I'm willing to take on Lynnell Mickelsen's rant about the DFL, because
she has some points, but I think she misapplies them. I have to say
first that Sack's cartoon on the OpEd section was great.--and in
color--kewl!
Mickelsen has a point in saying that the DFL has a list and people in
the party line up to amass enough delegate votes to get themselves
endorsed and have campaign workers to help them get elected. That's how
political parties of all stripes operate.
Theoretically at least, parties are grooming the next generation of
politicians who will bring the party to victory. Among them were some
who got all goofy around the idea of Rybak jumping in there out of an
airport noise push. But the sensible folks, and I consider myself one of
them, saw that the man had no background which would have given him any
training to lead a city well. Only some of the job is pr, there has to
be some management skills in the person's background as well.
Truth to tell, SSB had been mayor and council member and her time should
have been up. McLaughlin should have run against her in the last
election. Better yet, the party should have looked at SSB's ouvre and
determined whether or not to ask her to retire from the position rather
than face a possible defeat, allowing other DFLers to come forward. But,
if foresight were as good as hindsight, we wouldn't have half as much to
argue about. It may very well be the case that 10 years on the council
and eight in the mayor's office is enough for any given politician.
So saying, had the last election been McLaughlin vs. Rybak, I would have
voted McLaughlin because, of the two, he would be the one with
experience in office, a much deeper knowledge of the ins and outs of the
issues, the location of the minefields, and other very important pieces
of information Rybak clearly hasn't figured out to this day.
It is not entirely honest for Rybak to come in, cut the budget, screw up
the city's development function even worse than it already was screwed
up, and claim he's done a miracle. Nor is it honest to stand on the
pretense that anyone else who might have gotten elected was not facing
the same budget crisis and lack of state funding. Even SSB would not
have been able to ignore it (though those closer to her than I ever was
say she'd lost her ability to listen to her supporters).
Rybak has further disappointed voters and those who have to deal with
the city for a huge variety of reasons by surrounding himself with a
staff some of whose members are likewise not the best and the
brightest. (SSB would never have become mayor without Vernon Wetternach
at her back, for example.)
From a rational issues (Mickelsen's words, not mine) position, those of
us who support McLaughlin are saying that Rybak has not lived up to the
demands of the job and, as a consequence, we now have an even bigger
mess to contend with. Not only has the budget shrunk and without the
possibility of growing in the immediate future, but CPED is a disaster.
(MCDA was only a mess.)
The loss of 150 cops (and how many firefighters I can't recall--too
many) is only a portion of the screw up Rybak has produced. Under his
leadership, the CPED is no longer buying up vacant/boardeds--and neither
is anyone else. The v/bs become havens for predators of one stripe or
another, making it harder for the police to do predator control. That's
a big piece of why things are so difficult on the northside and it will
be why the southside will lose ground it has worked so hard to gain over
such a long period of bone crushing struggle by many.
I'm willing to grant that the way MCDA was dealing with vacant/boardeds
wasn't working either and wasted houses which could have been rescued,
but Rybak's "fix" has made the situation much worse and made the city's
more marginal, older neighborhoods more welcoming to infestations of
predatory behaviors--robbery, burglary, rape, murder, assault with and
without a deadly weapon, drug dealing, and all the concomitant nuisance
behaviors.
Rybak's wing of the party is as responsible for this mess as are the
members of the so called old guard. All the members of the party needed
to be and still need to be involved in nurturing the next generations of
leadership, trying them out in small ways first, with increasingly more
responsibility as they prove themselves and less responsibility if they
do not. Therein lies one of the reasons I could not vote for Rybak as
well. He didn't try to learn the business of politics, he didn't ask for
the opportunity to train himself to the bureaucratic work of leadership,
he jumped in to take a very difficult position near the top. I want to
see a little more of a person's mettle before I grant them a really
tough job through my vote.
McLaughlin shows himself as a politician who understands the complexity
of turning what is essentially a rail head with attitude into a real
city. He has moved mass trans forward. That was not a cakewalk. It was a
hotly contested issue, but the results have proven it to be the
progressive choice to have made. He was also instrumental in bringing in
the NRP which greatly aided many neighborhoods to finance infrastructure
and focus it more narrowly, after the long years of neglect. Ergo,
whether McLaughlin stood in line politely or not, he's the better
politician leader.
I'll also grant Mickelsen's contention that Roger Moe was not the one to
be gov, nor was Skip Humphrey (though Skip did a good job as Attorney
General) and I'll grant that Moe is about as interesting as watching
paint dry as a candidate. But until 20 minutes before she asked for my
delegate vote Judi Dutcher was a member in good standing of the
Republican Party. I would like the DFL to be at least little more
progressive (in truth, a lot more progressive) than the GOP. The DFL had
that same argument with Eva Young when she started the 'democrats for
Arnie Carlson' push years back while she was an officer of some piece of
Mpls. DFL. I want the party to nurture democrats not
democrats-to-get-ahead-politicians (Norm Coleman, for instance). And
that's how I read Judi Dutcher's attempt to lead the DFL as soon as she
joined the party.
WizardMarks, Central
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