Thursday, June 16, 2005

States' Politics

There are rumbles about Al Franken running for election in 2008. The Times has a piece on it, but I admit I was less interested in Al than in this description of Minnesotans:

Then again, Minnesota is a place of enormous, and not easily explained, contradictions. A place where lions of the Democratic party - Hubert H. Humphrey and Eugene J. McCarthy - once strode the earth, it takes voting very seriously, with a 79 percent turnout in the 2004 general election. Yet in 1998 it elected a professional wrestler to run the state. Minnesotans, who show up in droves at the state fair to marvel at seed art and butter sculptures but also show up en masse at the legitimate theater, are their own darn thing. So frequently cast as droll practitioners of the art of common sense, they have displayed some fairly atavistic tendencies, electing Mr. Ventura out of nowhere as both a slap and a jolt to the system. In their own quiet way, they remain mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore.

It's nice to see a citizenry so invested in the system. (For the record, I get the same warm fuzzies from Vermont, land of the Independent, Jim Jeffords.)

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home