I moved to Minnesota 25 years ago.<\/p>\n
I moved here because my home state, North Dakota, was mired in an epic farm depression – and even in the best of times, the job market for a guy with a BA in English and a drive to be a writer was dodgy.<\/p>\n
I moved to find opportunity.\u00a0 I worked my ass off, and eventually found it.<\/p>\n
But I look at the Minnesota that a forty-year near-monopoly stranglehold of DFL control has had left behind – but for a few hopeful years in the past decade – and wonder “would I move here if I were getting out of college today?”<\/p>\n
And “will my kids have any reason to stay here?”<\/p>\n
Eight years ago, I might have said “absolutely’!” without reservation.\u00a0 Sane adults were taking over.\u00a0 Even Saint Paul had been run for quite some time by guys – Norm Coleman and Randy Kelly – who could focus on what mattered, at least by Saint Paul DFL standards.<\/p>\n
But Minnesota’s sliding backwards.\u00a0 Businesses are leaving.\u00a0 And Mark Dayton’s entire goal is to make sure goverment wants for absolutely nothing.<\/p>\n
It’s a recipe for decay, decline, and failure.\u00a0 Ask the Greeks.\u00a0 Ask California and New York.<\/p>\n
It reminds me of the years not long before I moved to Minnesota.\u00a0 The Carter years – the years of malaise and hopelessness.<\/p>\n
What would America have given, in retrospect, to have avoided the years of malaise? Of hopelessness?\u00a0 Of that feeling that we were rolling downhill like the proverbial snowball headed for hell?<\/p>\n
We found our redemption, of course – in Reagan, in a way, but in a larger sense in rediscovering part of our nation’s soul.<\/p>\n
So what will Minnesota choose?\u00a0 Lining up like dutiful oxen to drag the wagon of government forward, groaning and creaking as the driver cracks the whip ever louder as the going gets tougher?<\/p>\n
Or will it choose to again become the place that drew my great-grandparents from the old country, over 100 years ago – a place of opportunity, of untapped potential?\u00a0 The place that spawned my paternal grandparents, where gumption and will and hard, hard work could lead one to a better place (even if that place was North Dakota, for a few generations?)\u00a0 The place that has the potential to be for our kids what it was for me?<\/p>\n
Mark Dayton is the candidate of stagnation.\u00a0 Of decay and decline.\u00a0 He is the driver on that oxcart.\u00a0 He wants you to be good, compliant, oxen – happy to drag your days away for a Better Minnesota.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow is your chance to choose better.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
To choose growth over decay.<\/p>\n
To choose the American, and Minnesotan, spirit over the soulless miasma of the bureaucracy.<\/p>\n
To choose the spark of personal initiative, creativity and soul over the deadening hand of Big Mother Government.<\/p>\n
To choose freedom, prosperity and happiness over lumpen gray satiation.<\/p>\n
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Vote Emmer.<\/p>\n
Previous Reasons Emmer Should Be Governor<\/strong><\/p>\n #2: Moving Minnesota Forward<\/a><\/p>\n #3: You And I<\/a><\/p>\n