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Lori Sturdevant’s column Sunday was really nothing but an ad for Walter Mondale’s new book:

Former Vice President Walter Mondale speaks both for and to people of that mindset in his new autobiography, “The Good Fight,” published by Scribner and due in bookstores Tuesday. (It was written in collaboration with an Editorial Board alumnus, Star Tribune health team editor David Hage.)

“I came of age in an optimistic America, a society that believed in opportunity and the value of common endeavor. Today, two generations have grown up in a flinty and anxious America,” Mondale wrote, citing the ills of increasing poverty, unaffordable health care, ineffective schools and widening inequality. “I wonder what happened to that other America, a place of empathy and hope.”

In other words, the book is what Sturdevant’s entire history of print work has been; an uncritical hagiography of an era of big government that we can’t afford anymore, wrapped up in a collective slander (“flinty”?  “Anxious?”  Really?) of those who want something more rational.

Gary Gross puts it well:

The day of reckoning for these programs has finally arrived. Unfortunately, the designers of the bills didn’t mix cost containment with their compassion. Unfortunately, we elected a radical who thinks he can spend unprecedented and unsustainable amounts of money without consequence.

Now the thoughtful people of the TEA Party are telling government what they already know: that you can’t keep putting expensive item after expensive item on the credit card without it catching up with you. You don’t have to be the brightest bulb in the chandelier to figure that out.

The other thing that happened is that, in Minnesota at least, the DFL said yes to their special interest allies so often that they came to think of our wallets as their ATM. It’s difficult for people to be magnanimous when they’re either unemployed, underemployed or worried if they’ll have a job next week.

The Mondale legacy is a society that, for whatever reason, believed that a happy government made for a happy society.

We can do better.

Sturdevant’s job is to make sure we don’t.

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