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November 08, 2002

Open Letter to Keillor

Garrison Keillor illustrates in this Salon piece why the DFL not only got clobbered last Tuesday, but probably hasn't learned its lesson.

Contempt? He's got it!

To choose Coleman over Walter Mondale is one of those dumb low-rent mistakes, like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich.
That's right - going to a steakhouse and ordering tuna, to escape a friggin' Lutheran church basement lutefisk social. Elsewhere:
St. Paul is a small town and anybody who hangs around the St. Paul Grill knows about Norm's habits. Everyone knows that his family situation is, shall we say, very interesting, but nobody bothered to ask about it, least of all the religious people in the Republican Party.
I don't know much about Keillor's family situation, but I hear from many former radio colleagues (and people who also hang around the St. Paul Grill) that he's an, er, "interesting" employer. Anyway, nobody who supported Bill Clinton had best throw stones about that issue.

Here's the worst of many parts of this article:

But I don't envy someone who's sold his soul. He's condemned to a life of small arrangements. There will be no passion, no joy, no heroism, for him. He is a hollow man. The next six years are not going to be kind to Norm.
Ah, Garrison Keillor, dowser of the human soul.

Baby-boomers, at least those who spend their declining years pining for Camelot, caterwaul endlessly about wanting to find "joy" and "heroism" in politics. And yet, how could one look further than Norm Coleman, the most joyfully political man in Minnesota politics today? The man who was...well, not heroic, but certainly above-and-beyond the call in the way he revitalized St. Paul. Not that that wasn't without problems - we're on the hook for the Excel Energy Center, and I really detest subsidizing pro sports. But he did a fabulous job - not that fellow St. Paulite Keillor would admit it.

Beyond that, though - we don't need joy or heroism in the Senate - because that means people are having too much fun doing that job, or that there are crises that must be solved. Do the job. Keep things out of trouble. Then go home. That's all I ask.

And that's why we benighted slobs elected the apparently soulless, joyless bag of skin, Norm Coleman, over the joy-sotted Walter Mondale.

Here's the letter I sent to MPR, which is in the midst of pledge week:


I had planned on pledging money to MPR this year.

After reading Garrison Keillor's smug, unctuous piece in Salon, I changed my mind.

Voting for Coleman was "a low-rent" choice? Coleman was a tuna sandwich to Mondale's "great steak"?

Sorry, Garry. I, and just under half of the rest of your fellow Minnesotans, prefer tuna to warmed-over lutefisk.

And I'll be spending my charity dollar someplace that doesn't actively condescend to me.

They rejected it, of course. Surprise.

Posted by Mitch at November 8, 2002 10:23 AM
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