Trapped In A World That She Never Made
By Mitch Berg
The most pathetic things in the world:
- Listening to old guys from Georgia who swear the “south’s gonna rise again”.
- Martin Short
- Minnesota DFLers who pine for the good old days when Republicans and Democrats worked together…by acting like Democrats.
Of course I’m talking about Lori Sturdevant, who wrote Sunday to pine for the mythical past:
Jim Pederson, upon whose good head and heart various DFL officeholders and the Minnesota Historical Society have relied for decades, added last week to my store of state political lore. Did I know, he asked, that nearly every DFL (then “liberal”) legislator who voted for the huge 1971 tax increase won reelection in 1972?
It was news to me, I said — thanking him for courteously (and correctly!) assuming that I am too young to have covered the 1972 election, rather than too addled to recall the results.
The crack researchers at the Legislative Reference Library confirmed it: In October 1971, at the end of a marathon special session, 75 liberals (46 in the House, 29 in the Senate) voted for the biggest income and sales tax hike in state history, in exchange for lower property taxes and more money for schools.
One might wonder if Sturdevant knows if anything else…anything else at all – might have possibly changed since then?
We’ll get back to that.
Every legislative seat was on the ballot the next year. The Legislature did not meet in 1972, so there was no chance to fog voters’ memories with new business. In the 1972 election, Republican President Richard Nixon was romping to easy victory — even in blue Minnesota. Those taxapalooza DFLers were politically exposed and vulnerable.
Yet all but four of those who sought reelection won.
The parallel to current events is unavoidable. Property taxes are rising, schools are hurting, and the Legislature’s DFLers (most of them, anyway) are responding with proposals to raise the income tax.
History might be urging today’s DFLers to press on. If there was no penalty at the polls for voting for the Big One, how much safer is it now to embrace tax increases that are much smaller as a percentage of the state budget? Further, no Republican presidential candidate for ’08 looks nearly as formidable as Nixon was in ’72.
Nixon, formidable? The only thing that made Nixon “formidable” was the Democrat meltdown – having the “peace at any cost” wing of the party anoint McGovern as the nominee.
No parallel there, is there?
But I’d counsel DFLers against getting too giddy over this history lesson. There are at least two fairly crucial differences between then and now. One: Tim Pawlenty is no Wendell Anderson.
The Republican hockey-playing governor of 2007 never behaved less like the DFL hockey-playing governor of 1971 than he did last week. Pawlenty mounted a radio offensive against the raising any and all state taxes. In the spot, a narrator accuses DFL legislators of going on a “trip to the all-you-can-eat buffet.” The governor’s voice pleads: “Please, call your legislators and tell them, you’re taxed enough.”
And that’s the part that Sturdevant got really wrong.
Because has soft as Pawlenty has always been on bedrock conservative issues – he’s always been a pragmatist, and I don’t think he’d take that as an insult! – something did happen between 1971 and 2007 that makes Sturdevant’s vision ever more of a hallucination.
It was 1980.
Oh, the Reagan Revolution initially bypassed Minnesota; it took until 2002 for genuine conservatism to play more than a spoiler role in this state. But by 2002, the Taxpayers League and Brian Sullivan were able to make Tim Pawlenty – the ur-pragmatist – see that edging to the right was the way to go.
The dynamics have changed since 1980; the primary motivator for most people isn’t so much “getting government off your back” as it was when Reagan ran for office, as it is “security first”; people want their nation, their streets, their jobs and their homes to be secure, which is supposed to be government’s job.
People are – or should be, to quote Little Steven, “sick and tired of paying for s**t [they] never get”. Ergo:
That’s so, only if you can tolerate what Pawlenty’s own budget shows is coming in 2010-11: a decrease in state funding for schools.
It’d be interesting to see if the average Minnesotan really believes giving the schools more money is ever going to do any good.
Which leads to Difference Two: Larry Pogemiller, the new DFL Senate Majority Leader, is no Stan Holmquist.
Holmquist, the last Republican (then “conservative”) to lead a Senate majority, was Anderson’s quiet ally in forging what became known as the Minnesota Miracle. Holmquist spent summer and fall of 1971 looking for ways to satisfy both his conservative caucus and the liberal governor. Their political alliance that year became a personal friendship that lasted until Holmquist’s death in 2003.
Sturdevant is dreaming. Republicans were not especially conservative, even nationwide, in 1971, and even less so in Minnesota. Beaten down by decades of Democrat control going back to the thirties, the mainstream of the GOP – in Minnesota more than most places – was content to go along and get along with the Dems.
Which may sound perfectly fine to people, like Sturdevant, who pine for the days when the whole state got in lockstep behind, essentially, their high-tax, high-“service” vision for this state. But the GOP in those days – especially in Minnesota – didn’t see being an alternative to that vision as a part of its mission. And it’s disingenuous of Sturdevant and the rest of the dozey mopes pining for the glory days of the “Minnesota Miracle” to pretend otherwise.
By contrast, it does not appear that Pawlenty and Pogey have become pals, quiet or otherwise. Pogemiller’s Senate has seemed intent on pulling the plug on two of Pawlenty’s favorite Term One accomplishments, for reasons that look like political spite. The rural business tax breaks known as JOBZ and the teacher performance pay plan called Q-Comp are at risk of being frozen at DFL hands.
If that’s how Pogemiller means to soften up Pawlenty for a nice friendly season of negotiation, I’d hate to see how he’d provoke a fight.
Sturdevant misses the irony of it all.
The “Minnesota Miracle” – or at least the legendary version of it, the one that the likes of Sturdevant and Nick Coleman pine for without, apparently, understanding it at all – depended on having a quiet, acquiescent second party in this state, one too afflicted by Stockholm Syndrome to resist.
We don’t have that in Minnesota anymore. And while that means big government has to work harder to tax us all back to the stone age, it is a good thing for genuine representative democracy.
One wonders what Sturdevant values more.
April 9th, 2007 at 10:56 am
Lori “why can’t the Republicans just go along with the Democrats like they used to” Sturdevant.
Years ago, at the Republican convention during one of the many ballots between Sullivan and Pawlenty, things were heating up on the floor, and during a break I bumped into Lori and Eric Eskola talking. I went up to them and said, “boy, isn’t this exciting! You are in the heart of the beast! Look at all these Republicans!”
Eric put his head down and acted like he was jotting something in his notebook and Lori gave me a big frown. I wish I could have gotten a picture of it.