June
2, 2003, 12:30 p.m. Minnesota
Nice
A
contrarian view.
wice
in recent weeks, I've come across political commentators referring to
Minnesota as a "blue" state. David Brooks and John McLaughlin
have each mentioned President Bush's popularity there as a sign that he
can do well in Democratic areas. But the fact is that Minnesota is not
reliably blue, and is well on its way to becoming a red state. The Democrats
have the state senate, and the state went — barely — for Gore
in 2000. But Minnesota also elected Norm Coleman to the Senate in 2002.
Republicans hold the lower house of the state legislature. And it's been
17 years since the last time it elected a Democrat as governor. In 1998,
the Democrats didn't even come in second in the gubernatorial race. President
Bush may very well win Minnesota in 2004. If so, he will have accelerated
a red shift that was already underway.
SPEAKING
OF DATED PERCEPTIONS. . .
"Columnist Arianna Huffington, herself an outspoken conservative.
. ." — William Raspberry, Washington
Post,
today. Raspberry's column is headlined "Struck Dumb?"
Raspberry complains
that "[n]obody's paying much attention" to Senator Robert Byrd,
whose "impassioned cry. . . . is ignored in the mass media."
Raspberry must have missed the puff pieces in Time
and the Wall Street Journal. The Time article says Byrd
is being "lionized" and is enjoying a "renaissance."
DISSENT
AT THE NATION
The latest issue of the left-wing magazine includes a book
review by Michael Lind that condemns racial preferences and, indeed,
the very idea of official racial classifications. Lind writes, "The
insistence of many progressives that the elimination of government racial
labels and race-specific policies must await the complete extinction of
racist sentiments in the American population reverses the cause-and-effect
relationship. It makes no sense to say that race doesn't matter, on the
one hand, while insuring that how the federal government classifies your
race makes a difference in access to benefits or even to adoptive parents.
The fact that there are still bigots in America should not prevent the
federal government from treating all Americans as individuals. And if
conservatives want to quote Martin Luther King Jr. and adopt the liberal
integrationist position as their own, this is proof of the success of
the civil rights revolution in transforming American thinking about race
even on the right. We will never eliminate the vestiges of caste from
this society by multiplying the number of castes. The United States ought
to go from having five official races to having none — preferably
by the census of 2010 or 2020." I can't remember the last time I
read anything like that in The Nation.
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wice
in recent weeks, I've come across political commentators referring to
Minnesota as a "blue" state. David Brooks and John McLaughlin
have each mentioned President Bush's popularity there as a sign that he
can do well in Democratic areas. But the fact is that Minnesota is not
reliably blue, and is well on its way to becoming a red state. The Democrats
have the state senate, and the state went — barely — for Gore
in 2000. But Minnesota also elected Norm Coleman to the Senate in 2002.
Republicans hold the lower house of the state legislature. And it's been
17 years since the last time it elected a Democrat as governor. In 1998,
the Democrats didn't even come in second in the gubernatorial race. President
Bush may very well win Minnesota in 2004. If so, he will have accelerated
a red shift that was already underway.
