"To understand America," wrote Sinclair Lewis, "it is merely necessary to understand Minnesota."
No doubt this often-quoted boast from Minnesota's (and America's) first Nobel Prize-winning author is an exaggeration. But maybe Minnesota does contain more than its share of the eccentricities and contradictions that add up to America. Maybe that's why the state can now boast of a second literary Nobel laureate, Bob Dylan — out of just 14 Americans ever to win that honor.
Anyhow, Lewis went on to say that "to understand Minnesota, you must be an historian, an ethnologist, a poet, a cynic, and a graduate prophet all in one."
One certainly wants to keep one's inner cynic handy when the subject turns to politics. And it's Minnesota's kaleidoscopic political scene that looks just now like a messy jumble of national trends — and it's not the first time. The state that shocked the world (and, you might say, tried to warn it) in 1998 by electing a trash-talking celebrity as its chief executive is weirdly in the political spotlight again in these early, disorienting days of the Age of Trump.
Consider all the ways Minnesota's congressional delegation is reflecting novel positions and predicaments today's pols find themselves in.
Democrats in Trump Country: Word came earlier this month that the National Republican Congressional Committee has named 36 U.S. House Democrats as prime targets in the 2018 midterm elections. The GOP is aiming especially at Democrats re-elected last fall in districts that Donald Trump carried.
Three such Democrats are Minnesotans — Rick Nolan in the northeastern Eighth District; Collin Peterson in the northwestern Seventh; and Tim Walz in southern Minnesota's First District.
Only California (with four) has as many vulnerable Democrats the NRCC is gunning for.