From Planet Lori

Lori Sturdevant complaints that “It’s hard to get a fix on today’s politics”:

Duane Benson — former NFL player, former state Senate GOP leader, former CEO of the Minnesota Business Partnership, now head of the Minnesota Early Learning Foundation (MELF) — was describing the “funny thing” he was experiencing this year as a lobbyist for smarter state spending on early childhood education.

He’d come to the Capitol with a passel of proven ideas that spring from traditional Republican philosophy. They had substantial business backing.

Among them: Don’t start a new government program. Make use of existing private-sector providers. Engage them in a purely voluntary rating system. Take advantage of market forces. Empower poor parents to be informed consumers. Trust them to make preschool choices, in the same way affluent parents routinely do.

So far, so good.

“I thought the Republicans would love this stuff,” Benson told me. “Instead, the Democrats are the ones who love it. A lot of Republicans don’t want anything to do with it.” In the new GOP view, government ought to have no role in the prekindergarten education of children, he explained.

I’ll make a not-very-long story short; Benson was plugging a tax-responsible, revenue-neutral way to push choice in early childhood education.  Better than a DFL proposal would have been – and either (from Sturdevant) very much against the current mood, a temporal temper tantrum that’s making children’s education its victims, or (for conservatives) pumping money into something that starts the process of weeding kids into educational haves and have nots – people who are adapted to the the academic chase and those who don’t – bright and early, and at best does no good.

If you read Sturdevant – or her many, many critics on the right – you know where this goes.  It’s a template, really:

1. Republican from the Carlson era and of the pre-1998 school of GOP state politics bemoans a change – inevitably in the GOP.
2. Sturdevant broadens it into a generalized conclusion on how our “state conversation” is being sullied by uppity conservatives.
3. By the way – did you know the DFL is really the center?

Let’s carry on here:

It’s often said that Minnesota’s two big political parties have grown more polarized because they have moved in opposite directions from an ill-defined midpoint.

Indeed, it is.

Not least by Sturdevant herself.

Benson got me thinking that the notion needs rethinking. A case can be made that the ideological shift of both big parties has been to the right, and that a lot of DFL ideas now occupy what not long ago was considered Republican territory.

DFLers seldom frame their policy arguments in social-justice terms. They talk about “jobs, jobs, jobs” and seem increasingly keen on employing market forces to do public work. Witness their friendly response to MELF’s early ed quality rating system and its plan to convert early childhood subsidies into (dare I say) a voucher program.

The lefty lines of an earlier era are heard no more. I can’t recall when I heard a DFL politician openly question the merit of capitalism.

Then Phyllis Kahn must not have happened by the press room lately.

On the one hand – ta daaa.  The state is getting more conservative, and even the DFL has to adapt.

On the other hand – Sturdevant is picking and choosing.  You can’t listen to the likes of the reps of the various unions and hear anything you didn’t in the 1970’s.  And the urban metrocrat left, while displaying the odd bit of pragmatic adaptation, is still your grandparents’ DFL (and, with the likes of Linda Berglin and Phyllis Kahn, is still sending your grandparents’ legislators to St. Paul).

If there’s a change, it’s this; the DFL is twigging to the fact that Minnesota is moving to the right under their feet.