In my daydream, Mike Hatch and Dean Johnson stood alongside Tim Penny and Peter Hutchinson (and in some versions, the Green Party’s Ken Pentel). They were surrounded by a bevy of Minnesota’s progressive glitterati.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Interesting phrase, “progressive glitterati”. We will have to come back to that.<\/p>\n
Amid gentle joshes and handshakes all around, they announced the merger of their parties, with a new platform blending the best of the old, and a new name. (Did I hear somebody suggest the Minnesota Democratic Party?) The ghost of Hubert Humphrey, the last wizard to pull off a major party merger in Minnesota, hovered about, beaming.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
If I were my younger, cruder self, the response would write itself. Fortunately, I’m older, wiser, and more rhetorically sober. Just so you know.<\/p>\n
But onward and upward. Sturdevant isn’t merely dreaming. She wants to get those damn smart-alecky Ventura<\/strike> Independence Party heretics to rejoin the mother party!<\/p>\nThe DFL candidate for governor missed the brass ring by fewer than 22,000 votes, out of more than 2 million cast. Hutchinson got about 141,000 votes. Had he not been in the race, some of those 141,000 would have gone to GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Some might have stayed home. But it’s hard not to believe that enough of them would have gone to Hatch to put him in the governor’s office.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And apostasy, to a committed DFL flak (or “progressive glitterata”) like Sturdevant, has consequences:<\/p>\n
I can also scratch Hutchinson and Penny, the previous bearer of the IP’s gubernatorial standard. Not even Tuesday’s drubbing has them interested in merging with anybody. They think the Independence Party has only just begun to grow.<\/p>\n
Hutchinson talked Tuesday night like somebody starting a long campaign, not ending one with 6.4 percent of the vote. “Minnesotans did not send us here just to start this race. They sent us here to finish it,” he said. “As a party, as a people, it is our duty to do that.”<\/p>\n
It’s fair to question whether he’s thinking straight about who, in a democracy, gets to do the political finishing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
“Who, in a democracy, <\/em>gets to do the political finishing”?<\/p>\nOne wonders who Sturdevant actually does <\/em>think “gets” to do the “political finishing”. “Progressive glitterati”, or voters and people who want to run for office based on their own ideas, ideals and passions.<\/p>\nIt’s a valid question, given that Sturdevant’s concern for “democracy” seems to be entirely filtered through the institution of the DFL:<\/p>\n
He’s right about this much: They’ll have money. Hutchinson squeaked past the 5 percent bar in state law that bestows major-party status and access to public funds in the next campaign.But will the IP have a distinct and salable reason to exist in 2008 or 2010? Voters evidently had trouble finding one this time. Hutchinson had his own slant on the issues, but it was a slant in the DFL’s direction.<\/p>\n
Penny says the Independence Party’s raison d’\u00eatre is twofold: 1) It stands for honest budgeting, as opposed to DFLers who promise too much, then underfund the big things, and Republicans who keep trying to have something for nothing. 2) It wants government disconnected from special interests.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In my daydream, the DFL took up those causes to the IP’s satisfaction. Actually, House Speaker-designate Margaret Anderson Kelliher is moving that way. Her commitment to do the big things right on a fiscally prudent budget signals an end to DFL overpromising.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Um, no, it “signals” the DFL is trying to get people to shut up about its many shortcomings as a governing party, and get the foot soldiers – like Sturdevant – in line.<\/p>\n
She already has government reform on her agenda. Bringing the state’s campaign finance system into the Internet era, with disclosure rules that preclude anonymous end-of-campaign ad bombs, belongs on her list.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Further restrictiosn on free (if arguably objectionable) speech! Such a “reform!”<\/p>\n
But one begins to wonder whether there can be any satisfying a crowd that views its 6.4 percent of the vote as a mandate to press on. It increasingly looks as if they would rather stand apart and hope that the lightning of 1998 will strike again than participate in governing this state now.<\/p>\n
I’m awake now. I don’t see a reunion of Minnesota progressives on the horizon. And without one, there likely won’t be an inauguration of a progressive governor to cover, either.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So there you have it, all you V<\/strike> IPers; stop your petty objections about financial responsibility!\u00a0 Why, the Speaker-Designate has made a non-binding pre-campaign promise to maybe uphold one of your (most trivlal-yet-authoritarian) campaign ideas!<\/p>\n
With brains like this measuring the drapes in their new offices, who needs <\/em>reform?
\n [1] The assumption is purely for satiric purposes. While my sister loved disco music, I don’t know <\/em>that she ever asked my rhetorical question. As opposed to Lori Sturdevant, whose pre-teeny mooniness is on public display in the linked column.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back in the late seventies\/early eighties, my little sister – like a lot of early-teens – pined for the disco stars of the era. And I think that, in her thirteen-year-old way, she might at one point have asked “how cool would it be if Andy Gibb joined the Bee Gees?” [1] In yesterday’s Strib […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-minnesota-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}