Katherine Kersten: Is there hope for Minnesota conservatives? There is now

The conservative movement in Minnesota is on life support -- or so the common wisdom goes. Lots of folks predict that the 2008 elections will pull the plug.

So why is conservative activist Annette Meeks brimming with optimism? She is launching a new organization, the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, to lead the movement's charge into the future -- and she believes that the future is bright.

Is Meeks whistling in the dark? After all, liberals dominate the Minnesota Legislature and the state's constitutional offices, while our center-right governor held on by his fingernails in the 2006 elections.

"I'll bet there are more Minnesotans who call themselves conservative, libertarian or free market today than in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected president," Meeks responded. "But people are dispirited because they conflate election cycles with the health of the conservative movement, and they get their news from the Chinese water torture -- the steady drip, drip -- of the liberal media. The conservative movement transcends that. It's a vision of personal responsibility, economic freedom and limited government."

The 2008 elections are not her focus. "I care more about shaping the size and scope of Minnesota government over the next decade," she said.

Meeks, my former colleague at the Center of the American Experiment, calls her new organization a "think tank with muscle," and says it will focus solely on state issues. "We won't solve the problem of Social Security privatization or ending the Iraq war here in Minnesota," she said. "We're going where the real action is -- we're going local."

The Freedom Foundation's mission is to provide intellectual ammunition for center-right ground troops in the war of ideas. It will arm legislators with information about innovative, free-market solutions to problems like crime and traffic congestion.

It will do "aggressive outreach" with the media. "We'll be a rapid response team when legislators make outrageous claims," Meeks. said. "We'll say, 'Stop, the data don't support that.'"

The foundation's website (www.freedomfoundationof minnesota.com) will soon guide citizens through the labyrinth of state and local government finances so they can learn where their tax dollars are going in order to judge the credibility of cries for ever-higher taxes.

"Most Minnesotans are happy with our quality of life, but the debate at the Legislature is always about spending more money," Meeks said. "If you listen to some legislators, you'd think we're spending down to the level of Mississippi, with services to match."

Meeks will counter with a new tool, "Minnesota by the Numbers," which compares our state with the other 49 on measures such as education, taxes and health care. "We're actually very generous," she said.

For example, Minnesota ranks No. 2 in the country in the percentage of people under age 65 with private health insurance. But in 2006, we were No. 1 in legislatively imposed health-care mandates, according to the Council for Affordable Health Insurance. That makes insurance more expensive, Meeks says. Flexible, affordable health-care packages, not more spending, may be the key to expanding access even further.

Today, Meeks says, city councils often fund money-losing enterprises like an arts center, cable TV service or townhouse complex, and then tell their citizens that whopping tax increases are necessary to provide police and fire protection. Soon a mom who hears such threats will be able to go online after putting the kids to bed and evaluate the situation for herself. She may be surprised to learn that her city has been running a golf course and subsidizing it with her property tax dollars.

Meeks says that the need for an organization like the Freedom Foundation has never been more urgent. She points to Colorado, where she says the left is creating a prototype of lavishly funded initiatives, including media watchdog groups, think tanks and activist training organizations.

A similar move is underway in Minnesota, where a phalanx of left-leaning organizations like Growth and Justice, Minnesota Monitor and Wellstone Action have recently sprung up.

Is conservatism in its death throes? No way, Meeks says. The Freedom Foundation has been overwhelmed by college students requesting scholarships to its inaugural conference on Saturday, which will set a future course for conservatism in Minnesota.

"We've heard for a long time that Ronald Reagan was the conservative movement and he's dead, so the movement must be dead," Meeks said. "But these young people have no memory of Ronald Reagan. They're drawn to conservatism by something else -- the power of our ideas."

Katherine Kersten • kkersten@startribune.com Join the conversation at my blog, Think Again, which can be found at www.startribune.com/thinkagain.