’t of such scholarly demeanor. In 1974, he was given a negative evaluation by his department and was on the verge of being fired. The then president openly wanted to be rid of him, as did most of his colleagues. (To their credit, many Carleton profs admitted this even after last Friday.) But students and recent alumni, who’d obviously picked up something about the power of politics in his classes, organized in his defense, as did some sympathetic colleagues. The college eventually agreed to an evaluation of his work by scholars not connected with Carleton. This evaluation was overwhelmingly positive, and the decision was reversed. He was actually granted tenure a year ahead of the normal cycle.

    Carleton was an early power base for him. A liberal arts college in a liberal state is a Petri dish for growing lefties, and he knew it. From Carleton, he started organizing in Rice County, moved from there to the western Minnesota power line controversy, to the nomination for state auditor and to the Senate. His cadre was young, very smart, and mesmerized by his power to harangue. Wellstone never taught, by example anyway, that it was sometimes more effective to shut up. (Rick Kahn, a former student who spoke at his memorial service, unfortunately didn’t pick up that lesson from anyone else either.)

    Wellstone’s attractiveness lay not just in his oratorical skills, though, but in his liberal message itself, repeated endlessly. His true believers never flagged.

    But to others, the diatribe became tiresome, and we lost interest. It’s hard to tell whether it was from pure repetition or because of the seeming change in Wellstone from outsider to insider, best typified by the change in his advertising strategy from the distinctive wit and message of 1990 to the same monotonous doggerel broadcast by every other Candidate X ad infinitum. As his erstwhile ad man said last month in The Rake, “He drank the Kool-Aid.” Hell, if you believe what you hear from those who spend too much time on counterpunch.com, our interest waned because Wellstone wasn’t radical enough.

    I went to a Democratic fundraiser with Al Gore last month. The main topic of the evening was why Democrats were losing ground every election. Gore, one would think, should have more insight into that question than any man alive. A brilliant man with the right ideas, who so muddled his message during the campaign that he couldn’t even carry his own state, somehow didn’t offer me any answers. Congressional candidate Janet Robert made it all clear to me though. She chimed in that she was in such a close race she had to support Bush’s Iraq policy so she could get elected.

    Since I also have never learned the lesson of shutting up, I asked “Why then should Democrats vote for you if you’re just going to act like a Republican? Any first year marketing student could tell you that you have to draw a clear distinction between your product and that of your competitor. Do you think they sell Aquafresh toothpaste by telling you it’s just like Colgate, only a little bit tastier?” There was a brief lull in the din, which in a room full of Democrats, is about all you can hope for.

    Wellstone wasn’t there that night, but he gave us his answer the next week by voting against granting Bush dictatorial war powers. He was the only candidate in a close race to do so. He certainly didn’t do it for marketing reasons, because, if anything should be clear to us, it’s that Wellstone knew nothing about marketing. What he did know was what was right. Oddly, that was his market advantage, and his polls immediately trended up. I wonder if he even knew why.

    That’s the last lesson the professor got through to me–that despite the prevailing political wisdom, the people will ultimately know the genuine man not by what he says, no matter how loud and often he says it, but by what he does. The rest is silence.

    Photo courtesy of Carleton College