Thought for Food

Jul 9, 2008

The Dark Alley Doctrine, or Why I'm Glad I'm Still Registered in Minnesota

On the morning of November 5th, 1998, 773,713 Minnesotans woke up, heard the news, and moaned, “But it was a joke!”

Jesse Ventura had won the governorship, with 37% of the vote, beating out the turncoat Republican, Norm Coleman, and the legacy Democrat, Hubert H. “Skip” Humphrey III.

At the impressionable age of 17, I saw what American voters were capable of, and politics hasn’t shocked me since. (Yoo-hoo, California? We did it first.)

Those were innocent times. It hardly mattered that we had a lazy governor who’d rather work the late-night talk show circuit than govern the state.

But then came Bush, and 9/11, and the lead-up to the Iraq War, and the (mysterious) death of one of the greatest Americans of the last century, Senator Paul Wellstone, weeks before the 2002 election.

His opponent, Norm Coleman — the New Yorker who ran for mayor of St. Paul as a Democrat in a Democrat town, and, once in office, promptly switched parties — claimed the fallen hero’s place.

And Coleman, now running for reelection, is trying to change his spots again. In an ad, his apparently on-again wife claims that he is an “independent” who is not a rubber-stamper for the unpopular Prez. (Despite ample evidence to the contrary.)

Meanwhile, Al Franken, former SNL writer and liberal radio host, has been publishing amusing books with unfortunate titles, and writing infantile articles in Playboy. Oh, and winning the Democratic nomination for Senate in his home state.

How his career as a “funnyman” (they’re always known as funnymen) makes him a good candidate to lead Minnesota is not immediately clear to many voters, though I fall in the camp that believes:

We’ve tried a showman, we’ve tried a scumbag*, we’ve lost a moral man, why not try a satirist?

As Jon Stewart can attest, politics is parody. Let’s go straight to the source.

Okay, the contest is simple enough: two Jews, one funny, one scrabbling, battle it out in the land of Irish Catholics and Scandinavian Lutherans.

But lo! Not so fast, says Jesse. According to a (great) NPR report, he wants back in. (Or maybe not: he insists he’s not revealing his plans until the filing deadline, next Tuesday — not even to his wife. I think he just wants to make Coleman, dutifully taking out the trash, look like a pansy.)

In any case, our man in Margaritaville has returned to lambast Coleman for his votes in support of the Iraq War, and drop classic Venturaisms, like:

All you Minnesotans take a good hard look at the three of us. And you decide if you were in a dark alley, which one of the three of us would you want with you?

Crazily enough, polls show his prospects are not bad.

Sure, this makes for an entertaining spectacle, but please, Minnesotans, let’s not goof around in the voter booths this time. We’re not that funny.

* When I was 17, I worked as a hostess at the St. Paul Grille, a popular hangout for local cigar-chomping prarie town muckety-mucks, including the then-mayor. Coleman was a letch. I once hissed at him, “I know who you are, and I’m a Democrat.” I should have added that I was underage.

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