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As a recovering Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party operative on an East Coast sabbatical, the recent news from Lake Wobegon has rudely interrupted my Minnesota politics detox.
In a 20-year career in the DFL, I held nearly every imaginable party role, from precinct captain to director of the colossal statewide coordinated field campaign. I served as a St. Cloud organizer and director on the state executive committee. I managed — and won — hard-fought campaigns, from Park Board to Hennepin County Attorney to U.S. Congress.
In 2014, I guided U.S. Rep. Rick Nolan's come-from-behind victory, implementing a mandatory campaign-wide messaging rule to always refer to our opponent as "Stewart Mills the Third," reminding working-class Eighth District voters that Mills' fortune was inherited, not earned. We ran a multimillion-dollar ad campaign, framing the retail scion as a trustafarian with long playboy hair, unable to relate to Iron Range voters. We won by 1%. Before Mills' next failed campaign bid, he cut his hair.
As a Duluth native with ancestral Minnesota roots dating to well before the state's founding, I have immersed myself in the politics and culture of our great state. After all, I did earn second place in the 1986 Virginia, Minn., Land of the Loon loon-calling contest. From this perspective, what I feel is lost in the current narrative around the legislative session and recent Minneapolis ward convention debacle is the direct connection between the grassroots of the DFL, the radical roots of the party, organized labor and the extraordinary record of DFL legislative accomplishments this year.
Powerful interests, including the Star Tribune Editorial Board, the Downtown Council and Regional Chamber of Commerce want to muddy the waters, casting a pox on both houses, insinuating that the far left is an equal threat to our state as the MAGA-extremist right. In the case of Minneapolis' 10th Ward, this false equivalency blames the victim — Council Member Aisha Chughtai — and obfuscates the ugly incident.
It is equally dangerous — and frankly, lazy — to resort to rhetoric about "extremes on both sides" and "civility" as a blanket messaging frame. Because while the MAGA right marched through American streets with torches repeating antisemitic and white supremacist mantras, joined the now-indicted former president on the stage at a city-owned arena in a mustache and blue Minneapolis police uniform, and led an insurrection at the nation's Capitol to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power, the left (including the Democratic Socialists that Minneapolis Downtown Council President Steve Cramer is so paranoid about — "A leftward-lurching Minneapolis confronts another time for choosing," Opinion Exchange, June 1) audaciously dares to dream of a world with universal college access, public housing and health care for all. Those two poles are not analogous. One operates well within the bounds of democracy, while the other is intent on destroying it.