Will DFLers be true to roots?
By Wyl Schuth / Community columnist

I often think growing up in Minnesota made me politically hyperaware. Despite a proud and often nationally influential political tradition, Minnesota is a state not often given its due in the contemporary scene, lost in the shuffle of presidential primaries between early contest states like Iowa and New Hampshire and delegate-rich states like New York and California.

With the exception of a certain irascible and endlessly intriguing former governing “Body” and a prominent U.S. senator who met a tragic end over half a decade ago, Minnesota hasn’t attracted much attention in the national political arena in recent years.
I do not identify as a Democrat, nor do I often vote for them. Nonetheless, growing up in Minnesota also made me hyperaware of the Democratic Party, both in national form and in our more local DFL flavor.

While nearly three times as many Republicans have been elected governor as have Democrats (25-9) since Minnesota became a state in 1858, much of the recent political legacy of our state has been dominated by the party of the donkey.

Most Minnesotans with a long enough memory are probably aware that a Republican presidential candidate has not won our state since Nixon’s re-election in 1972 a pretty amusing bit of historical irony.

This is the longest active streak of a state going to the Democrats. When President Reagan won re-election in his 1984 landslide, the only state he did not carry was Minnesota (he also lost Washington D.C.’s three electoral votes).

Even more telling of the statewide mood in national elections, Minnesota has only gone Republican three times since Herbert Hoover lost to FDR — Nixon’s landslide in 1972, and Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956.

Prominent Minnesotans were mainstream presidential candidates 20 times between 1948 and 1992. At least one Minnesotan was a candidate for president in every primary during that time with the exception of one (1956), but Hubert Humphrey ran for vice president at the Democratic National Convention that year.

Twice in 1968 and 1976 there were three Minnesotans running for president in the same primary season, and there are an additional five primaries where two Minnesotans were in the running.

Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey was a candidate four times and a vice presidential candidate twice. Sen. Eugene McCarthy was a presidential candidate five times, and Sen. Walter Mondale ran for president twice and vice president twice. Had Sen. Paul Wellstone not had health problems (later diagnosed as multiple sclerosis), I think he would have run as well. All men were highly regarded, influential Minnesota Democrats.

Minnesotans have clearly been receptive to the Democratic Party in a way few other states can even attempt to rival. As we head toward the elections this November, Minnesotans need to remember their state’s legacy of strong-minded and visionary Democratic leaders — leaders who possessed the intestinal fortitude necessary to take unpopular positions on vital issues.

McCarthy broke with both President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Democrat-controlled Congress in 1968 and initiated a presidential campaign based on ending the Vietnam War many months before Bobby Kennedy co-opted the anti-war platform for his own campaign.

Lest any of us have forgotten, Paul Wellstone was one of only 23 senators to vote against the Iraq War joint resolution, a group that did not include two prominent Democratic candidates for the 2008 nomination — Hillary Clinton and John Edwards.

Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, the true standard-bearer of the post-Wellstone Minnesota Democratic legacy, recently gave an interview with the Appleton Post-Crescent. Feingold had the following to say about a former Democratic Senate colleague:

“The one that is the most problematic is (John) Edwards, who voted for the Patriot Act, campaigns against it. Voted for No Child Left Behind, campaigns against it. Voted for the China trade deal, campaigns against it. Voted for the Iraq war. … He uses my voting record exactly as his platform, even though he had the opposite voting record.

“When you had the opportunity to vote a certain way in the Senate and you didn’t, and obviously there are times when you make a mistake, the notion that you sort of vote one way when you’re playing the game in Washington and another way when you’re running for president, there’s some of that going on.”

Feingold might also have criticized Hillary Clinton for voting for the Patriot Act, for No Child Left Behind and the Iraq War. While Clinton has not been quite as politically two-faced as Edwards, she has voted to extend the Patriot Act, still supports No Child Left Behind, and has continually hedged her bets on the Iraq War as public perception of the war has soured.

The Establishment candidate, Clinton, is far and away the most neoconservative, Republican-like of any of the Democratic candidates.

Minnesotans planning on supporting a Democrat for president should keep this in mind: Who best represents the legacy of Minnesotans like McCarthy and Wellstone, two men who were unafraid to contradict their party leaders and support issues that were not politically expedient, but they felt were ethically correct?

Is it Clinton, the dynastic candidate who resembles the current president more than she does a Minnesota-style Democrat like Feingold? Or is it the young, visionary senator from Illinois, a challenger to his party’s elites and both somewhat untested and mostly uninfected by the political games of Washington?

I will be observing from Wisconsin, most interested to see if Democratic Minnesotans remember their history and act on their legacy.

Winona native Wyl Schuth was recently honorably discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps. A veteran of the war in Iraq, he has returned to civilian life and is now double-majoring in English and Slavic languages at UW-Madison. He accepts correspondence at swedish.rhapsody@gmail.com

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